Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics
amc.sas.upenn.edu
amc.sas.upenn.edu
Even on the right, the phrases "Danish culture" and "Danish values" are used much more than any reference to blood or ethnicity. It is very much a fringe view to suggest that people are not able to become like us and assimilate (though a lot less fringe to claim that many foreigners, especially muslims, don't want to do so.)
And is the argument really about 'identity', or just 'status'?
IMHO, economics is flawed at it's core, because people do not just value material wealth, but relative, social wealth, aka status, in fact, almost above all. That also explains twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.
But, and I see it all the time, people will in many cases, not only not work together for mutual gain, but will actually choose actions that harm their own material wellbeing, if they harm their close rivals more.
People care about their relative status, not absolute wealth.
It isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics. Plenty has been written about the group of people that invaded the Capitol last year, and the only consistent characteristic of that group was being white. No, it has nothing to do with economics. It included a doctor making $ 650,000 p. a. as well as a group that traveled to DC on a private jet.
Hell, the major group of young reactionaries in Europe (until recently) had "Identity" in their name.
This text just seems entirely out of place, and I was wondering if I missed the (2008) in the title while reading it. There's nothing new in it, and it wouldn't get much attention if it weren't for the name.
People forget this a lot - and try to ignore it consistently.
isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics.
>>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.
This is another false, politically correct account.
The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, on black lives, has been devastating.
What this racial justice movement led to is riots, wherein 18 people were murdered in one night in Chicago:
https://forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/08/18-people-were...
And massively less aggressive policing, which led to 1,003 homicides in Chicago in 2021, twice that of 2019.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Report-paints-grim-...
The reason is that police are arresting fewer people, and solving fewer homicides:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/1/3/22858995/chicago...
“Many of our officers are not arresting people, are letting crimes that happen right in front of them go by because they don’t want to be misconstrued as being racist or being held liable for any kind of misconceived notions of brutality or whatever,” he said."
Consequently, revenge killings, where one gang retaliates against another for a previous, unsolved, homicide, have skyrocketed.
It presents a middle path and almost plaintively asks people to follow it. I fear this is wishful thinking, but at least he's trying to be conciliatory and constructive.
What surprised me was his reference to Snow Crash. I did not expect that in an essay by Francis Fukuyama.
"The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin."
Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants to send immigrants back, it would be illegal and unconstitutional as well as impossible. Now, restricting ILLEGAL immigration on the other hand? Yes, basically everyone on the right supports this. But not wanting illegal immigration is literally on the other side of the map from not wanting any immigration at all and sending back immigrants.
I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992, as other comments have mentioned. But I think just as important as identity politics is defining the opposing side by the worst ideas of its supporters. For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism". There are tons of people on both sides who don't believe in this crap and are dedicated to the core ideals of economic prosperity for all and expansion of opportunities. Tuning these crazies out would go a long way to calming down the discourse in this country, but I don't think essays like this really help the situation.
I'm not sure why people jump on this so much - it very well could have ended if the US had better leadership & strategy... If the US had Marshal plan equivalent for the former USSR & a realist China strategy, things would have been different. But sure Huntington's book is better.
end result : mental health funding decreased and police funding increased.
So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations
[1] https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psych...
Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.
It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.
Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).
ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.
I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.
Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."
Interesting. What form would you expect this to take? Maybe an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.
Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.
When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.
This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.
Should be
> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different. > Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
If that wasn't obvious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/state-and-local-...
> 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.
He's been playing that same song for decades. You already know what his position on everything is and how he'll argue for it. The real amazing thing is how much he's committed to it
Anyway it's not "character assassination" if it's true. I don't know enough about this person's work over time but.
> always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible
That does describe some people I can think of, so it's at least possible this is a fair description of his position.
> Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points?
No - why do you say that?
PP is attacking Fukuyama _based on his ideas_ - that imperialism is the natural course of events, the best for everyone, and inevitable. It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
That is the reverse of ad hominem. A ad hominem argument would go, "Fukuyama is wrong because he's from Harvard/Asian/etc", and of course those arguments are false.
