Francis Fukuyama: Identity

[Applause] so thank you very much for that introduction it's really great to be not just in Chicago but in Hyde Park so I was born in the lying-in Hospital in this neighborhood my first home was actually the robie house frank lloyd wright's robie house which at that time was graduate student housing because both of my parents were graduate students at the at the U of C then and then my father moved back I actually grew up in New York City I left Chicago at age 2 but then I came back as an adult because my father became the academic dean at the Chicago Theological Seminary so they just lived near here on 58th Street so I I feel like this is it's a lot of memories you know being here in Hyde Park and I'm really delighted that the Chicago humanities festival invited me to speak today so I'm going to talk about the question of identity if you want to know why I wrote the book it's because Donald Trump was elected in 2016 very simple and if you want to know what I think the current problem with identity is I think that a new form of ID well it may not be completely new but it's certainly very visible we've got a very I think toxic version of identity politics going which was on full display this past week where the president kept talking about this invasion by this caravan of migrants about all of the diseases and the terrible criminals and the Middle Easterners and all of these questionable people that were moving towards the United States and the way that he was going to defend the country against them now it's odd you know I'm gonna actually think he's a little bit panicked about what's gonna happen on Tuesday which is why he has been escalating this rhetoric but if you think about it it's actually a rather odd pitch to make to American voters at a time when the economy is actually doing really really well people are getting jobs wages are actually going up first time in a very long time and this president is not talking about that whether he's talking about how we ought to be fearful rather than happy because of this cultural invasion that somehow going to shift America's national identity and so how this came about is really what I've been thinking and writing about over the last couple of years especially I think that the kind of populist politics that we see in the United States is unfortunately just a case of a much broader phenomenon around the world where you've had a number of populist politicians elected now political scientists don't agree unnecessarily on the definition of populism my definition is something like this that a populist is someone that claims a mandate from the people he or she is elected legitimately elected and claims this personal relationship with the people that he or she claims to represent this charismatic personal relationship means that a populist politician is almost automatically anti institutional and that by that I mean a liberal democracy is not just about elections it is about institutions check-and-balance institutions defined in a constitution that prevent the executive from centralizing too much power and so there's a limitation on power but because the populace believes that he represents the people that makes him or her very anti institutional they want to attack independent courts an independent media of bureaucracy all of those institutions that limit power in a modern democracy and unfortunately this is what's been happening in quite a number of countries not just here in the United States so in Turkey president air Dewan has basically attacked you know his own military the bureaucracy teachers Journal it has the largest number of journalists in jail of any country in the world right now Viktor Orban in Hungary has done something similar since the election of his Fidesz party in 2010 where he's basically neutered all opposition parties he's controlling the media he's able to gerrymander voting districts to prevent his party from ever being unelected in Poland you had a similar attack by the law and justice party on the independence of the Polish courts and so and in the most recent case of this is in Brazil Latin America is a little bit different from Europe but Jai air Busan ro the new president-elect of Brazil is actually makes Donald Trump look like a pussycat in many ways because he you know overtly praised the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 70s he is racially divisive in a very very explicit way and so this is something that's going on in the world that is I think threatening democratic institutions around the world in our country I think that you see this anti institutional trend in the way that President Trump has behaved since being elected he came into office attacking the entire intelligence community he says the press the mainstream media is the enemy of the American people he's attacked judges and and the courts his own FBI his own Justice Department and the like and that's in the name of the people but as in the case of many contemporary populist especially those in northern Europe when he refers to the people it's not the whole people it's not everybody living on the territory of the United States there's a definite you know ethnic understanding about who the real people are which becomes really problematic in a multi-ethnic diverse multicultural de facto multicultural society so the question is why in the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century does this phenomenon arise the most common explanation which has been out there for the last several years has to do with globalization and I think that's probably true globalization if you if you take a basic trade theory course in in college you'll learn that a regime of free trade meaning you know the free movement of goods services investment people ideas across international borders benefits everybody in the aggregate if you listen carefully in that course you will hear that it doesn't benefit every individual in every country and in particular low-skilled people in rich countries are going to lose jobs and opportunity to rising middle classes in poor countries and that's exactly what's happened over the last thirty years for the rise of countries like China India Bangladesh Vietnam and so forth and there's been a very great increase in the amount of economic inequality in the United States a lot of people have actually lost ground about half of all Americans actually have incomes real incomes no higher than they were in 2000 you know 18 years ago and so this you know it is clearly one of the triggers it's connected to a social crisis in many working-class communities