Against Identity Politics
The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Beginning
a few decades ago, world politics started to experience a dramatic
transformation. From the early 1970s to the first decade of this century, the
number of electoral democracies increased from about 35 to more than 110. Over the same
period, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled, and growth
extended to virtually every region of the world. The proportion of people
living in extreme poverty plummeted, dropping from 42 percent of the global population in 1993
to 18 percent in 2008.
But not everyone benefited
from these changes. In many countries, and particularly in developed
democracies, economic inequality increased dramatically, as the benefits of growth flowed primarily
to the wealthy and well-educated. The increasing volume of goods, money, and
people moving from one place to another brought disruptive changes. In
developing countries, villagers who previously had no electricity suddenly
found themselves living in large cities, watching TV, and connecting to the
Internet on their mobile phones. Huge new middle classes arose in China and
India—but the work they did replaced the work that had been done by older
middle classes in the developed world. Manufacturing moved steadily from the
United States and Europe to East Asia and other regions with low labor costs.
At the same time, men were being displaced by women in a labor market
increasingly dominated by service industries, and low-skilled workers found
themselves replaced by smart machines.
Ultimately, these changes
slowed the movement toward an increasingly open and liberal world order, which
began to falter and soon reversed. The final blows were the global financial
crisis of 2007–8 and the euro crisis that began in 2009. In both cases,
policies crafted by elites produced huge recessions, high unemployment, and
falling incomes for millions of ordinary workers. Since the United States and
the EU were the leading exemplars of liberal democracy, these crises damaged
the reputation of that system as a whole.
Indeed, in recent years, the
number of democracies has fallen, and democracy has retreated
in virtually all regions of the world. At the same time, many authoritarian
countries, led by China and Russia, have become much more assertive. Some
countries that had seemed to be successful liberal democracies during the
1990s—including Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Turkey—have slid backward toward
authoritarianism. The Arab revolts of 2010–11 disrupted dictatorships
throughout the Middle East but yielded little in terms of democratization: in
their wake, despotic regimes held on to power, and civil wars racked Iraq,
Libya, Syria, and Yemen. More surprising and perhaps even more significant was
the success of populist nationalism in elections held in 2016 by two of the
world’s most durable liberal democracies: the United Kingdom, where voters
chose to leave the EU, and the United States, where Donald Trump scored a
shocking electoral upset in the race for president.
All these developments relate
in some way to the economic and technological shifts of globalization. But they
are also rooted in a different phenomenon: the rise of identity politics. For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined
by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions,
social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast,
was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the
private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or
ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies,
the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting
the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic
minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right,
meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of
traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race,
ethnicity, or religion.
Identity politics has become
a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs.
This shift overturns a long
tradition, dating back at least as far as Karl Marx,
of viewing political struggles as a reflection of economic conflicts. But
important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other
things as well, forces that better explain the present day. All over the world,
political leaders have mobilized followers around the idea that their dignity
has been affronted and must be restored.
Of course, in authoritarian
countries, such appeals are old hat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has
talked about the “tragedy” of the Soviet Union’s collapse and has excoriated
the United States and Europe for taking advantage of Russia’s weakness during
the 1990s to expand NATO. Chinese President Xi Jinping alludes to his country’s
“century of humiliation,” a period of foreign domination that began in
1839.
But resentment over
indignities has become a powerful force in democratic countries, too. The Black
Lives Matter movement sprang from a series of well-publicized police killings
of African Americans and forced the rest of the world to pay attention to the
victims of police brutality. On college campuses and in offices around the
United States, women seethed over a seeming epidemic of sexual harassment and
assault and concluded that their male peers simply did not see them as equals.
The rights of transgender people, who had previously not been widely recognized
as distinct targets of discrimination, became a cause célèbre. And many of
those who voted for Trump yearned for a better time in the past, when they
believed their place in their own society had been more secure.
Again and again, groups have
come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic,
sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity
politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified
confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes
skirmishes in “culture wars” promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity
politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in
global affairs.
That leaves modern liberal
democracies facing an important challenge. Globalization has brought rapid
economic and social change and made these societies far more diverse, creating
demands for recognition on the part of groups that were once invisible to
mainstream society. These demands have led to a backlash among other groups,
which are feeling a loss of status and a sense of displacement. Democratic
societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities,
threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as
a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately,
failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more
universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the
world—to continuing conflict.
THE THIRD PART OF THE SOUL
Most economists assume that
human beings are motivated by the desire for material resources or goods. This
conception of human behavior has deep roots in Western political thought and
forms the basis of most contemporary social science. But it leaves out a factor
that classical philosophers realized was crucially important: the craving for
dignity. Socrates believed that such a need formed an integral “third part” of
the human soul, one that coexisted with a “desiring part” and a “calculating
part.” In Plato’s Republic, he termed this the thymos, which
English translations render poorly as “spirit.”
