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".)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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
Well, it depends. A lot of real-world identity politics amounts to malicious, overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and economic outcomes than the relevant majority group.
This is the story of, e.g. Asians in the U.S. but also of recent African immigrants from subcultures like the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba with a focus on education and cultural development, who get marginalized in Black communities throughout the West for supposedly "acting white" or, more diplomatically stated, "pursuing respectability politics".
> overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and economic outcomes than the relevant majority group.
Because they aren't "disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism." Being a minority does not automatically make one marginalized and one does not need to be a minority to be marginalized.
> Because they aren't "disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society"
Of course they are, this is pretty much what marginalization means. My point is precisely that real-world marginalization can be an outcome of identity politics, especially when minorities differ in their overall attitudes towards education or economic development.
> Of course they are, this is pretty much what marginalization means
Then we can't agree on that premise. I don't think they are even remotely marginalized to the same extent. If they were, they would suffer the same consequences. To be clear, I'm not saying that anti-Asian racism doesn't exist; obviously it does, it's just not on the level that anti-Black racism is on.
> My point is precisely that real-world marginalization can be an outcome of identity politics
Sure, it can, Ethiopia is repeatedly a great example of that. Asians in America aren't. None of those that Fukuyama listed are either.
> To be clear, I'm not saying that anti-Asian racism doesn't exist; obviously it does, it's just not on the level that anti-Black racism is on.
I never said that anti-Asian attitudes are "on the level" that anti-Black ones are. What I'm saying is that such things should point us towards a far more nuanced understanding of how "identity politics" might play out in the real world.
I am not clear on your complaints here, maybe you are reading it wrong? To pick up on one thing: do you feel that the political right has, rather, sustained a consistent nationalistic bent for the past century? You dont feel like it has changed recently, and rather, perhaps, believing it has changed is misguided?
It is in fact the first feature - conservatism is almost always focused on preventing changes to a current identity from multiculturalism and cosmopolitan forces
I agree; he ignores all the national liberation movements, which were typically nationalistic and linked to an ethnic identity (even when nominally "Communist"). More charitably he's trying to talk about the transition from the Old Left to the New Left.
What, in your mind, was 20th century politics defined by?
Edit: like I get the economism here feels reductive to you, I think, but I just think it would at least be equally absurd to say they were predominantly defined by identity issues. As is shown in the essay, our concept of identity is intractable from globalism and modernity. So I'm just not sure what the obvious issue is here. If we admit that it is nuanced, then you have to explain where the lines of that nuance are obvious, and economism is a good tool for that.
Really, it’s just a shitty comment that probably doesn’t belong in any discussion and should be ignored. “Huh?!” This doesn’t pass as substantive in any way whatsoever. Don’t waste your time thinking about it.
Indian independance, irish independance and the formation of most current nation states...on the basis of national identity. Fascism, Nazism, the kmer rouge. Even communism, in its own terms, was about class identity.
The US civil rights movement and the creation of its modern political dichotomy. Islamism. Arabism & the Arab league. Apartheid. Post-apartheid SA. Post colonialism. The Rwanda genocide. Yugoslavia's demise.
The US is not the world. US politics were deeply identitarian too first of all, Jim Crow Laws, Civil Rights Act and desegregation were explicitly identity based and not economic.
And then as other posters have mentioned - hundreds of national independence movements - almost all based on a national identity
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.
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.
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
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much larger trend going on.
The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.
> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations...
Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.
It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.
Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
It is a possible interpretation. But there are a wide variety of interpretations of that slogan in a crowd of people chanting "defund the police". It isn't really possible to say that this specific interpretation is what the crowd means because in all likelihood even the crowd won't agree on any specific interpretation.
The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
I'd say that "defund" is softer than and different from "ACAB" or "abolish the police".
"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).
ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.
I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.
> Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning,
Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."
I think the morale of the story is, people fall for slogans and slogans always turn out shit results. Trump's MAGA, well everyone has a different definition of what it would take to "Make America Great Again." Some might even argue, like myself, that if we say that, we should really take off the "Again" part. I am pretty sure most slogans that get chanted, we could come to the same conclusion, slogans are shit. Trying to have a catch phrase that captures a large and complex idea, is a bad idea.
To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.
I'd argue that this is proof that the refund the police people mean something different.
Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.
When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.
This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.
Good lord a bunch of typos in the first part of that, and now too late to edit (I think I noticed one and fixed it in the wrong place, making things worse...)
Should be
> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different.
> Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
Fukuyama isn't worried about facts. Factually, Obama and now Biden have deported far more people than Trump or Bush. Obama was even known as "the deporter in chief."
Here is a quote from Fukuyama's essay about exactly that:
> Doing little to prevent millions of people from entering and staying in the country unlawfully and then engaging in sporadic and seemingly arbitrary bouts of deportation—which were a feature of Obama’s time in office—is hardly a sustainable long-term policy.
The key behind understanding the guy is he's always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible.
He's been playing that same song for decades. You already know what his position on everything is and how he'll argue for it. The real amazing thing is how much he's committed to it
Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points? I agree with OP that some of the points are ridiculous, but why assassinate character like this?
first off who cares you can insult people sometimes it helps.
Anyway it's not "character assassination" if it's true. I don't know enough about this person's work over time but.
> always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible
That does describe some people I can think of, so it's at least possible this is a fair description of his position.
> > he's always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible.
> Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points?
No - why do you say that?
PP is attacking Fukuyama _based on his ideas_ - that imperialism is the natural course of events, the best for everyone, and inevitable. It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
That is the reverse of ad hominem. A ad hominem argument would go, "Fukuyama is wrong because he's from Harvard/Asian/etc", and of course those arguments are false.
