Francis Fukuyama's argument against Identity Politics
First of all, I'm not a great fan of Fukuyama after his "End of History" argument on the triumph of Western values. But Fukuyama, who has retreated from many positions (including being a neocon), still can make interesting points and does have influence. In his latest writing he is against identity politics and sees it as a danger for a functioning democracy as both sides, the left and the right has embraced this kind of politics.
Fukuyama argues in his latest Foreign Affairs article "Against Identity Politics - The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy". First he talks about the change that has happened.
And then how identity politics has changed things:
The left embraced the new way of looking at politics:
Which brings here to my first question. Has the left really abandoned the "old" working class? Is Fukuyama here correct? There are signs of this especially in Europe where traditional blue collar workers who have traditionally embraced the left have gone to side of the populist anti-immigration movements. And at least here leftist party, the ex-communists, seem to be more of a hipster party with young attractive women as their leader and not the grim factory worker-looking guys of the last century. But this can be anecdotal and not really what has happened.
And then of course, the right has gotten to the bandwagon too. Fukuyama sees Trump's rise as an example of this. He writes:
Why is it such a problem? Fukuyama argues this is basically dangerous for democracy.
Identity is inherently plastic and sliced to narrow identities. Yet things like race or ethnicity one cannot change. One has to worry about national identity as you cannot have legimitate power and a democracy in a nation state without a national identity. Fukuyama understands that nationalism has given national identity a bad name, but this identity doesn't have to be hostile, racist or xenophobic. At least still the identity of being a citizen of the US isn't related to race and ethnicity, which Fukuyama calls a creedal identity, but Fukuyama fears that this is challenged. The challenge comes especially from the far right.
The basic question here is if Fukuyama is correct about identity politics or is this identity politics more of a media talking point than a change in political reality? And the question I'm interested is if the left really isn't so interested in the classical working class. Is identity politics a threat to social cohesion?
Anyway, if I explained Fukuyama's points incorrectly or in a confusing way, here's the guy himself talking about the issue (from last month):
Fukuyama argues in his latest Foreign Affairs article "Against Identity Politics - The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy". First he talks about the change that has happened.
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.
And then how identity politics has changed things:
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 embraced the new way of looking at politics:
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.
Which brings here to my first question. Has the left really abandoned the "old" working class? Is Fukuyama here correct? There are signs of this especially in Europe where traditional blue collar workers who have traditionally embraced the left have gone to side of the populist anti-immigration movements. And at least here leftist party, the ex-communists, seem to be more of a hipster party with young attractive women as their leader and not the grim factory worker-looking guys of the last century. But this can be anecdotal and not really what has happened.
And then of course, the right has gotten to the bandwagon too. Fukuyama sees Trump's rise as an example of this. He writes:
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.
Why is it such a problem? Fukuyama argues this is basically dangerous for democracy.
Identity is inherently plastic and sliced to narrow identities. Yet things like race or ethnicity one cannot change. One has to worry about national identity as you cannot have legimitate power and a democracy in a nation state without a national identity. Fukuyama understands that nationalism has given national identity a bad name, but this identity doesn't have to be hostile, racist or xenophobic. At least still the identity of being a citizen of the US isn't related to race and ethnicity, which Fukuyama calls a creedal identity, but Fukuyama fears that this is challenged. The challenge comes especially from the far right.
The basic question here is if Fukuyama is correct about identity politics or is this identity politics more of a media talking point than a change in political reality? And the question I'm interested is if the left really isn't so interested in the classical working class. Is identity politics a threat to social cohesion?
Anyway, if I explained Fukuyama's points incorrectly or in a confusing way, here's the guy himself talking about the issue (from last month):
Comments (39)
Does he give any indication of what the argument is for that claim?
Quoting ssu
I think we should be skeptical of any claim that a large amount of people are all thinking about something in the same way, that they're all focused on the same things, etc It's wiser to read this as being more about a shift a la a statistical trend that's noticeable.
"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."
What Fukuyama leaves out of this account is whether the demands to be treated equally were met. It also leaves out the unpleasant fact that a "celebration of intrinsic differences" is what the "dominant" group has been doing for centuries.
Without those elements kept in view, Fukuyama's account gives the impression that the marginalized groups got the equality they asked for and are now crying out for something more. A little extra pudding, please.