In politics, thymos is
expressed in two forms. The first is what I call “megalothymia”: a desire to be
recognized as superior. Pre-democratic societies rested on hierarchies, and
their belief in the inherent superiority of a certain class of people—nobles,
aristocrats, royals—was fundamental to social order. The problem with
megalothymia is that for every person recognized as superior, far more people
are seen as inferior and receive no public recognition of their human worth. A
powerful feeling of resentment arises when one is disrespected. And an equally
powerful feeling—what I call “isothymia”—makes people want to be seen as just
as good as everyone else.
The rise of modern democracy
is the story of isothymia’s triumph over megalothymia: societies that
recognized the rights of only a small number of elites were replaced by ones
that recognized everyone as inherently equal. During the twentieth century,
societies stratified by class began to acknowledge the rights of ordinary
people, and nations that had been colonized sought independence. The great
struggles in U.S. political history over slavery and segregation, workers’
rights, and women’s equality were driven by demands that the political system
expand the circle of individuals it recognized as full human beings.
But in liberal democracies,
equality under the law does not result in economic or social equality.
Discrimination continues to exist against a wide variety of groups, and market
economies produce large inequalities of outcome. Despite their overall wealth,
the United States and other developed countries have seen income inequality
increase dramatically over the past 30 years. Significant parts of their
populations have suffered from stagnant incomes, and certain segments of
society have experienced downward social mobility.
Perceived threats to one’s
economic status may help explain the rise of populist nationalism in the United
States and elsewhere. The American working class, defined as people with a high
school education or less, has not been doing well in recent decades. This is
reflected not just in stagnant or declining incomes and job losses but in
social breakdown, as well. For African Americans, this process began in the
1970s, decades after the Great Migration, when blacks moved to such cities as
Chicago, Detroit, and New York, where many of them found employment in the
meatpacking, steel, or auto industry. As these sectors declined and men began
to lose jobs through deindustrialization, a series of social ills followed,
including rising crime rates, a crack cocaine epidemic, and a deterioration of
family life, which helped transmit poverty from one generation to the next.
Over the past decade, a
similar kind of social decline has spread to the white working class. An opioid epidemic has hollowed out white, rural working-class communities all
over the United States; in 2016, heavy drug use led to more than 60,000
overdose deaths, about twice the number of deaths from traffic accidents each
year in the country. Life expectancy for white American men fell between 2013
and 2014, a highly unusual occurrence in a developed country. And the
proportion of white working-class children growing up in single-parent families
rose from 22 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2017.
But perhaps one of the great
drivers of the new nationalism that sent Trump to the White House (and drove
the United Kingdom to vote to leave the EU) has been the perception of
invisibility. The resentful citizens fearing the loss of their middle-class
status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, who they believe do not
see them, but also downward toward the poor, who they feel are unfairly
favored. Economic distress is often perceived by individuals more as a loss of
identity than as a loss of resources. Hard work should confer dignity on an
individual. But many white working-class Americans feel that their dignity is
not recognized and that the government gives undue advantages to people who are
not willing to play by the rules.
This link between income and
status helps explain why nationalist or religiously conservative appeals have
proved more effective than traditional left-wing ones based on economic class.
Nationalists tell the disaffected that they have always been core members of a
great nation and that foreigners, immigrants, and elites have been conspiring
to hold them down. “Your country is no longer your own,” they say, “and you are
not respected in your own land.” The religious right tells a similar story:
“You are a member of a great community of believers that has been betrayed by
nonbelievers; this betrayal has led to your impoverishment and is a crime
against God.”
The prevalence of such
narratives is why immigration has become such a contentious issue in so many
countries. Like trade, immigration boosts overall GDP, but it does not benefit
all groups within a society. Almost always, ethnic majorities view it as a
threat to their cultural identity, especially when cross-border flows of people
are as massive as they have been in recent decades.
Yet anger over immigration
alone cannot explain why the nationalist right has in recent years captured
voters who used to support parties of the left, in both the United States and
Europe. The rightward drift also reflects the failure of contemporary
left-leaning parties to speak to people whose relative status has fallen as a
result of globalization and technological change. In past eras, progressives
appealed to a shared experience of exploitation and resentment of rich capitalists:
“Workers of the world, unite!” In the United States, working-class voters
overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party from the New Deal, in the 1930s,
up until the rise of Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s. And European social democracy
was built on a foundation of trade unionism and working-class solidarity.
But during the era of
globalization, most left-wing parties shifted their strategy. Rather than build
solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the
economically exploited, they began to focus on ever-smaller groups that found
themselves marginalized in specific and unique ways. The principle of universal
and equal recognition mutated into calls for special recognition. Over time,
this phenomenon migrated from the left to the right.
THE TRIUMPH OF IDENTITY
In the 1960s, powerful new
social movements emerged across the world’s developed liberal democracies.
