12 ms·

Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

115 points by edu 5y ago

jzellis 5y ago
Golly, because he was so right about everything else.
- yob22 5y ago
  Have you ever read any of them his books?
  - wahnfrieden 5y ago
    I have, and I’ve read the field research that shows how obsolete his ideas are
borepop 5y ago
Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.
- retrac 5y ago
  Well, it kinda did though, didn't it? Being charitable for a second, I suspect it's more that history is "on pause" than ended, but I do get a feeling of almost timeless stasis. 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".)
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Are you aware that he admitted that he was wrong? I believe he wrote a book on it.
    - retrac 5y ago
      Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. (China didn't go liberal! Shocker.) Doesn't mean his ideas weren't thought-provoking. But it's probably best to think of such political science as political philosophy.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        > Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. 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.
        beepbooptheory 5y ago
        I think there is just not a shared definition for "history" among people who here that line in a vacuum, vs more Marxisty type people. "history" is a very particular thing for Marxists. even in his book you are talking about, it is talked about on those lines, not in an everyday concept of history.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        I don't understand why this comment is here. It's a good thing to point out to people that don't know what he meant, but within his own framework he was incorrect, which he admitted. The social relations we see today are not the ones he originally predicted and there's absolutely no guarantee that it won't get "worse" or go in a completely different direction.
  - 988747 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - SkyMarshal 5y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - babayega2 5y ago
        Eric Li, from China has a big take on that: the West thinkers, including Fukuyama, stopped thinking since they assumed history was written. No more authoritarian state would outperform a liberal one. Apparently history is still being written.
  - toyg 5y ago
    > essentially nothing has happened since 1992. 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.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      all of those sound quite mildly incremental though. Note how many of these wars achieved nothing and basically circled back to where they began, the same old conflicts returned ... with the addition of china
- mustache_kimono 5y ago
  A take that didn't make it past the title.
- skywal_l 5y ago
  Well his history ended in 1992. The guy spent a life becoming an expert on Soviet imperialism and in a few days most of his knowledge became obsolete. I could see how he could say something like that.
- huetius 5y ago
  To be fair, by “end” he meant “telos,” or “ideal,” following Hegel. He did not mean that there would be no more history. Of course, his thesis is still wrong. EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.
- tomlockwood 5y ago
  Yeah, not sure I'm going to give much serious eartime to an academic who is most famous for predicting democratic neoliberalism was going to sweep the globe, pre-9/11 and the ascendancy of China.
yob22 5y ago
Identity politics is well on its way to turning the USA into a failed state
- esarbe 5y ago
  Divisive identity politics could well be one symptom of the breakdown of the USA, but I doubt that it's the reason. 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-politics/article/div-classtitletesting-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizensdiv/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
draw_down 5y ago
netcan 5y ago
- rvense 5y ago
  He gives a summary of 20th century politics that doesn't include fascism, and makes the Cold War sound like it was a battle between "small government" and "worker's rights". He says outright that nationalism on the political right is a "redefinition". This is so bizarre I can only assume I'm reading it wrong.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    He also ignores all the material demands of the groups involved in identity politics, as if they don't intersect (A LOT!) This is inane.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      What are the material demands of those groups? There seems to be a general demand for special treatment and privileged legal status based on membership in their identity group, but symbolic issues seem very much at the center of identity politics.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes (sometimes extremely so.) This is almost always recognized by that group of people and a strong motivating factor from overcoming their systemic disadvantage. > demand for special treatment and privileged legal status based on membership in their identity group Usually they're just asking for equal treatment, but if you mean things like affirmative action then this is obviously just society paying off its debt to the group for previous exclusion or jump-starting things to get closer to an equal society.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins
IAmEveryone 5y ago
I have no earthly idea how "identity politics" is related to the demise of the arab spring. In as far as it may relate to the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary), it is by being easy foil for Victor Orban and his ilk (cf. "LGBTQ-free zones"). Even if one were to believe these neo-fascists wouldn't just find some other scapegoat, I don't see how it would morally justify a return to 1950s social policies. Throwing some people under a train in support of human rights seems to be the quickest way to defeat your stated purpose. 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.