involving crime family breakdown and opioid crisis and the like and so that is you know I think pretty clearly one of the triggers for why this is going on now a big backlash against globalization however I don't think that this really explains the particular character that this new populism has taken because if it's simply a reaction to inequality you would think actually that it's the left-wing populist parties that would really do well the Bernie Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement that sort of a form of redistributionist left-wing group they have been you know they've been active but the big phenomenon in most countries most rich countries has actually been the growth of right populism anti-immigrant in Europe anti European Union opposed to globalization and the like and the question is you know why has the right benefited more than the left and I think that it has to do with this question of identity it is a cultural it is a cultural issue that's driving this rise of populism so the word identity was not used commonly until the 1950s and 60s but the concept is actually very old and in my view it stems from a universal human psychological trait Plato in the Republic calls this thumos he says the human soul has three parts so there's a desiring part that wants food and drink and you know sex and cars and you know the sort of thing there's a rational part that calculates one's own self-interest right so those first two parts are what the economists understand the economists have this utility maximization model of human behavior where people have preferences that's the desiring part and they're rational utility maximizers meaning they want to maximize their utility what they don't get is the part that Plato refers to as through most this is the part of the human personality that feels it has a certain inner dignity and it wants public recognition of that dignity recognition by other people and that can run counter to your economic self-interest a lot of people actually believe that their dignity is worth a lot more than you know material material well-being and that is the psychological ground for this phenomena now the specifically modern form of identity is a somewhat different phenomenon it builds off this universal human characteristic but it is based on this notion that my inner self first of all there isn't inner self I have depths to my own being sometimes I don't perfectly understand what that inner self is but it's there inside of me but the important thing is that is the moral valuation given to that inner self the inner self the authentic inner self is valuable and if the surrounding society disrespects it pays no attention to it disregards it it's the outside society that needs to change and is wrong and not that authentic in herself in a certain way the first Western thinker that conceptualized this form of identity was actually Martin Luther at the beginning of the Reformation because what Luther said was all of the external rituals and laws and and rules of the Catholic Church are meaningless in God's eyes what God cares about is the inner believer if that inner believer does not have faith than that you know that person is not a Christian and is not saved by God's grace and all of the external signs of conformity to religious law defined by the Catholic Church don't count for anything it's only the inner believer and so you begin this process of valorizing the inner self over the outer society and the argument then is the outer society is what has to change and in fact that's exactly what happened as the Protestant Reformation unfolded you have later thinkers that present secular versions of this so I think probably the most important was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century his view was that the man in the state of nature that is to say primitive man before the advent of society was good was happy was a complete individual and he is unhappy today because of society because of all of the rules and norms and laws that make him conform to somebody phony somebody that is inauthentic and the path to human happiness is actually the recovery of that authentic self and so you can see this you know basically in every teenager that thinks that you know their parents don't understand them that they have this inner express itself that is waiting to get out this inners this this belief that the inner self is valuable in the au society is is false you know if you think about it that's basically what's driving the me2 movement right because women believe I'm a whole human being you know I have intelligence I have knowledge I have skills I have you know whatever constitutes you know my my complete existence and men are looking at me simply as a sexual object they're only seeing you know one dimension and that does not value me value me as I really deserve to be valued and it's not me that has to change I don't I'm not the one that needs to conform to these outside expectations it's the society that needs to change its norms and that's in fact what you know me too is bringing about it's really a wholesale cultural revolution in the way that we think about the relationships between men and women all right so that's the basic structure of identity it's almost always inherently political because the demand for recognition of dignity has to be public and it's in politics that you make these these recognitions all right now I think that this is actually a very broad phenomenon that encompasses a lot of modern politics we tend to think of identity politics as just something that goes on on university campuses but in fact if you understand identity in the way that I've just described it it's actually at the basis of a lot of modern political movements including just to begin with modern democracy so in 2011 in February 2011 there's a Tunisian vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi he had a cart that was confiscated by a policewoman he went to the governor's office and said where's my cart and nobody nobody would give him an answer and in despair at being treated in this fashion he doused himself with gasoline set himself on fire and that was a trigger of the Arab Spring it triggered revolutions in Egypt in Syria in Yemen in Libya in a whole number of other Arab countries because many Arabs saw in Mohamed Bouazizi a reflection of themselves they were dealing with authoritarian governments that did not treat them in the most minimal way as human beings a human being deserves an answer right if you take away their livelihood as as a police as a policeman you actually should have an answer