Civil rights activists in the United States demanded that the country fulfill
the promise of equality made in the Declaration of Independence and written
into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. This was soon followed by the
feminist movement, which similarly sought equal treatment for women, a cause
that both stimulated and was shaped by a massive influx of women into the labor
market. A parallel social revolution shattered traditional norms regarding
sexuality and the family, and the environmental movement reshaped attitudes
toward nature. Subsequent years would see new movements promoting the rights of
the disabled, Native Americans, immigrants, gay men and women, and, eventually,
transgender people. But even when laws changed to provide more opportunities
and stronger legal protections to the marginalized, groups continued to differ
from one another in their behavior, performance, wealth, traditions, and
customs; bias and bigotry remained commonplace among individuals; and
minorities continued to cope with the burdens of discrimination, prejudice,
disrespect, and invisibility.
This presented each
marginalized group with a choice: it could demand that society treat its
members the same way it treated the members of dominant groups, or it could
assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as
different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter strategy tended to
win out: the early civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr., demanded
that American society treat black people the way it treated white people. By
the end of the 1960s, however, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation
of Islam emerged and argued that black people had their own traditions and
consciousness; in their view, black people needed to take pride in themselves
for who they were and not heed what the broader society wanted them to be. The
authentic inner selves of black Americans were not the same as those of white
people, they argued; they were shaped by the unique experience of growing up
black in a hostile society dominated by whites. That experience was defined by
violence, racism, and denigration and could not be appreciated by people who
grew up in different circumstances.
Multiculturalism
has become a vision of a society fragmented into many small groups with
distinct experiences.
These themes have been taken
up in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which began with demands for justice for individual
victims of police violence but soon broadened into an effort to make people
more aware of the nature of day-to-day existence for black Americans. Writers
such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have connected contemporary police violence against
African Americans to the long history of slavery and lynching. In the view of
Coates and others, this history constitutes part of an unbridgeable gulf of
understanding between blacks and whites.
A similar evolution occurred
within the feminist movement. The demands of the mainstream movement were
focused on equal treatment for women in employment, education, the courts, and
so on. But from the beginning, an important strand of feminist thought proposed
that the consciousness and life experiences of women were fundamentally
different from those of men and that the movement’s aim should not be to simply
facilitate women’s behaving and thinking like men.
Other movements soon seized
on the importance of lived experience to their struggles. Marginalized groups
increasingly demanded not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal
to dominant groups but also that the broader society recognize and even
celebrate the intrinsic differences that set them apart. The term
“multiculturalism”—originally merely referring to a quality of diverse
societies—became a label for a political program that valued each separate
culture and each lived experience equally, at times by drawing special
attention to those that had been invisible or undervalued in the past. This
kind of multiculturalism at first was about large cultural groups, such as
French-speaking Canadians, or Muslim immigrants, or African Americans. But soon
it became a vision of a society fragmented into many small groups with distinct
experiences, as well as groups defined by the intersection of different forms
of discrimination, such as women of color, whose lives could not be understood
through the lens of either race or gender alone.
The left began to embrace
multiculturalism just as it was becoming harder to craft policies that would
bring about large-scale socio-economic change. By the 1980s, progressive groups
throughout the developed world were facing an existential crisis. The far left
had been defined for the first half of the century by the ideals of
revolutionary Marxism and its vision of radical egalitarianism. The social
democratic left had a different agenda: it accepted liberal democracy but
sought to expand the welfare state to cover more people with more social
protections. But both Marxists and social democrats hoped to increase
socioeconomic equality through the use of state power, by expanding access to
social services to all citizens and by redistributing wealth.
As the twentieth century drew
to a close, the limits of this strategy became clear. Marxists had to confront
the fact that communist societies in China and the Soviet Union had turned into
grotesque and oppressive dictatorships. At the same time, the working class in
most industrialized democracies had grown richer and had begun to merge with
the middle class. Communist revolution and the abolition of private property
fell off the agenda. The social democratic left also reached a dead end when
its goal of an ever-expanding welfare state bumped into the reality of fiscal
constraints during the turbulent 1970s. Governments responded by printing
money, leading to inflation and financial crises. Redistributive programs were
creating perverse incentives that discouraged work, savings, and
entrepreneurship, which in turn shrank the overall economic pie. Inequality
remained deeply entrenched, despite ambitious efforts to eradicate it, such as
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. With China’s shift
toward a market economy after 1978 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, the Marxist left largely fell apart, and the social democrats were left
to make their peace with capitalism.
The left’s diminished
ambitions for large-scale socioeconomic reform converged with its embrace of
identity politics and multiculturalism in the final decades of the twentieth
century. The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality—by
isothymia—but its agenda shifted from the earlier emphasis on the working class
to the demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized minorities. Many
activists came to see the old working class and their trade unions as a
privileged stratum that demonstrated little sympathy for the plight of
immigrants and racial minorities. They sought to expand the rights of a growing
list of groups rather than improve the economic conditions of individuals. In
the process, the old working class was left behind.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
The left’s embrace of
identity politics was both understandable and necessary. The lived experiences
of distinct identity groups differ, and they often need to be addressed in ways
specific to those groups. Outsiders often fail to perceive the harm they are
doing by their actions, as many men realized in the wake of the #MeToo movement’s revelations regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault. Identity
politics aims to change culture and behavior in ways that have real material
benefits for many people.