> It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
I totally agree.
This is a false equivalence.
On the one hand, the Democratic party has unequivocally rejected “defund the police” on multiple occasions. First in the 2020 primary by electing a presidential candidate who explicitly rejected the slogan, and continues to do so as president; then by excluding it from its platform altogether; and most recently by a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote in the senate to denounce the slogan. So the record is quite clear that Democrats do not in fact stand for “defund the police” beyond a loud minority.
On the other hand, Republican senators have unanimously refused to renew the Voting Rights Act, which until 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. The VRA is one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement and has been a bulwark in protecting Black citizens in particular from disenfranchisement in the southern states. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the VRA has lapsed, virtually all Republican-controlled states have resurrected the same sweeping restrictions on the right to vote that MLK and others marched against. Let’s not even get into the January 6 attack on the capitol which was instigated and carried out by openly white supremacist organizations and which, to this day, the Republican party refuses to denounce, probably because so many of its own leadership is directly implicated.
So, yes, the Republican party is now defined by white nationalism. This is an established fact, and you being uncomfortable with it does not make it less true.
1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws. It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
I referred to a very specific piece of legislation for a reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is, to quote Wikipedia, “a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting”. It is the direct result of Martin Luther King Jr marching against Jim Crow laws in the south. Supporting it was a no-brainer Republican policy as recently as 2006 (the last time all its provisions were re-authorized).
In other words, the VRA is no ordinary law: it is the quintessential anti-Jim Crow law. When the modern Republican party took the unprecedented step of removing these protections against Jim Crow laws, they effectively made themselves the champions of Jim Crow - the champions of white nationalism.
> It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
No, it absolutely is not. Civil rights organization like the NAACP and SPLC systematically challenge these laws on the grounds that they are disguised racial discrimination - and they win. The problem is that the legal process takes too long and enforcement is easily dodged by the states. This is why the VRA was crucial: it required federal pre-approval of voting laws, and allowed proper enforcement against states that persisted in racial discrimination.
This is not only well documented legislative fact, it is actually tought in History class. It is mind-boggling to me that it is even a point of debate. The only excuse for your argument is ignorance.
> 2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
Large scale voter suppression is a serious matter. MLK and countless other Americans shed blood marching to secure the VRA, and now their work is undone. That is a grave threat to our democratic institutions. I am optimistic that the white nationalists will lose, but it will be a difficult and uncertain fight ahead.
But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
I'm not American and there is even a fair chance I wouldn't vote for the Republicans if I were, I'd likely be trying to split the right wing vote for the libertarian party to force the Republicans to adopt more acceptable policies.
Political parties are large and complex beasts. If you want some aspects of the Republicans that could define them, probably the obvious one is a heavy focus on individual identity over group identity when assigning credit/blame. They also tend to adopt more aggressive policies of individual liberty, and are more oriented towards rules and order.
> And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
They think it is likely to hurt their chances in an election. That is why I'm telling you it isn't white nationalism; white nationalists don't get especially excited about the details around how close elections get decided. If it was white nationalism you'd be leading with policies where they wanted to expel non-white people. Which you aren't so I assume they don't have any that you think would stand up to scrutiny.
It pretty clear that in the last forty years, politics has primarily focused on the needs of the wealthy[0], to the detriment of the needs of the general populous. This has led to a massive discontentment in the populace that - in my opinion - was the driving factor in the election of Donald Trump. (The Democrats were able to bring their populist wing under control, otherwise it could well have been Bernie.)
So, all in all I think it is the misguided attempts by the elites to somehow divert the plebes from the realization that they have been screwed over that's breaking the USA. On the right this is done using white-grievance politics and xenophobic propaganda, on the left using identity politics.
What they use in the end doesn't matter, as long as they manage to divide the plebs.
Unfortunately, the spiral of escalating language has now reached a point where the 'other' side is so railed up that legitimate elections are being questioned. I hope the elites are smart enough to turn it around before they totally wreck the country.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.