as to what law was I violating but they would not even talk to him and I think this experience of being treated as less than human was the common experience that made people rise up against these dictatorships a couple of years later in 2013/14 in Ukraine you had a similar rise uprising the Maidan revolution which the Ukrainians now refer to as the revolution of dignity this was about a leader Viktor Yanukovych that was pro-russian he wanted to take Ukraine back away from Europe and into this miasma of Russian hypocrisy in which government officials became unaccountably rich because of the crony capitalism that was fed by a narrow elite of oligarchs that were self-dealing a lot of young Ukrainians wanted to live in a society that had a modern european government in which the government wasn't something to be exploited by elites but was something that existed in the public interest and that's why they staged this revolution so a democracy gives us recognition by granting us rights a democracy recognizes us as human beings by saying you have a right to speech you have a right to Association you have a right to to belief and above all you have a right to a share in political power which we grant you by giving you the franchise by giving you the vote that's the way that we consider you as human beings equal human beings equal in your ability to choose your dignity your your humaneness lies in your agency the fact that you can actually choose your rulers and so in some sense democracy itself and the emotional power of democracy builds on the fact that democracies recognize all of us on a universal basis as individuals with agency alright so in many respects all of the color revolutions that have happened in various countries around the world in Burma in in Georgia in Hong Kong and other places are driven by this kind of desire for basic recognition as a citizen now the problem I think is that this kind of universal recognition that is given us by a liberal society oftentimes is not enough it's not enough for people because once you live in a liberal democracy that is peaceful and prosperous you begin to you you begin to take that for granted you begin to take that universal recognition for granted and you begin to demand other more particular more specialized forms of recognition the first major manifestation of this was nationalism in Europe in the 19th century right French Revolution triggered two separate revolutionary demands so the first was a liberal revolution about the Rights of Man which were the individual rights guaranteed by you know constitutions but it also triggered a national revolution where the French people United across class lines for the first time because they all spoke a common language and had a common culture rose up you know in common to throw out the Prussians and the Austrians and other country other foreign powers invading their country a nationalist feels that there is an inner community that is not being recognized the political borders of the the place that they're living in do not correspond to the the cultural group that they think that they are part of and with whom they identify and so the 19th century saw this conflict between these two forms of identity one liberal and universal and the other particular istic and national and as the century went on unfortunately the national form of identity is the one that won out so the Germans you know we're scattered all over Central and Eastern Europe they wanted to have a single country under a single German government they achieved this you know under Bismarck but unfortunately as in many identity movements that was not enough it wasn't enough simply to be recognized as equal there are two forms of recognition there's what I called isotherm iya meaning I want to be recognized as equal of everybody else and so identity movement start out as a demand for equal recognition but there's also something I called megalo Fumiya meaning I want to be recognized as superior and one of the characteristics of a lot of identity movements as they move from Iceland Fumiya to megalo Fumiya you know to this demand to be seen as greater and that was obviously the trigger of the two world wars because you had these competing nationalisms that wanted recognition a place in the Sun in a way that was not compatible with the International Peace I also think that there are other political phenomenon that can be seen through this identity lens and one of the you know other manifestations I think is contemporary Islam ISM so you know we've had this experience now with al-qaeda with the Islamic state and it seems curious that all these young especially European Muslims would leave the relative safety and security of Belgium or France or the Netherlands or Germany to go you know take up an ak-47 and fight in in Syria and I think that you know in some cases it was driven by actual piety by by some religious motive that was clearly present but I think for many people it was actually a matter of identity especially for the European Muslims because they rejected the religious beliefs of their parents grandparents which was usually village-based and and and and very traditional but they were not they did not feel accepted by the European societies into which they had moved and they were confused as to who they were so you get a asama bin Laden or a Baghdadi that says to them I'll tell you exactly who you are you're Muslim you're part of the great umma it's a proud tradition but Muslims are being mistreated all over the world when he was 13 years old Osama bin Laden came into his parents bedroom with tears in his eyes he had been watching the mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza and he said you know Muslims all over the world are suffering you know and I think that one of the motives for going to Syria and picking up a gun is that you want to express your solidarity with this community that gives you identity that tells you exactly who you are as a Muslim and as a member of of this particular group right so both nationalism and religion have this identity component to them as does liberal democracy now the the way that identity has played out in liberal societies in the United States in Britain Australia you know other developed countries followed a somewhat different path that ultimately ended up in a strange way converging with these group identities the original understanding of identity was very individualistic that each one of us has a unique identity that is hidden that needs to be recognized by other people I think that you know quite honestly most people if they plumb the