That syllogism has been a right wing talking point for decades. So, what does that make Francis Fukuyama?
By Fukuyama's measure, there is no way to distinguish between the desire to be an Amish person and the desire to be a self identified Nazi.
Tired of talking about narcissism? Here are 3 new Greek terms to wear out: Thymos, megalothymia, and Isothymia.
Megalothymia and isothymia are the two elements of thymos.
Thymos is a philosophical concept introduced by Plato as one of the three motivations of man, the first two being needs and desires. Thymos is the emotional need for every human to be recognized by others as human, and deserving of respect. Megalothymia specifically is the need to be recognized as superior to others, while isothymia is the need to be recognized as merely equal to others.
The nice thing about this pair of terms is that there is a built in ambiguity that will lead to lots of disputes as to whether transgendered people, for instance, are asking to be merely equal to others or not. Maybe they are claiming to be more special than everybody else. If I assert the isothymia of white people, is that believable? Everybody knows that white people think they are superior. If you are against open borders you must be a white supremacist. (The Guardian carried a piece the other day in which the author equated the Republican Party with white supremacy.) Thymos = isothymia = megalothymia.
@ssu: I know you understand this, but a lot of people do not. They think that if you work in an office, drive a decent car, and have a mortgage, then you are "middle class" and not "working class". The idea of "middle class" is defined by not using wrenches and hammers and living a slightly up-scale life style which probably floats on a pool of debt. For the uninitiated, "middle class" properly means "entrepreneurs who own their small businesses or professional offices. A successful law practice is "middle class". A successful surgical practice is "middle class". Owning a plumbing company employing a dozen plumbers and additional helpers is "middle class". Owning a batch of small office buildings and collecting rent on them is "middle class".
The old Dutch and English families who still own property underneath famous buildings in New York have been collecting rent for decades -- in some cases centuries. They are not dependent on their labor for their sustenance. Neither are the major heirs of the Rockefeller fortune. Bill gates, Warren Buffet, Fuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Brin, et al are not dependent on a daily, weekly, or monthly wage. Maybe Bezos was when he just started out, but when you are worth $150,000,000,000...
Why our hipster marxists can't understand the basic facts of class definition and class interest is beyond me. It is not that complicated. And their ignorance has led them to go in search of exotic and more interesting problems than those of people who are merely forced to work for a living. Gender confused people fill the bill! So do gay people. Migrants and Illegals -- darker skinned or not. (New York has a lot of Irish illegals.) Ahhhh, vive le différence! (Sounds better in French than in German -- vive la Unterschied.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think the link between a nation state and it's citizens, which then as citizens of that state do share a common identity, is rather obvious. Once that common identity is meaningless, you can have at worst a civil war. After all, how many in Jugoslavia believed in the 1990's that "they are, first and foremost, Jugoslavians"? Suddenly you were a Serb, a Slovenian, a Croat, a muslim Bosniak or an christian (Serbian) Bosniak. Not a Jugoslav citizen anymore.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Might be so. Nearly everything today has it's roots in the past and hence every topic or discourse can be argued that it's not anything new.
The entire concept of identity politics has still been based on the notions of ideology, rationally behaving political actors (groups or individuals), and political representation. Haven’t we already seen the failure of this theoretical scheme in Fukuyama’s “ End of the History”? Yet, Fukuyama himself has not cared about choosing different concepts. One could find out that the politics of identities has based on the same theoretical base as the notion of populism and Steve Bannon’s thesis and narrative that “The future of Western politics is populist, not liberal”. Yet, both should be explained using more fundamental and appropriate concepts.
There are attempts to conceive contemporary politics as politics of affect. Understood ideologically, affect is the set of means that the dominating group has applied to make the dominated ones to mislead their own interests and instead to invest into the foreign ones. Nevertheless, affect can be understood as the primary process, whereas ideology has become a secondary effect. Accordingly, politicians and acting groups have not acted and thought primarily pursuing long-term plans and programs. What are matters – an immediate effect of catching a maximum of public attention, getting a positive resonance in mass media, changing a focus of discussion to a more appropriate one, adjusting a discourse and lexicon to momentarily political needs, etc.
“There is nothing easier than self-delusion. Since what man desires, is the first thing he believes.”