By turning a spotlight on
narrower experiences of injustice, identity politics has brought about welcome
changes in cultural norms and has produced concrete public policies that have
helped many people. The Black Lives Matter movement has made police departments
across the United States much more conscious of the way they treat minorities,
even though police abuse still persists. The #MeToo movement has broadened
popular understanding of sexual assault and has opened an important discussion
of the inadequacies of existing criminal law in dealing with it. Its most
important consequence is probably the change it has already wrought in the way
that women and men interact in workplaces.
So there is nothing wrong
with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to
injustice. But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues
has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of
progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies
toward greater socioeconomic inequality. It is easier to argue over cultural
issues than it is to change policies, easier to include female and minority
authors in college curricula than to increase the incomes and expand the
opportunities of women and minorities outside the ivory tower. What is more,
many of the constituencies that have been the focus of recent campaigns driven
by identity politics, such as female executives in Silicon Valley and female
Hollywood stars, are near the top of the income distribution. Helping them
achieve greater equality is a good thing, but it will do little to address the
glaring disparities between the top one percent of earners and everyone else.
Today’s left-wing identity
politics also diverts attention from larger groups whose serious problems have
been ignored. Until recently, activists on the left had little to say about the
burgeoning opioid crisis or the fate of children growing up in impoverished
single-parent families in the rural United States. And the Democrats have put
forward no ambitious strategies to deal with the potentially immense job losses
that will accompany advancing automation or the income disparities that
technology may bring to all Americans.
Moreover, the left’s identity
politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse
needed to sustain a democracy. Liberal democracies are committed to protecting
the right to say virtually anything in a marketplace of ideas, particularly in
the political sphere. But the preoccupation with identity has clashed with the
need for civic discourse. The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes
the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues
in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of
reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions. The fact
that an assertion is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen
as grounds for silencing or disparaging the individual who made it.
A reliance on identity
politics also has weaknesses as a political strategy. The current dysfunction
and decay of the U.S. political system are related to extreme and ever-growing
polarization, which has made routine governing an exercise in brinkmanship.
Most of the blame for this belongs to the right. As the political scientists
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have argued, the Republican Party has moved
much more rapidly toward its far-right wing than the Democratic Party has moved
in the opposite direction. But both parties have moved away from the center.
Left-wing activists focused on identity issues are seldom representative of the
electorate as a whole; indeed, their concerns often alienate mainstream
voters.
But perhaps the worst thing
about identity politics as currently practiced by the left is that it has
stimulated the rise of identity politics on the right. This is due in no small
part to the left’s embrace of political correctness, a social norm that
prohibits people from publicly expressing their beliefs or opinions without
fearing moral opprobrium. Every society has certain views that run counter to
its foundational ideas of legitimacy and therefore are off-limits in public
discourse. But the constant discovery of new identities and the shifting
grounds for acceptable speech are hard to follow. In a society highly attuned
to group dignity, new boundaries lines keep appearing, and previously
acceptable ways of talking or expressing oneself become offensive. Today, for
example, merely using the words “he” or “she” in certain contexts might be
interpreted as a sign of insensitivity to intersex or transgender people. But such
utterances threaten no fundamental democratic principles; rather, they
challenge the dignity of a particular group and denote a lack of awareness of
or sympathy for that group’s struggles.
In reality, only a relatively
small number of writers, artists, students, and intellectuals on the left
espouse the most extreme forms of political correctness. But those instances
are picked up by the conservative media, which use them to tar the left as a
whole. This may explain one of the extraordinary aspects of the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, which was Trump’s popularity among a core group of
supporters despite behavior that, in an earlier era, would have doomed a
presidential bid. During the campaign, Trump mocked a journalist’s physical
disabilities, characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals, and was heard on
a recording bragging that he had groped women. Those statements were less
transgressions against political correctness than transgressions against basic
decency, and many of Trump’s supporters did not necessarily approve of them or
of other outrageous comments that Trump made. But at a time when many Americans
believe that public speech is excessively policed, Trump’s supporters like that
he is not intimidated by the pressure to avoid giving offense. In an era shaped
by political correctness, Trump represents a kind of authenticity that many
Americans admire: he may be malicious, bigoted, and unpresidential, but at
least he says what he thinks.
And yet Trump’s rise did not
reflect a conservative rejection of identity politics; in fact, it reflected
the right’s embrace of identity politics. Many of Trump’s white
working-class supporters feel that they have been disregarded by elites. People
living in rural areas, who are the backbone of populist movements not just in
the United States but also in many European countries, often believe that their
values are threatened by cosmopolitan, urban elites. And although they are
members of a dominant ethnic group, many members of the white working class see
themselves as victimized and marginalized. Such sentiments have paved the way
for the emergence of a right-wing identity politics that, at its most extreme,
takes the form of explicitly racist white nationalism.