inner depths of their soul they find there's nothing there I mean there's you know that that actually what's underneath all the external social layers is just a more deeply buried another deeply buried social layer but they also feel lonely and they want to be connected to other people and life in a modern liberal democracy does not provide them with a kind of sense of identity belonging and community that they are seeking and therefore they want to be recognized as members of particular groups and in particular if you are a member of a marginalized group that has suffered discrimination at the hands of the mainstream society that sense of identity becomes a way of understanding your situation and a way of demanding redress and that is really what happened in the United States following the big social movements of the 1960s for african-americans with the civil rights movement for women with the rise of feminism for the LGBT community for the disabled for Native Americans all of these groups had been disrespected and disregarded by mainstream American society mainstream American society was basically white and male you know if you thought of yourself as an American you were probably you know a white male and you you know you didn't think further about it and you didn't really think of these other people is actually belonging in that identity and as a result as a result of real and justices and real disrespect these social movements sought to both get that respect as distinct social groups and this is a transformation that happened as the decades went on after the 1960s so Martin Luther King originally in the civil rights movement said we want African Americans to be treated like other Americans we want to basically integrate into the larger society and America should fulfill its promise you know as a society of free and equal people but there were other voices within the Black Power movement that said no actually black people are not simply you know white people with a different skin color we have our own culture we have our own traditions we have our own way of doing things and it's that culture that needs to be respected I think that this was a tendency even more prominent in feminism where a lot of women say you know they said the point of feminism is not that women should act like all these boorish men you know there's a there's a unique way that women are that needs to be respected different from the way that that men are and so each group began to emphasize its own lived experience and seek redress for the specific wrongs that were that were due to it now I think that this was a necessary set of movements identity politics you know as I've defined it was trying to go after real and justices so black lives matter is about police violence and there's a lot of police violence right I mean Chicago you know you don't have to you don't have to you don't have to teach that to anybody right so there is a real and you know behind me too there are real in justices in the way that women are treated the problem started to come when that group identity became all-encompassing and started to undermine the individual judgment and agency when people started being categorized as members of groups and then this natural tendency to use group identity you know to build group identity by demonizing people that were not part of the group so this was not obviously true of all identity politics as it played out in liberal societies but there's definitely that that tendency which I think you see most pronounced in in university campuses you know and now there's a familiar kind of conservative you know trope about the way that campuses have been overtaken by identity politics whether this is actually the case I think empirically I'm not so sure but it's definitely a trend the problem I think is that it has been linked to now to the rise of a kind of white identity politics which as I said we're seeing on display now by saying this I'm not morally you know I'm not trying to create a moral equivalence between the groups on the Left you know african-americans and women and white people you know that are part of white nationalist roots obviously those groups are you know they're discriminatory they're you know based on a lot of xenophobia and genuine racism but psychologically you have a similar kind of feeling of disrespect the one illustration of this was given by Arlie Hochschild Jesus sociologist at Berkeley that wrote a book called strangers in their own land so she did an ethnographic study of Tea Party voters in rural Louisiana and her central metaphor was that they see themselves as standing in a long line in front of a house in the distance and over the door of the house it says the American dream they're waiting patiently raising families going to work everyday behaving playing by the rules and then all of a sudden they see other people cutting in line in front of them so it's African Americans women Syrian refugees you know Mexican immigrants all being assisted by elites that they think are conspiring to push these people ahead of them and they feel disrespected by those elites now this is the point so I said I don't think that there's really moral equivalence between these Tea Party voters and these identity groups on the left but there is some aspect of that feeling of disregard that I think is is legitimate which is that you know the the white working-class that had been you know the the greater part of the United States population especially in the heyday of you know American greatness in the 50s and 60s has actually lost a great deal of ground economically and socially and I think the perception that their situation you know the way that they were victimized actually by globalization is something in fact that elites have really not paid a whole lot of attention to the elites have benefited you know greatly from globalization they're the ones that are cosmopolitan they can move around they can take advantage you know of cheap labor from immigrants with their nannies and gardeners and the like but the people that have actually lost a job in a coal mine or he'll mill or some other industry that has closed down because of outsourcing by a very you know competitive global capitalism has never been at the center of American cultural concerns at least not in you know the my recent experience in in this society and in fact you know the social situation of a lot of these people is really not good opioid crisis killed in the estimate now is that it killed something like 72 thousand Americans in 2017 which is about twice as many Americans has died in traffic