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  It is equally confounding to me that you either: read the piece and still have these complaints, or you didn't and still feel authorized to respond in this way.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  > 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. People forget this a lot - and try to ignore it consistently.
- weerd 5y ago
  isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics. The essay explicitly states that it is not!
wahnfrieden 5y ago
Graeber tears this guy’s work apart in his new book and shows his work is incompatible with recent and old anthro research. Hard to take him seriously in other areas
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  > recent and old anthro research "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.
  - wahnfrieden 5y ago
    If you’d like to see the writing on Chagnon that Graeber promoted, which I’m not certain your summary really captures - http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm
    - UIUC_06 5y ago
      You really want to push an article with garbage phrases like this? "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."
cblconfederate 5y ago
(2018) 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.
jacknews 5y ago
Now I realise you have to produce many words to fill a book, but a more succinct argument would be appreciated, and this seems to be all over the place, with pat explanations of recent history, which is probably much more complex in reality. 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.
- Gimpei 5y ago
  Ego rents are very much a part of modern economic theory. As are any range of cognitive biases (see behavioral economics), institutional frictions, spatial constraints, and on and on. It's a wide tent. Some say too wide.
  - jvsg_ 5y ago
    Could you explain ego rent? Google didn't give me an answer (it sucks these days tbh).
    - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
      Like, you make no money but get to feel important. See the "CEOs" at startup conferences.
  - jacknews 5y ago
    Yes even with these additions, I don't think the central problem is addressed, which is that economics still treats people as 'rational actors', albeit flawed, interested in gaining wealth. 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.
uejfiweun 5y ago
I hate identity politics as much as the next guy, but I think a lot of Fukuyama's takes here are pretty bad. He repeatedly paints massive groups with a large and indiscriminate brush. For instance: "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.
- rkk3 5y ago
  > I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992 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.
- was8309 5y ago
  per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't have the proof, the common sense reaction would be to allocate more officers to the zone. I'll bet the officers in the street weren't thrilled. 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
fumeux_fume 5y ago
Old academic yells at clouds
moomin 5y ago
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  That's really not what it says. The essay is very explicit about calling Trumpism a form of white identity politics. (That's why the title is terrible: It dissuades anyone left of Joe Biden from reading.)
  - krapp 5y ago
    Trumpism is white identity politics. That Trump's base is rural white voters who feel alienated and disenfranchised by the loss of white demographic majority and the encroachment of multiculturalism into their communities is a thesis they themselves have put forth. This isn't even controversial, the relationship between Trumpist populism and the alt-right/white supremacist communities has been thoroughly discussed and well documented at this point. Note that the presence of non-white Trump supporters doesn't invalidate the premise. No one is claiming Trumpism is only and exclusively white identity politics, but that is certainly a core motivating factor behind the movement.
    - AzzieElbab 5y ago
      - “ Trumpism is white identity politics” - What happens if you replace the word “white” with say non-college educated working people?
      - N1H1L 5y ago
        > non-college educated working people? Lots of Hispanics and Blacks in that group, who surprisingly aren't that keen on Trump
        AzzieElbab 5y ago
        Not entirely true. Larger percentage of Hispanics and Blacks voted for Trump than any other republican presidential candidate.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
This is a moderate essay with an unfortunate title. What it is not is a typical right-wing rant. I would hope people could tell these apart. 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.
rvense 5y ago
His point at the end about the impossibility of the word "un-Danish" is at least thirty years out of date, if not 80. "Udansk" is fairly frequently used, across the political spectrum, usually denoting some variation of intolerance, unwillingness to compromise, and narrowmindedness which are implied almost universally to be antithetical to Danishness. 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.)
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  fukuyama has more than a few ideas at least 30 years out of date with the field research
- mollerhoj 5y ago
  Yeah, saying "Udansk" is all too common. Though is strikes me as a word almost exclusively used by politicans - maybe a tactic that some spindoctor picked up from US media at some point?
  - rvense 5y ago
    DDO actually has some very old examples: https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=udansk https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=udansk
Lamad123 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>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. 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-murdered-in-chicago-on-may-31-making-it-the-citys-single-deadliest-day-in-60-years/ 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-picture-of-Chicago-area-gun-16746049.php 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-violence-dangerous-murders-per-capita-2021-2020-surge-garfield-park-police-lori-lightfoot 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.
magwa101 5y ago