- Demosthenes
You tell people what they want to hear (preferably from a position of some authority) and they will become even more convinced of their beliefs. There's a lot of material on this topic by an ex-KGB informant named Yuri Bezmenov. He defected to the west in 1970 and gave a number of lectures about Soviet influencing campaigns. He called these groups that the Soviets used for their purposes 'useful idiots'. Ignorant people who got fed the lies they wanted to hear and never realized they were being manipulated.
Of ignorant people there is no lack nowadays, and somewhere along the road western society has decided ignorant opinions are worth as much as educated opinions are worth as much as wise opinions. I have no problem entertaining the thought that maybe our society is full of useful idiots.
Well, that may what I left out from the quote from Fukuyama. He acknowledges that these before invisible minorities did have success and they indeed had been repressed.
Quoting Valentinus
I'm not so sure he is assigning a divisive animus to all form of self identification. But I guess his idea is that that the "you cannot relate to me or understand me as I'm x and you are y" is divisive. I think it's obvious from the next quote.
Sure. That much is obvious. What's not obvious is the notion that you cannot have legimitate power and a democracy in a nation state without a national identity.
This is an interesting point. But aren't churches different because they express the other side of the coin rather strongly - the push for identity-suppressing social cohesion? They are tools for conformity and so "safe" in that sense.
That's the problem. Vast majority of people don't have a problem for example with transgender people being treated equally, but many can get offended if one has to start referring themselves being of cis-gender because this rather small minority came up with the definition. And of course, everything concerning "white people" and the discourse goes quite nuclear, just like the debate about nuclear energy.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Thanks Bitter, nice to hear that from an old school Marxist. :wink:
The problem is that class distinctions seem antiquated especially when many academic jobs, like teachers or military officers etc. are actually low paying jobs which previously weren't. The term middle class confuses this quite if then it's counterpart below is the underclass. And so do terms like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seem something from only fit for the 19th Century and early 20th Century.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn't demand to be treated like white people, he demanded that black people be treated as equal to white people. The signs the activists held to their chests said "I am a Man." They did not say "I am White."
Now Fukuyama argues that some people added a demand to this first one when they spoke of already having a culture and form of life that had its own value. For most of those who advocated for that message, it was bound up with the original demand to be recognized as a human being.
Fukuyama sells his idea of an added demand by saying that later generations had not experienced what the former generation had. After this, its just a bunch of complainers who are tired of being treated like white people.
Cue Newt Gingrich.
Give an example. Do you have in mind another way how people could identify with their nation or is the whole identity issue meaningless?
They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community.
One of the obvious points of tension relate to the education of our children. Religious education is permitted but does run into restrictions developed through the norms of secular society and legal limits when the practices become criminal.
The other large area of tension regards involvement in means of production. The Amish of Pennsylvania are not competing for resources in the same manner as the Hasidim in Brooklyn.
Perhaps when people don't support universal agendas anymore, they then go with identity politics.
Sure. I take it as basic to social structure that there is always a tension between the individual and the collective, the competitive and the co-operative. That dynamic is in itself the healthy one that a well-adapted social system is going to foster.
So my point was really that churches fit the democratic/enlightenment scheme because they are essentially pro-social. They foster community more than division. And then once the balance tips, we start calling it a cult, a sect, or whatever. That church is now seen as a divisive threat to the general public fabric.
So in the bigger picture, the modern version of religious tolerance is a way to neutralise churches as political forces. It gets them out of the workings of the state and gives them a community building role, along with sports clubs and all the other community level institutions.
I think this just helps to define the line when it comes to the assimilation vs multiculturalism debate. As a modern society, there is some optimal balance we would want to strike.
We can kind of sense how much diversity, how much homogeneity, is a healthy balance. And we wouldn't thus think that either diversity or homogeneity in themselves were the desirable goals. A sophisticated political position would be wanting more of both, not more of just one or other. And beyond that, more of both up to some understanding of what the long term social goal would be.
It just seems like a complete non-sequitur to me.
Imagine we have a nation state, and for whatever reason, there's some conceptual block where the citizenry have no notion of a unique ethnic or other cultural identity, etc.
So, the claim is that just in case the above obtains, that nation state can't practice democracy, they can't all vote on the laws they'll institute, because . . . well, I have no idea why we'd think that, because it seems like a complete non-sequitur. What in the world does the one have to do with the other?
Quoting Valentinus
The problem would seem to be the internet. The new shared public space without a stabilising "memory" to fix some sort of useful social goal in mind.