accidents that year so in some sense you know there is a genuine social crisis going on and that I think is the cultural side of what's been driving the rise of this you know this Trump phenomenon and it's it's something that I think a lot of times the elites have a hard time hearing you know but you see this in in the reactions to political correctness political correctness is all about dignity its dignity politics right that you say something that is offensive or indicates that you do not understand properly the marginalized status of a particular group in society and you suddenly are told you can't say that anymore right and the conditions of political correctness have changed very rapidly over time because the targets of discrimination you know have the the attention has has shifted very rapidly and I think that part of the reason that honestly Donald Trump is popular is that he's not politically correct people were amazed that he managed to survive the Hollywood access tape and calling Mexicans rapists and muggers and so forth but I think that the you know the answer to that was that a lot of his supporters would give is well I actually may not agree with a particular thing he said but he's authentic right and the politics of identity is about authenticity it's about that inner self actually being able to express itself and I think that that's actually what's driven a lot of the support that he has got all right so to wrap this up I think that we are in a very bad place because the country is as you can probably tell polarized you know you just watch if you watch the Cavanaugh hearings it was pretty bad because you saw you know testimony by dr. Ford and by by Judge Cavanaugh and the two halves of America's just saw completely different things they saw completely different things and it's gotten down to the point where even the kinds of facts that you accept as factual are actually related to which of these groups you identify with which is not the basis for deliberation or for a democratic any kind of democratic community and I would say that the single biggest threat to democracy in the United States now is in fact this this degree of polarization it means the government cannot agree on you know the most basic things it means that any incident becomes politicized and more and more of our institutions are now either red or blue you know that polarization has been creeping into sports it's been creeping into popular culture the kind of music we listen to in you know the kinds of tastes that we have and I think that you can't have a democracy unless you have something like national identity right national identity is oftentimes derided because it's related to nationalism but it does not need to take an aggressive chauvinistic form national identity is actually critical if you think about what's the problem in the Middle East right now in Syria Iraq Libya Yemen it's that none of these countries actually has a sense of national identity I was in Iraq in August and the politics of that country is identity politics you know basically run wild nobody is loyal to an entity called Iraq they're they're loyal to their sect to their region to their ethnicity to their tribe but not to an overarching idea of something called Iraq I not think that you can have a democratic society without having something like a civic identity or but sometimes called a creedal identity based on a creed that is to say people have to have some minimal degree of agreement on basic principles what holds them together as a society that allows them to interact and to see the same institution same democratic institutions as legitimate so for the United States this would be something like a belief in the Constitution a belief in the rule of law a belief in the principle of human equality as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and I think that it's important to get back to an emphasis I mean that's what leaders need to do to rienne ffice the need for an overarching a civic national identity so I'm going to conclude just with this observation about this very nice suggestion of President Trump about birthright citizenship that he made in the last in the last week so if you think about what American identity was over the last over the years since the writing of the Constitution up until the Civil War it was a racial identity right African Americans Native Americans women were not given a right to vote so it was racial and patriarchal the United States fights a civil war 600,000 Americans died in this war and the one major outcome of it is the 14th amendment 14th amendment says all persons born or naturalized on the territory of the United States are citizens of the United States that was a major achievement because it shifted American identity away from something that was based on race and towards something that was universal so birthright citizenship is actually crucial to this kind of universal creedal liberal national identity and they're people now in the United States that want to take that away right they want to walk us back to an earlier version identity that is based on race or I've or ethnicity and this I think is not I mean it's simply not compatible with a kind of diverse society that America actually is and so what I think the political agenda is is to defend you know the creedal identity and its attacked from the from the right its attacked from the left as well as from the right but right now much more severe threat I think is coming from the right but it needs to be defended and that's something that leaders our political leaders can do I hope they you know will continue this I think there are other more specific policy ideas I have about national service about how to deal with immigration that will also affect you know the way we think about national identity I'm happy to talk about that in the Q&A but in the meantime thank you thank you very much for your attention [Applause] so I like the idea of national service I like it for the following reason that in the United States we do not you know we we think about rights all the time but we don't think about duties beyond paying our taxes and obeying the law and voting so I hope you're all voting them in Tuesday I you know we the country does not ask very much of us and I think that actually a national service where young people were expected to give like a year of their lives doing something that is in the public interest would be a very good thing to bind the country together so military service is the only you know the US military is really the only institution that brings people of different races