115 points by edu 5y ago

jzellis 5y ago

Golly, because he was so right about everything else.

yob22 5y ago
Have you ever read any of them his books?
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  I have, and I’ve read the field research that shows how obsolete his ideas are

borepop 5y ago

Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.

retrac 5y ago
Well, it kinda did though, didn't it? Being charitable for a second, I suspect it's more that history is "on pause" than ended, but I do get a feeling of almost timeless stasis. 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".)
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Are you aware that he admitted that he was wrong? I believe he wrote a book on it.
  - retrac 5y ago
    Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. (China didn't go liberal! Shocker.) Doesn't mean his ideas weren't thought-provoking. But it's probably best to think of such political science as political philosophy.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. 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.
      - beepbooptheory 5y ago
        I think there is just not a shared definition for "history" among people who here that line in a vacuum, vs more Marxisty type people. "history" is a very particular thing for Marxists. even in his book you are talking about, it is talked about on those lines, not in an everyday concept of history.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        I don't understand why this comment is here. It's a good thing to point out to people that don't know what he meant, but within his own framework he was incorrect, which he admitted. The social relations we see today are not the ones he originally predicted and there's absolutely no guarantee that it won't get "worse" or go in a completely different direction.
- 988747 5y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - babayega2 5y ago
      Eric Li, from China has a big take on that: the West thinkers, including Fukuyama, stopped thinking since they assumed history was written. No more authoritarian state would outperform a liberal one. Apparently history is still being written.
- toyg 5y ago
  > essentially nothing has happened since 1992. 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.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    all of those sound quite mildly incremental though. Note how many of these wars achieved nothing and basically circled back to where they began, the same old conflicts returned ... with the addition of china
mustache_kimono 5y ago
A take that didn't make it past the title.
skywal_l 5y ago
Well his history ended in 1992. The guy spent a life becoming an expert on Soviet imperialism and in a few days most of his knowledge became obsolete. I could see how he could say something like that.
huetius 5y ago
To be fair, by “end” he meant “telos,” or “ideal,” following Hegel. He did not mean that there would be no more history. Of course, his thesis is still wrong. EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.
tomlockwood 5y ago
Yeah, not sure I'm going to give much serious eartime to an academic who is most famous for predicting democratic neoliberalism was going to sweep the globe, pre-9/11 and the ascendancy of China.

yob22 5y ago

Identity politics is well on its way to turning the USA into a failed state

esarbe 5y ago
Divisive identity politics could well be one symptom of the breakdown of the USA, but I doubt that it's the reason. 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-politics/article/div-classtitletesting-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizensdiv/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

draw_down 5y ago

netcan 5y ago

rvense 5y ago
He gives a summary of 20th century politics that doesn't include fascism, and makes the Cold War sound like it was a battle between "small government" and "worker's rights". He says outright that nationalism on the political right is a "redefinition". This is so bizarre I can only assume I'm reading it wrong.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  He also ignores all the material demands of the groups involved in identity politics, as if they don't intersect (A LOT!) This is inane.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    What are the material demands of those groups? There seems to be a general demand for special treatment and privileged legal status based on membership in their identity group, but symbolic issues seem very much at the center of identity politics.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      When a group is disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism, they tend to have disproportionately worse economic outcomes (sometimes extremely so.) This is almost always recognized by that group of people and a strong motivating factor from overcoming their systemic disadvantage. > demand for special treatment and privileged legal status based on membership in their identity group Usually they're just asking for equal treatment, but if you mean things like affirmative action then this is obviously just society paying off its debt to the group for previous exclusion or jump-starting things to get closer to an equal society.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins

IAmEveryone 5y ago

I have no earthly idea how "identity politics" is related to the demise of the arab spring. In as far as it may relate to the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary), it is by being easy foil for Victor Orban and his ilk (cf. "LGBTQ-free zones"). Even if one were to believe these neo-fascists wouldn't just find some other scapegoat, I don't see how it would morally justify a return to 1950s social policies. Throwing some people under a train in support of human rights seems to be the quickest way to defeat your stated purpose. 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.