From what I've read, a lot of people felt similarly in the late era of the Pax Britannia. (Which is a big part of why I think it's just "on pause".)
Okay, it wasn't clear to me that was your view from your comment.
> political science as political philosophy
I think he stepped out of that realm when he tried to make a prediction and justify it as correct.
The period since 1992 was relatively peaceful, that's right. But that's not what Fukuyama's thesis was about, especially since he couldn't know in 1992 what would happen in the next 30 years.
Fukuyama's theory was that mankind has reached its optimal, stable state and that that the further historical changes are very unlikely, because why would people want to mess with perfection :) It was basically very naive optimism, I guess he was still in euphoria after Soviet Union collapse...
Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic. Plenty of historical changes, most of them for worse.
Don't forget rising authoritarianism again, which was one of the characteristics of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history, the fall of totalitarianism with the USSR.
Oh yeah, the web changed nothing. /s
> No major nation has had a revolution.
You are disrespecting Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey... and of course Yugoslavia, which started breaking up in 1991 (Fukuyama started his ramblings in 1989) and didn't end until 2001 - if you can consider the current fragile peace an end, which it really isn't. Plus, most South American countries continue to "tweak" their constitutions every few years, one way or the other. And if you go to Africa, well, have I got news for you...
> There have been no major wars between nation-states.
The US literally invaded and occupied two sovereign countries since then, in both cases continuing major operations for more than a decade. But if we consider "nation-states" only Western states or superpowers, there has been no such war in the 30 years before 1992 either. That's because conventional "top-quality" nation-state conflicts have been made impractical by nuclear weapons and MAD, well before 1992. What we have now is asymmetrical warfare (superpower vs minnow) or proxy warfare. That doesn't mean these conflicts don't make history or don't change things significantly - they very much do.
> No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down.
The techno-utopianism that the internet generated is an ideology in itself, and the backlash has only just started. Same for conspiracy-theorism as a way of life, climate change, identity politics... just because they don't make people wear the same shirt and march in the streets, it doesn't mean they are not deeply-ideological movements. You can argue that they were "invented" before 1992, but 1) inevitably these things take time, 2) they didn't really have that much traction until the '00s.
> Nothing historical has happened
That's such a sheltered viewpoint. I'm sure quite a few people in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Ukraine, Tunisia, Lybia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Liberia, Mali, etc etc, would have something to say.
History is very much grinding all around us, it's just a question of whether we actually want to look at it or we'd rather pretend it didn't exist.
EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.
"Anthropology" is a field that so thoroughly discredited itself by political advocacy that no one to the right of Trotsky could possibly take it seriously. These are the people who trashed Napoleon Chagnon, who actually lived with the Yanomani, for the audacity of reporting what they were like, which wasn't what they like to hear.
From the NYT obituary:
Dr. Chagnon dismissed as “Marxist” the widespread anthropological belief that warfare in tribal life was usually provoked by disputes over access to scarce resources.
“The whole purpose and design of the social structure of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive- age females,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Noble Savages.”
Other anthropologists rejected these assertions as exaggerated and even racist, saying they could do harm to the tribe by casting it in a bad light. Many argued that human behavior was best explained not by genetics and evolution but by the social and natural environments in which people live.
"By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science tribe of America."
"during the late 1960s and early 1970s Chagnon had served as a jungle advance man and blood collector."
"Chagnon inscribed these indelible identification numbers on people's arms--barely 20 years after World War II."
And yet the future is all about Identity politics. It's an optimization problem really. Recent crises show that liberal democracy can no longer serve the needs of individuals that have increasingly more freedoms (partly thanks to technology) and who are no longer willing to compromise with large groups. The challenge is going to be how to build political systems that simultaneously cater to all the various identity dimensions of citizens, while at the same time avoiding the oppression of 50% by the other 50%, as happens in democracies. This is a technological problem (after all democracy itself was technology), and interestingly many of the decentralized projects aim to solve parts of it. What seems to be lacking is an integrated understanding of all such parts.