Trump has directly
contributed to this process. His transformation from real estate mogul and
reality-television star to political contender took off after he became the most
famous promoter of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, which cast doubt on Barack
Obama’s eligibility to serve as president. As a candidate, he was evasive when
asked about the fact that the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke had
endorsed him, and he complained that a U.S. federal judge overseeing a lawsuit
against Trump University was treating him “unfairly” because of the judge’s
Mexican heritage. After a violent gathering of white nationalists in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017—where a white nationalist killed a
counterprotester—Trump averred that there were “very fine people on both
sides.” And he has spent a lot of time singling out black athletes and
celebrities for criticism and has been happy to exploit anger over the removal
of statues honoring Confederate leaders.
Thanks to Trump, white
nationalism has moved from the fringes to something resembling the mainstream.
Its proponents complain that although it is politically acceptable to talk
about black rights, or women’s rights, or gay rights, it is not possible to
advocate the rights of white Americans without being branded a racist. The
practitioners of identity politics on the left would argue that the right’s
assertions of identity are illegitimate and cannot be placed on the same moral
plane as those of minorities, women, and other marginalized groups, since they
reflect the perspective of a historically privileged community. That is clearly
true. Conservatives greatly exaggerate the extent to which minority groups
receive advantages, just as they exaggerate the extent to which political
correctness muzzles free speech. The reality for many marginalized groups remains
unchanged: African Americans continue to be subjected to police violence; women
are still assaulted and harassed.
What is notable, however, is
how the right has adopted language and framing from the left: the idea that
whites are being victimized, that their situation and suffering are invisible
to the rest of society, and that the social and political structures
responsible for this situation—especially the media and the political
establishment—need to be smashed. Across the ideological spectrum, identity
politics is the lens through which most social issues are now seen.
A NEED FOR CREED
Societies need to protect
marginalized and excluded groups, but they also need to achieve common goals
through deliberation and consensus. The shift in the agendas of both the left
and the right toward the protection of narrow group identities ultimately
threatens that process. The remedy is not to abandon the idea of identity,
which is central to the way that modern people think about themselves and their
surrounding societies; it is to define larger and more integrative national
identities that take into account the de facto diversity of liberal democratic
societies.
Human societies cannot get
away from identity or identity politics. Identity is a “powerful moral idea,”
in the philosopher Charles Taylor’s phrase, built on the universal human
characteristic of thymos. This moral idea tells people that they have
authentic inner selves that are not being recognized and suggests that external
society may be false and repressive. It focuses people’s natural demand for
recognition of their dignity and provides language for expressing the
resentments that arise when such recognition is not forthcoming.
It would be neither possible
nor desirable for such demands for dignity to disappear. Liberal democracy is
built on the rights of individuals to enjoy an equal degree of choice and
agency in determining their collective political lives. But many people are not
satisfied with equal recognition as generic human beings. In some sense, this
is a condition of modern life. Modernization means constant change and
disruption and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. This is by
and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have fled
traditional communities that did not offer them choices in favor of communities
that did. But the freedom and degree of choice that exist in a modern liberal
society can also leave people unhappy and disconnected from their fellow human
beings. They find themselves nostalgic for the community and structured life
they think they have lost, or that their ancestors supposedly possessed. The
authentic identities they are seeking are ones that bind them to other people.
People who feel this way can be seduced by leaders who tell them that they have
been betrayed and disrespected by existing power structures and that they are
members of important communities whose greatness will again be recognized.
The nature of modern
identity, however, is to be changeable. Some individuals may persuade
themselves that their identity is based on their biology and is outside their
control. But citizens of modern societies have multiple identities, ones that
are shaped by social interactions. People have identities defined by their
race, gender, workplace, education, affinities, and nation. And although the
logic of identity politics is to divide societies into small, self-regarding
groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more
integrative. One does not have to deny the lived experiences of individuals to
recognize that they can also share values and aspirations with much broader
circles of citizens. Lived experience, in other words, can become just plain
experience—something that connects individuals to people unlike themselves,
rather than setting them apart. So although no democracy is immune from
identity politics in the modern world, all of them can steer it back to broader
forms of mutual respect.
The first and most obvious
place to start is by countering the specific abuses that lead to group
victimhood and marginalization, such as police violence against minorities and
sexual harassment. No critique of identity politics should imply that these are
not real and urgent problems that require concrete solutions. But the United
States and other liberal democracies have to go further than that. Governments
and civil society groups must focus on integrating smaller groups into larger
wholes. Democracies need to promote what political scientists call “creedal
national identities,” which are built not around shared personal
characteristics, lived experiences, historical ties, or religious convictions
but rather around core values and beliefs. The idea is to encourage citizens to
identify with their countries’ foundational ideals and use public policies to
deliberately assimilate newcomers.