beepbooptheory 5y ago
It is equally confounding to me that you either: read the piece and still have these complaints, or you didn't and still feel authorized to respond in this way.
N1H1L 5y ago
> 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. People forget this a lot - and try to ignore it consistently.
weerd 5y ago
isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics. The essay explicitly states that it is not!

wahnfrieden 5y ago

Graeber tears this guy’s work apart in his new book and shows his work is incompatible with recent and old anthro research. Hard to take him seriously in other areas

UIUC_06 5y ago
> recent and old anthro research "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.
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  If you’d like to see the writing on Chagnon that Graeber promoted, which I’m not certain your summary really captures - http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm
  - UIUC_06 5y ago
    You really want to push an article with garbage phrases like this? "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."

cblconfederate 5y ago

(2018) 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.

jacknews 5y ago

Now I realise you have to produce many words to fill a book, but a more succinct argument would be appreciated, and this seems to be all over the place, with pat explanations of recent history, which is probably much more complex in reality. 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.

Gimpei 5y ago
Ego rents are very much a part of modern economic theory. As are any range of cognitive biases (see behavioral economics), institutional frictions, spatial constraints, and on and on. It's a wide tent. Some say too wide.
- jvsg_ 5y ago
  Could you explain ego rent? Google didn't give me an answer (it sucks these days tbh).
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    Like, you make no money but get to feel important. See the "CEOs" at startup conferences.
- jacknews 5y ago
  Yes even with these additions, I don't think the central problem is addressed, which is that economics still treats people as 'rational actors', albeit flawed, interested in gaining wealth. 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.

uejfiweun 5y ago

I hate identity politics as much as the next guy, but I think a lot of Fukuyama's takes here are pretty bad. He repeatedly paints massive groups with a large and indiscriminate brush. For instance: "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.

rkk3 5y ago
> I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992 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.
was8309 5y ago
per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't have the proof, the common sense reaction would be to allocate more officers to the zone. I'll bet the officers in the street weren't thrilled. 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

fumeux_fume 5y ago

Old academic yells at clouds

moomin 5y ago

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
That's really not what it says. The essay is very explicit about calling Trumpism a form of white identity politics. (That's why the title is terrible: It dissuades anyone left of Joe Biden from reading.)
- krapp 5y ago
  Trumpism is white identity politics. That Trump's base is rural white voters who feel alienated and disenfranchised by the loss of white demographic majority and the encroachment of multiculturalism into their communities is a thesis they themselves have put forth. This isn't even controversial, the relationship between Trumpist populism and the alt-right/white supremacist communities has been thoroughly discussed and well documented at this point. Note that the presence of non-white Trump supporters doesn't invalidate the premise. No one is claiming Trumpism is only and exclusively white identity politics, but that is certainly a core motivating factor behind the movement.
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    - “ Trumpism is white identity politics” - What happens if you replace the word “white” with say non-college educated working people?
    - N1H1L 5y ago
      > non-college educated working people? Lots of Hispanics and Blacks in that group, who surprisingly aren't that keen on Trump
      - AzzieElbab 5y ago
        Not entirely true. Larger percentage of Hispanics and Blacks voted for Trump than any other republican presidential candidate.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

This is a moderate essay with an unfortunate title. What it is not is a typical right-wing rant. I would hope people could tell these apart. 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.

rvense 5y ago

His point at the end about the impossibility of the word "un-Danish" is at least thirty years out of date, if not 80. "Udansk" is fairly frequently used, across the political spectrum, usually denoting some variation of intolerance, unwillingness to compromise, and narrowmindedness which are implied almost universally to be antithetical to Danishness. 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.)

wahnfrieden 5y ago
fukuyama has more than a few ideas at least 30 years out of date with the field research
mollerhoj 5y ago
Yeah, saying "Udansk" is all too common. Though is strikes me as a word almost exclusively used by politicans - maybe a tactic that some spindoctor picked up from US media at some point?
- rvense 5y ago
  DDO actually has some very old examples: https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=udansk https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=udansk

Lamad123 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>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. 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-murdered-in-chicago-on-may-31-making-it-the-citys-single-deadliest-day-in-60-years/ 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-picture-of-Chicago-area-gun-16746049.php 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-violence-dangerous-murders-per-capita-2021-2020-surge-garfield-park-police-lori-lightfoot 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.

magwa101 5y ago