It is quite normal and indeed functional to have polarities or dichotomies. And the most productive divisions are those that are metaphysically complete - as in same vs different, competition vs co-operation, one vs many, integration vs differentiation, particular vs general. So a healthy society will be expressing some constructive balance of its tensions.
However, social discourse has changed in some essential way as it has moved from the old civics media age to the new social media age. As with everything, the internet disintermediates. It removes all the intermediaries that stand in the middle and "slowed things down". This removal of the middle ground can be free-ing. But it can also remove a lot of the machinery that represents some kind of collectively-adaptive memory. Sometimes things are being slowed down for good reason. Public institutions frame long-term truths and goals. They are designed to change slowly so that societies can be pointed towards long-term aims.
The social media internet strips out the kinds of checks and balances the old media had. Again, the old media had a lot of problems. It was in the pocket of the corporates and the states. On the other hand, governments and big business also represented institutional interests. They were part of the wisdom stabilising their societies in pursuit of relatively agreed long-term goals.
So the central question for me is about the nature of the internet as the new underpinning infrastructure of social discourse. Will it develop a sufficiently cohesive sense of purpose? Will it rise above the memes and hypes enough to develop far-sighted constraints?
The US might seem a hot mess for sure. But what is happening in India, or Ghana, or Chile? What does the new world order look like in terms of developing a modern institutional form?
I'm not assuming it is working, or not working. There sure is plenty of dysfunction any time you turn on the news. However that would seem the critical question. Trump and social justice warriors and all the other nonsense could be the true end of the old Enlightenment dream. Or it might be the noise masking the real deeper world social changes that will manifest.
Identity politics is clearly a symptom - but of what exactly?
Maybe the silliest part of Fukuyama's position would be the attempt to frame it still as a left vs right kind of thing. That feels so stale - the US dealing with its own "reds under the bed" existential threat. Or Europe still dealing with its industrial era class wars.
And then every generation has to discover what is going to be the agenda for social change. That is natural. So you have arguably the trajectory of 1950s counter-culture, 1980s slacker culture, 2010s inclusiveness culture. There is some kind of thread in breaking the mould, mainstreaming individuality, collectivising the consequences.
What is happening in the US seems a bit of a sideshow. How much is explained just by the particular kind of urban~rural divide that characterises the states? Is that such a thing anywhere else in the world?
So it seems complicated. But the left vs right lens probably tells us very little of interest.
Social discourse in general has embraced the internet. And that is going to look like something for a start - disruptive, disintermediated, ADHD. Worldwide, bigger things are going on. And in claiming both left and right are embracing identity politics/demolishing democracy, Fukuyama is mashing up the progressive and the conservative, the inclusive and the privileging, the young and the old, the urban and the rural, and all the other natural polarities that are the historical dynamics that need to be more clearly understood.
I agree with your argument for a balance between homogeneity and diversity.
In regards to Fukuyama's argument, my point is that it is not simply a matter of people either seeking forms of self identity or agreeing to a single culture. As you point out, some people can pat their heads and rub their stomachs at the same time.
Therefore, why should it be axiomatic that "marginalized groups" cannot do this balancing act too? Or to put it another way, how is wanting to be recognized an attack upon the "public shared space" by default?
Fukuyama treats the matter as a self evident truth. It is not self evident. He is inviting the reader to overlook the only interesting thing to consider.
Perhaps you haven't thought this out.
How could there be a block of citizenry who have no notion of a unique ethnic or other cultural identity?
OK. What's you mother tongue? English? Whatever it is, imagine then that everything officially given to you, taxes, tickets or even the newspapers you can buy, everything is in different language that either you can barely read or don't understand at all. You simply won't get the service in English (or in your mother tongue). So, you think that doesn't affect you and your identity? Do you think then that government is for your when you will not get any service from any official in the language you speak? Now, if your relatives, friends and co-workers would have the same problem with the official language, wouldn't there be something common between you? No? You just happily go to vote without any knowledge what actually you are doing in the voting booth as all the instructions are in a language you cannot understand. Still democracy prevails.