Combating the pernicious
influence of identity politics will prove quite difficult in Europe. In recent
decades, the European left has supported a form of multiculturalism that
minimizes the importance of integrating newcomers into creedal national
cultures. Under the banner of antiracism, left-wing European parties have
downplayed evidence that multiculturalism has acted as an obstacle to
assimilation. The new populist right in Europe, for its part, looks back
nostalgically at fading national cultures that were based on ethnicity or
religion and flourished in societies that were largely free of
immigrants.
The fight against identity
politics in Europe must start with changes to citizenship laws. Such an agenda
is beyond the capability of the EU, whose 28 member states zealously defend
their national prerogatives and stand ready to veto any significant reforms or
changes. Any action that takes place will therefore have to happen, for better
or worse, on the level of individual countries. To stop privileging some ethnic
groups over others, EU member states with citizenship laws based on jus
sanguinis—“the right of blood,” which confers citizenship according to the
ethnicity of parents—should adopt new laws based on jus soli, “the right
of the soil,” which confers citizenship on anyone born in the territory of the
country. But European states should also impose stringent requirements on the
naturalization of new citizens, something the United States has done for many
years. In the United States, in addition to having to prove continuous
residency in the country for five years, new citizens are expected to be able
to read, write, and speak basic English; have an understanding of U.S. history
and government; be of good moral character (that is, have no criminal record);
and demonstrate an attachment to the principles and ideals of the U.S.
Constitution by swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States. European
countries should expect the same from their new citizens.
In addition to changing the
formal requirements for citizenship, European countries need to shift away from
conceptions of national identity based on ethnicity. Nearly 20 years ago, a
German academic of Syrian origin named Bassam Tibi proposed making Leitkultur
(leading culture) the basis for a new German national identity. He defined Leitkultur
as a belief in equality and democratic values firmly grounded in the liberal
ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet leftist academics and politicians attacked his
proposal for suggesting that such values were superior to other cultural
values; in doing so, the German left gave unwitting comfort to Islamists and
far-right nationalists, who have little use for Enlightenment ideals. But
Germany and other major European countries desperately need something like
Tibi’s Leitkultur: a normative change that would permit Germans of
Turkish heritage to speak of themselves as German, Swedes of African heritage
to speak of themselves as Swedish, and so on. This is beginning to happen, but
too slowly. Europeans have created a remarkable civilization of which they
should be proud, one that can encompass people from other cultures even as it
remains aware of its own distinctiveness.
Compared with Europe, the
United States has been far more welcoming of immigrants, in part because it
developed a creedal national identity early in its history. As the political
scientist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out, a U.S. citizen can be accused of
being “un-American” in a way that a Danish citizen could not be described as
being “un-Danish” or a Japanese citizen could not be charged with being
“un-Japanese.” Americanism constitutes a set of beliefs and a way of life, not
an ethnicity.
Today, the American creedal
national identity, which emerged in the wake of the Civil War, must be revived
and defended against attacks from both the left and the right. On the right,
white nationalists would like to replace the creedal national identity with one
based on race, ethnicity, and religion. On the left, the champions of identity
politics have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story
by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender
discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are in the country’s
DNA. Such flaws have been and continue to be features of American society, and
they must be confronted. But progressives should also tell a different version
of U.S. history, one focused on how an ever-broadening circle of people have
overcome barriers to achieve recognition of their dignity.
Although the United States
has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity on
diversity. A workable creedal national identity has to offer substantive ideas,
such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, and human equality. Americans
respect those ideas; the country is justified in withholding citizenship from
those who reject them.
BACK TO BASICS
Once a country has defined a
proper creedal national identity that is open to the de facto diversity of
modern societies, the nature of controversies over immigration will inevitably
change. In both the United States and Europe, that debate is currently polarized.
The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send
immigrants back to their countries of origin; the left asserts a virtually
unlimited obligation on the part of liberal democracies to accept all
immigrants. These are both untenable positions. The real debate should instead
be about the best strategies for assimilating immigrants into a country’s
creedal national identity. Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy
diversity to any society; poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state
and in some cases constitute security threats.
European governments pay lip
service to the need for better assimilation but fail to follow through. Many
European countries have put in place policies that actively impede integration.
Under the Dutch system of “pillarization,” for example, children are educated
in separate Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and secular systems. Receiving an
education in a state-supported school without ever having to deal with people
outside one’s own religion is not likely to foster rapid assimilation.