genders and regions of the country and classes social classes yeah I mean one of the things that I think is terrible about American society today is we completely live we've sorted ourselves out into these essentially class and race-based bubbles where we only deal with people that you know that looked like ourselves and have similar educational backgrounds and so forth and so if you have national service it would be something that would actually you know the governor I mean it is a bit of social engineering the government is being a little bit journalistic and saying it's good for you to actually you know deal with your fellow citizens but I think it would help get people out of those bubbles and get them you know working with fellow citizens I don't think it could be mandatory I just think politically that's a non-starter so it would have to start out as something voluntary but I do think that it's something that you know our leaders ought to consider we have question right here in the center so how did the Democratic Party lose the white working-class yeah so this is a very this is a very important point the you know a lot of things happen that the the the Democratic Party just like all parties of the left in Europe had been built around the working-class so back in the 1930s like in the 1936 election probably eighty ninety percent of rural whites in the south voted for Franklin Roosevelt you know in his New Deal coalition because he was redistributing you know the TVA I mean there are a lot of programs that were designed to help them and that was one of the biggest of groups within that you know within that New Deal coalition and progressively the white working-class defected I think it was over a lot of things so you know one just had to do with the rise of other issues that began to define the left like environmentalism that you know a lot of white working-class people felt was just killing their jobs but a lot of it I think did have to do with the rise of a different sort of understanding of inequality that was based on these marginalized communities and not so much on them and in fact a lot of people on the Left began to regard you know the white working-class you know with its trade unions and so forth there's a kind of privileged class and the real source of inequality were the people below them that were African American or Hispanic or female or you know a member of one of the identity groups and this defection began really in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and it's been continuing I think ever since then and that's really why Trump won the election I mean it was Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin where enough of these working-class voters switched sides in 2016 and that's why you know Hillary Clinton didn't get of the white house and I actually think that this is a really important choice that faces the Democrats going forward because you know they they've got two strategic directions so one is to double down on the existing identity groups and to win an election it's really tempting to do that because that's where all the activists you know that's where all the energy is and you know that's the way Obama you know one one two victories although not by appealing so much directly to them but you know the the get out the vote was based on understanding these identity groups very well I don't think it's necessarily a good way to govern because what's been going on in the United States is that the Republican Party is increasingly becoming the party of white people and you know the Democratic Party is becoming the the party of minorities and and women especially professional women or middle class educated women and I think you know it's not a good thing for a democracy to shift from disagreements over economic policy issues to identities because these identities are fixed they're not negotiable and you know as I said you can see the problem with that in a place like the Middle East where that's all politics and I don't think we you know we want to move in that direction I'm sorry say that again no no so populism is not good or bad in itself I mean if ordinary people get upset about something it means that something's wrong right and so why are people really upset with elites well it's not as if the elites both here and in Europe have done such a great job over the last 15 years right I mean they produced the Iraq war big foreign policy disaster they produced the the subprime crisis in 2008 in Europe they produced the euro crisis in 2010 and then this refugee crisis in following the Syrian civil war and so there's actually a reason for ordinary people to get upset so you know populism actually can provide a lot of energy for political reform if it's used properly you know in many ways Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s responding to a much deeper crisis at that time used that populist energy to build consensus and support behind you know a new American welfare state with all of the institutions you know Social Security and the SEC and you know these big programs that were initiated at that time and that's an example I think of populism being used to good advantage but the trouble is it can also be used by demagogues and people that really do not believe in democracy and because of this populist style that is very personal istic it has this tendency to be anti institutional and that's certainly the form it's taken you know in this country in in Hungary and Poland and you know a number of other places where it's where it's appeared we have a question here in the centre well following up on what you're saying oh I'm over here okay yeah all right I see you where do you locate fear in your conceptualization and your schema of this of identity well fear has obviously been a big it's it's something that's been exploited by you know the these identitarian x' on the right so that's what I was trying to say about the the rhetoric coming out of President Trump this past week yeah actually American society is really good right now I people have jobs we're at peace largely a peace people are pretty secure and he's trying to make people believe that we're really in in grave danger and the particular danger that he's emphasizing is a danger to identity that somehow there is a understanding of what it means to be an American that is threatened by these you know these people coming from Central America that they want to steal your identity in Europe it's a little bit different because they're the right-wing politicians actually worried about them stealing the welfare state that you know these