The fact is that identities are not usually a personal choice you make. You don't pick them like your diet of being vegetarian or whatever. At worst it's pushed down your throat by other people in everyday life. If you argue that there are people who don't care about the issue, that's surely true, there are masses of them. They likely live in a country where the official language is the language they speak and everything for them is just given, all the perks from education to social welfare to other public services brought to them by their state. Hence they don't have to care at all about it, they'll just take it for granted and so hence they can question the whole reason for the state to exist.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because if people don't relate to the state in any way, why would they vote? It's not their government, it's for somebody else.
This is the only part that addresses the question I'm asking.
No one is positing people not relating to the state in any way. Unless you think that the only way to relate to a state is via national identity. (In which case you'd need to present an argument for that.)
So, you don't think that people with no concept of national identity (it doesn't matter why exactly they wouldn't have that, it's simply a thought experiment scenario) would be interested in voting on laws about, say, health care, whether marijuana should be legal, whether taxes should be raised, etc.?
Question, Terrapin: what do you think citizenship is?
If you go to a vacation on another continent and fly there, what do you think that passport is about?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Now you are mixing up identity and how the people understanding what their identity is. As I said, many people don't give a damn because it's no problem to them.
And I asked you, who do you think has no notion of a unique ethnic or other cultural identity? How's that possible? The language you speak makes part of that identity. The place you live makes part of that identity.
Re "citizenship," conventional dictionary definitions work well enough. Citizens in the relevant sense, quoting Merriam-Webster, are members of a state or native or naturalized persons who owe allegiance to a government and are entitled to protection from it.
Re "about" that's a can of worms I don't want to sidetrack to re a big semiotics/semantics (philosophy of meaning) discussion. At any rate, re passports, I'd personally say they're focused on controlling movement.
Isn't that part of their identity then? Even if they don't actually like the country or it's government. (Who wouldn't be critical about his or her government.)
And there you said it yourself. Persons who owe allegiance to a government. Owing allegiance is the "problem" here. And if you don't feel that you get protection from the state, perhaps it discriminates against you, doesn't take into account you or perhaps even persecutes you, why would owe allegiance for that state? Obviously it's not working for you.
And with the passport they actually check your identity.
You seem to think that I'm asking questions about identity. I'm not. I'm challenging a purported logical implication.
So if we zero in on this, what would be the democratic ideal then?
I'm not familiar with your definition of "public shared space". But I take it to be an idealised notion of a commons where we all get serviced by a standard civic infrastructure and show some standard balance of tolerance~consideration. So get up close, and does this public shared space rightfully carry the higher demand that we recognise, celebrate and even perhaps love all our differences? Doesn't this in itself undermine the public right to form your own communities or in-groups in the "usual way" - the usual way involving what you as a community stand against, as well as what you stand for?
So there is a problem if we expect the public shared space not to organise itself in the normal social fashion with signifiers to separate the in-group from the out-group. There are always going to be haters and prejudices just because that is how social dynamics generally works. It is nature in action, so to speak.
The job of a public shared space is to then provide a "neutral" arena where the rules of etiquette are minimal enough that there is both a practical respect or tolerance for difference, but also a maximal possibility for free self-expression by communities, whatever size they happen to be.
Militant SJW types are criticised for being intolerant of intolerance. And I think Fukuyama would have a point that identity politics extremists do go too far in that direction. That would be a legitimate complaint. (Just as the dominant mainstream would possibly make the matching mistake of tolerating intolerance that "goes too far" ... too far by some prevailing balancing norm...)
So it is not axiomatic that marginalised groups can't understand what a balanced public shared space would look like. But it is one thing to want equality - or indeed, demand not to be actively oppressed - and another to want to be "recognised and celebrated" for whatever differences you might have to express.
Thus the functional neutrality of the public shared space could be under attack from both directions as Fukuyama argues. What do you think about the marginalised also having some right to be "celebrated". Is that necessary to the underlying social compact?
Is it logical, or even factual, that any nation doesn't have a concern for its identity? Every country wants to tell some story about who it is and what defines it. It is a human necessity.
You are saying that a nation doesn't have to have some foundation myth, some positive sense of self. Yet anthropology tells you want a dumb position that is. Humans just are that way. To suggest that an abstract kind of statehood would be possible is like trying to persuade the world to speak Esperanto. :)
No. I'm not saying anything even remotely like that.
Fukuyama said:
If not-P, then not-Q.
P was "a national identity" (of a nation state).
Q was "legimitate power and a democracy."