In France, the situation is
somewhat different. The French concept of republican citizenship, like its U.S.
counterpart, is creedal, built around the revolutionary ideals of liberty,
equality, and fraternity. France’s 1905 law on laïcité, or secularism,
formally separates church and state and makes impossible the kinds of publicly
funded religious schools that operate in the Netherlands. But France has other
big problems. First, regardless of what French law says, widespread
discrimination holds back the country’s immigrants. Second, the French economy
has been underperforming for years, with unemployment rates that are twice
those of neighboring Germany. For young immigrants in France, the unemployment
rate is close to 35 percent, compared with 25 percent for French youth as a
whole. France should help integrate its immigrants by making it easier for them
to find jobs, primarily by liberalizing the labor market. Finally, the idea of
French national identity and French culture has come under attack as
Islamophobic; in contemporary France, the very concept of assimilation is not
politically acceptable to many on the left. This is a shame, since it allows
the nativists and extremists of the far-right National Front to position
themselves as the true defenders of the republican ideal of universal
citizenship.
In the United States, an
assimilation agenda would begin with public education. The teaching of basic
civics has been in decline for decades, not just for immigrants but also for
native-born Americans. Public schools should also move away from the bilingual
and multilingual programs that have become popular in recent decades. (New York
City’s public school system offers instruction in more than a dozen different
languages.) Such programs have been marketed as ways to speed the acquisition
of English by nonnative speakers, but the empirical evidence on whether they
work is mixed; indeed, they may in fact delay the process of learning English.
The American creedal national
identity would also be strengthened by a universal requirement for national
service, which would underline the idea that U.S. citizenship demands
commitment and sacrifice. A citizen could perform such service either by
enlisting in the military or by working in a civilian role, such as teaching in
schools or working on publicly funded environmental conservation projects
similar to those created by the New Deal. If such national service were
correctly structured, it would force young people to work together with others
from very different social classes, regions, races, and ethnicities, just as
military service does. And like all forms of shared sacrifice, it would
integrate newcomers into the national culture. National service would serve as
a contemporary form of classical republicanism, a form of democracy that
encouraged virtue and public-spiritedness rather than simply leaving citizens
alone to pursue their private lives.
ASSIMILATION NATION
In both the United States and
Europe, a policy agenda focused on assimilation would have to tackle the issue
of immigration levels. Assimilation into a dominant culture becomes much harder
as the numbers of immigrants rise relative to the native population. As
immigrant communities reach a certain scale, they tend to become
self-sufficient and no longer need connections to groups outside themselves.
They can overwhelm public services and strain the capacity of schools and other
public institutions to care for them. Immigrants will likely have a positive
net effect on public finances in the long run—but only if they get jobs and
become tax-paying citizens or lawful residents. Large numbers of newcomers can
also weaken support among native-born citizens for generous welfare benefits, a
factor in both the U.S. and the European immigration debates.
Liberal democracies benefit
greatly from immigration, both economically and culturally. But they also
unquestionably have the right to control their own borders. All people have a
basic human right to citizenship. But that does not mean they have the right to
citizenship in any particular country beyond the one in which they or their
parents were born. International law does not, moreover, challenge the right of
states to control their borders or to set criteria for citizenship.
The EU needs to be able to
control its external borders better than it does, which in practice means
giving countries such as Greece and Italy more funding and stronger legal
authority to regulate the flow of immigrants. The EU agency charged with doing
this, Frontex, is understaffed and underfunded and lacks strong political
support from the very member states most concerned with keeping immigrants out.
The system of free internal movement within the EU will not be politically
sustainable unless the problem of Europe’s external borders is solved.
In the United States, the
chief problem is the inconsistent enforcement of immigration laws. Doing little
to prevent millions of people from entering and staying in the country
unlawfully and then engaging in sporadic and seemingly arbitrary bouts of
deportation—which were a feature of Obama’s time in office—is hardly a
sustainable long-term policy. But Trump’s pledge to “build a wall”
on the Mexican border is little more than nativistic posturing: a huge
proportion of illegal immigrants enter the United States legally and simply
remain in the country after their visas expire. What is needed is a better
system of sanctioning companies and people who hire illegal immigrants, which
would require a national identification system that could help employers figure
out who can legally work for them. Such a system has not been established
because too many employers benefit from the cheap labor that illegal immigrants
provide. Moreover, many on the left and the right oppose a national
identification system owing to their suspicion of government overreach.
Compared with Europe, the
United States has been far more welcoming of immigrants, in part because it
developed a creedal national identity early in its history.
As a result, the United
States now hosts a population of around 11 million illegal immigrants. The vast
majority of them have been in the country for years and are doing useful work,
raising families, and otherwise behaving as law-abiding citizens. A small
number of them commit criminal acts, just as a small number of native-born
Americans commit crimes. But the idea that all illegal immigrants are criminals
because they violated U.S. law to enter or stay in the country is ridiculous,
just as it is ridiculous to think that the United States could ever force all
of them to leave the country and return to their countries of origin.
The outlines of a basic
bargain on immigration reform have existed for some time. The federal
government would undertake serious enforcement measures to control the
country’s borders and would also create a path to citizenship for illegal
immigrants without criminal records. Such a bargain might receive the support
of a majority of U.S. voters, but hard-core immigration opponents are dead set
against any form of “amnesty,” and pro-immigrant groups are opposed to stricter
enforcement.