these foreigners are coming in they're not going to pay taxes are gonna get benefits and that's gonna undermine you know our welfare state in this country it's more you know about how we regard you know who Americans are and what they look like and so fear is something that is you know that that's the thing about dignity politics is no matter how well you're doing in in material terms if you start worrying about dignity and threats to dignity you can Stoke you know resentment and fear at any point and I think that's exactly what's happening in you know in many countries around the world yeah well so that's actually that chicken and egg question egg question is something that political scientists have been debating for some time I have a colleague Morris Fiorina at Stanford that argued actually that Americans are not that polarized he this is based on data that you know was actually now getting a little bit dated because I actually think that it's harder and harder to maintain that position but I think it works both ways you know I think that we are polarized in a number of ways just the residential sorting that's gone on in the United States where we live in excuse me increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods is one example of that where it's coming from the bottom up but there's no question that the elites are polarizing the country as well beginning with you know the guy that happens to be living in the White House who you know has seen his political fortunes tied actually to the exacerbation of that polarization but you know a lot of people are guilty of that as well it's easier to be you know a polarizing politician and it kind of speaks to people's you know these instinctive attitudes to protect your own and to demonize you know people that are different and I think everybody has participated in that to some extent we have a question here in the rape hi so you you talked about the need to develop say a national American identity or to strengthen that in order to deal with challenges as a country would you agree that for global challenges say global warming that we would need to develop or foster some sort of universal human I guess global identity and is that even possible when you don't have in that in that case you wouldn't really have another to contrast your identity against well there's Martians you know but ya know I understand the point of your question so I think that we've got a whole layer of problems that are global in nature there's no question about so global warming is just one but you know international narcotics you know terrorism just you know airline safety I mean there's all sorts of things where because of the nature of our global economy the existing structures are really not sufficient to deal with them and so we need more cooperation but in my opinion that cooperation is unfortunately gonna have to be continued continue to be based on on States on nations and the reason for that is that that's where the power is right it's only a state that can legitimately use power and if you're actually going to do anything about let's say global warming like you have standards standards have to be enforced who enforces them well it's a government that enforces them right it's not the international community the international community has no power to enforce anything what you can do is you can be sympathetic you can be aware of problems that exist in other countries you can be you know oriented towards cooperation but I think that that cooperation really does have to be based on on countries in Europe they had a somewhat less ambitious project after World War two to create a European identity that I think many of the founders of the European Union hoped would replace the individual national identities of Germany of France of of the UK and so forth and it's really been a failure I mean it was a noble try but I think after the euro crisis you know Greeks and Germans were much more aware of how they were different than you know they were aware of how how much they had in common and so I think for better or worse we're kind of stuck with identities that have to be located somehow at a at a national level because that's you know that's the way we organize political power okay yeah so I agree with that under certain interpretations of multiculturalism there's a there's a big kind of philosophical issue underlying that there's a liberal society consists of a plurality of individuals or is it a plurality of cultures I believe it really has to be based on individuals because certain cultures have cultural norms that are not compatible with the basic tenants of liberal democracy so you see this with certain it's it's more of a problem in Europe than it is here but you know with certain Muslim communities that you know discriminate against women so they you know the family sends the daughter to you know back to Morocco or Pakistan you know for an arranged marriage that the daughter doesn't want and then the state has a choice of do you side with a daughter on the basis of her individual rights as a as a as a human being or do you say well this is a cultural practice and we have to respect all cultures equally and I just think in a liberal society there's no question of that you gotta side with it with the girl you gotta side with the with the individual and it means also that all cultures are not created equal that you know a liberal society a liberal democracy has a certain minimal set of cultural values that maintain its belief you know and one of them is this belief in individual agency and if you have cultures that really reject that it's a problem so I think that you know so you know well I teach in an International Studies Institute I teach about other countries others Society that's what my books are about right so there you don't have to tell me that it's important to learn about about China about Islam about you know Latin America you know that's I think that's very clear that we need to be less parochial but I do think that we need to also if you're going to actually have civic education you've got to have people understand what the origin of their own democratic you know culture and values is and that's something I think that needs to be taught and I think that's something that's made much harder by you know certain contemporary understandings of multiculturalism thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 29,161

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, identity politics, democracy

Id: GxZBsALaVys

Length: 55min 57sec (3357 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019