When we plug "a national identity (of a nation state)" into P and " legitimate power and democracy " into Q, I'm disagreeing with Fukuyama's assertion that if not-P, then not-Q is true. That conditional rather seems to be a complete non-sequitur with zero support.
Quoting Terrapin Station
But the positive claim here would be that you can't have "a nation state" unless there is some identity that indeed characterises that nation as being that nation. The legitimacy resides in that identity and fulfilling those goals. If there is no identity, then there is no nation to speak of.
So regardless of whether the identity is "land of the free", or "land of the white and powerful", it is obvious surely that any claimed legitimacy flows from the national story of what a country is about?
That part would make sense, but the part about a democracy is completely irrelevant to it. You might as well say, "You cannot have an underwear factory in a nation state without a national identity," or, "You cannot have peanut butter in a nation state without a national identity." Both would be just as relevant.
OK. But how would a nation state have legitimacy unless it claims to speak for the people who constitute it? So being a democracy would seem perfectly relevant in being the most transparent possible way of legitimatising that operational sense of national identity.
Now, one other way to create that identity at the present (that comes to my mind) is with the terrorist state IS who think they're creating a Caliphate for the muslim Ummah. They have very strict attitudes at who is a member of that state (who is a proper Muslim) and who is an infidel based on religion, not nationality or ethnicity.
Yet your argument is that either democracy doesn't need membership or that identity linking to that membership is totally irrelevant. Well, guess then I should be able then to vote in the next US elections because the actions that the US makes affects my country and me. And you pick such lousy presidents anyway. Why don't actually everybody that wants to participate in the next US elections have a chance to vote or even become a candidate?
Perhaps then the next elections in the US would be won by the Chinese Communist Party!
In other words, it's not just that the left abandoned economic problems in favor of identity-based ones, it's that neoliberalism has systematically defanged and deprived the people of the ability to intervene - and thus conduct politics - at the level of the economic. Having subject governments around the world to regulatory capture, while increasingly shifting decision making power away from the demos and into the hands of the already-powerful, identity politics is the only 'kind' of politics left that anyone can scrap over.
While it's easy to blame the left - and the right - for the turn to identity politics, this should also be coupled with the necessary question: what other options for political action are available, and more importantly, how viable are they? Fukuyama's proposed solution - building national identities - does nothing to address the engineered lack of political agency which is everywhere ascendant. Its no good just to attempt to 'change the discourse', as it were: the discourse will follow the institutional arrangements, and not the other way around. And precisely what is lacking are the institutional arrangements which would allow people to excercize political power in a way that isn't just the last-resort efforts of identity politics.
tl;dr: identity politics responds to a crisis of political action in general, a crisis engineered by neoliberal approaches to governance and policy.
I wasn't focusing on "legitimate* because one could have any arbitrary thing in mind for that term. "Legitimate power" isn't conventionally well-defined in the same way that "democracy" is.
A democracy being the "most transparent possible way . . ." is a very different idea than whether democracy is even possible without a national identity.
Good viewpoint.
The fact is that a lot of the legal agenda and objectives that various political movements have histrorically had have already been reached: universal suffrage, labour and employment laws, end of open segratation etc. For example classical liberalism, once a potent political movement in the 19th Century, has basically had all of it's basic agenda pushed through and hence liberal parties have turned into caretaker parties or have withered away as they don't have some obvious objective to fight for and hence exist.
Perhaps it is when economic needs are met (at least with the majority of voters) and globalization is working at least somewhat, parties become as I said complacent caretaker parties just running the government as usual and promoting their state in the global market. They are not thinking much about why they exist as elections are just a silly season repeated in a few years or so. Thymos has been forgotten and as you say, neoliberalism has defanged the people of the ability to intervene. Or at least it feels like it.
Perhaps the best example of how important identity is and what happens when there's a lack of it is the European Union itself. The EU basically has basically sold itself to it's member state citizens as something that will improve the economy. Sure, it has a flag, has taken one old masterpiece as it's "national" anthem and even has come up with a "Europe Day", but otherwise it has failed miserably in creating an European Identity. Or basically doesn't think it needs one. It seems that all you need is bureaucrats in Brussels and nothing else.