Public policies that focus on
the successful assimilation of foreigners might help break this logjam by
taking the wind out of the sails of the current populist upsurge in both the
United States and Europe. The groups vociferously opposing immigration are
coalitions of people with different concerns. Hard-core nativists are driven by
racism and bigotry; little can be done to change their minds. But others have
more legitimate concerns about the speed of social change driven by mass
immigration and worry about the capacity of existing institutions to
accommodate this change. A policy focus on assimilation might ease their
concerns and peel them away from the bigots.
Identity politics thrives
whenever the poor and the marginalized are invisible to their compatriots.
Resentment over lost status starts with real economic distress, and one way of
muting the resentment is to mitigate concerns over jobs, incomes, and security.
In the United States, much of the left stopped thinking several decades ago
about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying
conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to
come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality.
A major exception to this trend was Obama, whose Affordable Care Act was a
milestone in U.S. social policy. The ACA’s opponents tried to frame it as an
identity issue, insinuating that the policy was designed by a black president
to help his black constituents. But the ACA was in fact a national policy
designed to help less well-off Americans regardless of their race or identity.
Many of the law’s beneficiaries include rural whites in the South who have
nonetheless been persuaded to vote for Republican politicians vowing to repeal
the ACA.
Identity politics has made
the crafting of such ambitious policies more difficult. Although fights over
economic policy produced sharp divisions early in the twentieth century, many
democracies found that those with opposing economic visions could often split
the difference and compromise. Identity issues, by contrast, are harder to
reconcile: either you recognize me or you don’t. Resentment over lost dignity
or invisibility often has economic roots, but fights over identity frequently
distract from policy ideas that could help. As a result, it has been harder to
create broad coalitions to fight for redistribution: members of the working
class who also belong to higher-status identity groups (such as whites in the United
States) tend to resist making common cause with those below them, and vice
versa.
The Democratic Party, in
particular, has a major choice to make. It can continue to try to win elections
by doubling down on the mobilization of the identity groups that today supply
its most fervent activists: African Americans, Hispanics, professional women,
the LGBT community, and so on. Or the party could try to win back some of the
white working-class voters who constituted a critical part of Democratic
coalitions from the New Deal through the Great Society but who have defected to
the Republican Party in recent elections. The former strategy might allow it to
win elections, but it is a poor formula for governing the country. The
Republican Party is becoming the party of white people, and the Democratic
Party is becoming the party of minorities. Should that process continue much
further, identity will have fully displaced economic ideology as the central
cleavage of U.S. politics, which would be an unhealthy outcome for American
democracy.
A MORE UNIFIED FUTURE
Fears about the future are
often best expressed through fiction, particularly science fiction that tries
to imagine future worlds based on new kinds of technology. In the first half of
the twentieth century, many of those forward-looking fears centered on big,
centralized, bureaucratic tyrannies that snuffed out individuality and privacy:
think of George Orwell’s 1984. But the nature of imagined dystopias
began to change in the later decades of the century, and one particular strand
spoke to the anxieties raised by identity politics. So-called cyberpunk authors
such as William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling saw a future
dominated not by centralized dictatorships but by uncontrolled social
fragmentation facilitated by the Internet.
Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow
Crash, posited a ubiquitous virtual “Metaverse” in which individuals could
adopt avatars and change their identities at will. In the novel, the United
States has broken down into “Burbclaves,” suburban subdivisions catering to
narrow identities, such as New South Africa (for the racists, with their
Confederate flags) and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (for Chinese immigrants).
Passports and visas are required to travel from one neighborhood to another.
The CIA has been privatized, and the aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise
has become a floating home for refugees. The authority of the federal
government has shrunk to encompass only the land on which federal buildings are
located.
Our present world is simultaneously
moving toward the opposing dystopias of hypercentralization and endless
fragmentation. China, for instance, is building a massive dictatorship in which
the government collects highly specific personal data
on the daily transactions of every citizen. On the other hand, other parts of
the world are seeing the breakdown of centralized institutions, the emergence
of failed states, increasing polarization, and a growing lack of consensus over
common ends. Social media and the Internet have facilitated the emergence of
self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by shared
identities.
The good thing about
dystopian fiction is that it almost never comes true. Imagining how current
trends will play out in an ever more exaggerated fashion serves as a useful
warning: 1984 became a potent symbol of a totalitarian future that
people wanted to avoid; the book helped inoculate societies against
authoritarianism. Likewise, people today can imagine their countries as better
places that support increasing diversity yet that also embrace a vision for how
diversity can serve common ends and support liberal democracy rather than undermine
it.
People will never stop
thinking about themselves and their societies in identity terms. But people’s
identities are neither fixed nor necessarily given by birth. Identity can be
used to divide, but it can also be used to unify. That, in the end, will be the
remedy for the populist politics of the present.
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