The English could form a unifying identity with "British" above the older national identities and was accepted by the Scots and the Welsh (yet it failed with the Irish). Being British didn't make them less Scotsmen or Welshmen, which is notable. Likely the EU simply doesn't have the stomach or the will to push through a new identity that would unite people under a common European (Union) Identity. Now in the US, perhaps if you put in a glass cup a New Yorker, a Texan and a Californian and shake the glass, they will start fighting each other, but I would argue that they would find a common identity of being American even if they differ a lot otherwise. In Europe, we differ a lot and don't have a strong common identity.
When this promise of economic prosperity hasn't worked (at least not for all) in the EU and there isn't that common identity, then unfortunately the EU has chosen a path that one European philosopher warned in a lecture (and I've forgotten the name) and that is to vilify nationalism and hint that critique of the EU is this ugly nationalism. Of course those that think their nation state is important doesn't mean that they are jingoists or extreme-nationalists. Add the fact that some countries in the Eurozone have acted more irresponsibly and recklessly than other (notably Greece) and you get a bit of hostility with the different countries (of "why we should pay for their lousy faults").
In terms of the Establishment of Religion clause, the shared commons is the absence of a state religion in any civic capacity. In that context, we do not need to celebrate a difference to permit it. Nor is permitting a form of self identification a celebration of it.
When Fukuyama says:
"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",
how is the distinction between the "institutions" and "broader society" to be understood? The intention behind setting up our polity to create a secular commons is that those two spheres of activity have a lot to do with each other. Any distinction to made here puts some burden of proof upon the distinction maker if that maker is basing their entire argument upon it. Fukuyama speaks as if the difference is self evident.
In regards to your questions, the lack of distinction given in the matter makes it impossible for me to imagine what Fukuyama is saying when he says marginalized groups are demanding more than equality. This is why I said in my first response to ssu that:
"What Fukuyama leaves out of this account is whether the demands to be treated equally were met. It also leaves out the unpleasant fact that a "celebration of intrinsic differences" is what the "dominant" group has been doing for centuries."
Where can I find this "broader society"? If the "marginalized group" is both an equal part of it and outside of it at the same time, this discussion of motives that Fukuyama embarks upon seems like a blame game about an invisible offense.
I think the reasoning goes that when obvious institutional and legal discrimination, like women not being able to vote or homosexuality being illegal, is done away with (through universal suffrage and abolition of the sodomy laws etc.), then one can argue that you have equality on the legal/institutional level. However, this obviously doesn't mean that everything was great after women got to vote and homosexuals weren't put into jail or treated as mentally ill. Attitudes take more time to change. Yet one can make the argument that playing the victimhood card and arguing that one is being discriminated can go a little too far and that simply be employed as a political method.
Perhaps this can be seen from the example of the far-right when it has adapted in it's identity politics of victimhood the idea of "reverse racism" and the lunatic "white genocide" argument.
It is reasonable to expect time and a lot of problems to unwind between changes of legal status and changes in how we live together. Your observation weakens Fukuyama's argument that an entirely new desire has replaced the original one for equality and inclusion in the broader society. With the introduction of the element of time, it is reasonable to ask when the change in motive occurred. My asking whether the demands to be treated equally have been met is not a challenge outside of Fukuyama's argument, it is the missing piece he uses without mentioning. I am not the one trying to prove why people are doing things.
In regards to changes in law, per se, it should be noted that this itself is no simple thing and also takes place over long periods of time. I don't want to become verbose on this topic because I am not trained in the law but there is much to be learned in looking into toleration as a point of constitutional law and how it relates to equal treatment of people under the law. As a matter of full disclosure, I am strongly influenced by David A.J. Richards' Toleration and the Constitution.
One thing that is very clear in Fukuyama's approach is that his table of motives is not helping clear up what is a legitimate demand compared to one that has "gone too far." He cites Black Lives Matters as an example. Without arguing the validity or necessity of their political methods, I don't understand how any outcome of that debate relates to the initial and primary objective of having less unarmed black people getting shot. When Fukuyama describes a change in their motives, an insinuation of betrayal to their own cause appears. No politics there, right?
On the general topic of too much "victim-hood", it is not a dismissal of the topic to ask just how that is an assault upon inclusion and cohesiveness. That is not self evident to me.
One of the real genius judo moves of the "identity politics" meme is that it allows people to say that efforts toward a diverse society based upon equal opportunity taught white people how to self identify. I am not even going to bother refuting the idea. Some things are self evident.