Yeah that’s a bad take, though it’s true that even for legal migration the right is generally cooler on it than the left. They wouldn’t cut it all off, but they’d probably restrict it more.
They "seek to" cut off immigration altogether, and work towards it. They "would like to" send immigrants back to their countries of origin, but know it's not going to happen. The sentence seems carefully constructed to me.
During the last administration, a leading Republican senator brought forth a bill to cut legal immigration by 50%. Many, many Republicans, or at least their elected representatives, want to restrict both legal and illegal immigration.
The most relevant aim of that bill was to introduce a "points system" following the Canadian model, to encourage skilled immigration and easier integration of immigrants within mainstream society. This can sustain far greater volumes of migration in the long-term than the current mix of legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. It's the closest thing to "open borders" that can actually work without significant social disruption. And Canada proves it, because they've made it work.
> For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism".
This is a false equivalence.
On the one hand, the Democratic party has unequivocally rejected “defund the police” on multiple occasions. First in the 2020 primary by electing a presidential candidate who explicitly rejected the slogan, and continues to do so as president; then by excluding it from its platform altogether; and most recently by a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote in the senate to denounce the slogan. So the record is quite clear that Democrats do not in fact stand for “defund the police” beyond a loud minority.
On the other hand, Republican senators have unanimously refused to renew the Voting Rights Act, which
until 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. The VRA is one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement and has been a bulwark in protecting Black citizens in particular from disenfranchisement in the southern states. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the VRA has lapsed, virtually all Republican-controlled states have resurrected the same sweeping restrictions on the right to vote that MLK and others marched against. Let’s not even get into the January 6 attack on the capitol which was instigated and carried out by openly white supremacist organizations and which, to this day, the Republican party refuses to denounce, probably because so many of its own leadership is directly implicated.
So, yes, the Republican party is now defined by white nationalism. This is an established fact, and you being uncomfortable with it does not make it less true.
While I disagree at some level with most of what you've written, I think the most egregious point is that nothing that you wrote is linked to the conclusion you draw.
1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws. It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
> 1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws.
I referred to a very specific piece of legislation for a reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is, to quote Wikipedia, “a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting”. It is the direct result of Martin Luther King Jr marching against Jim Crow laws in the south. Supporting it was a no-brainer Republican policy as recently as 2006 (the last time all its provisions were re-authorized).
In other words, the VRA is no ordinary law: it is the quintessential anti-Jim Crow law. When the modern Republican party took the unprecedented step of removing these protections against Jim Crow laws, they effectively made themselves the champions of Jim Crow - the champions of white nationalism.
> It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
No, it absolutely is not. Civil rights organization like the NAACP and SPLC systematically challenge these laws on the grounds that they are disguised racial discrimination - and they win. The problem is that the legal process takes too long and enforcement is easily dodged by the states. This is why the VRA was crucial: it required federal pre-approval of voting laws, and allowed proper enforcement against states that persisted in racial discrimination.
This is not only well documented legislative fact, it is actually tought in History class. It is mind-boggling to me that it is even a point of debate. The only excuse for your argument is ignorance.
> 2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
Large scale voter suppression is a serious matter. MLK and countless other Americans shed blood marching to secure the VRA, and now their work is undone. That is a grave threat to our democratic institutions. I am optimistic that the white nationalists will lose, but it will be a difficult and uncertain fight ahead.
But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
> But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
I'm not American and there is even a fair chance I wouldn't vote for the Republicans if I were, I'd likely be trying to split the right wing vote for the libertarian party to force the Republicans to adopt more acceptable policies.
Political parties are large and complex beasts. If you want some aspects of the Republicans that could define them, probably the obvious one is a heavy focus on individual identity over group identity when assigning credit/blame. They also tend to adopt more aggressive policies of individual liberty, and are more oriented towards rules and order.
> And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
They think it is likely to hurt their chances in an election. That is why I'm telling you it isn't white nationalism; white nationalists don't get especially excited about the details around how close elections get decided. If it was white nationalism you'd be leading with policies where they wanted to expel non-white people. Which you aren't so I assume they don't have any that you think would stand up to scrutiny.
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.
Hispanics are not a homogenous group like you portray them to be. For example Republicans won Hispanics in Virginia this year [1]. There is a balance between more conservative leaning Hispanics from Central/South America, wealthier 3rd+ generation Hispanics who lean conservative, and more liberal recent Mexican demographics. All evidence from the past 2 elections in 2020 and 2021 indicate that Hispanics as a whole are shifting towards the GOP (even if Democrats currently have a solid majority among Hispanics as a whole).
for democrats blacks or hispanics are like a hivemind. and for the ones that publicly state they are republican, they will call them uncle tom and ostracise them. this is the real racism ive seen in usa more so than the white identitarian politics
From my point of view identity politics is just standard issue divide and conquer Marxism. This ideology is meant to split people and nations into oppressor and oppressed categories with the sole purpose to facilitate utopian revolution(s).
What? Precisely the opposite, Marx thought the only fundamental differences were class differences. Does "proletarians of the world, unite!" seem like a nationalist/identitarian slogan?
Not “unite”, unite in fight against oppression. Unite against your countrymen, the opposite of nationalism. Once proletariat in developed countries was deemed unsuitable as engine for revolution new ideologies aimed at urban blacks and college students were developed.
This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, some applications of which are good and some of which (the obvious example being cancel culture) are bad. But the whole point is to try to move towards an egalitarian society for queer, trans, ethnic, female etc people who have historically had the short end of the stick in the West in various different ways. The whole "if you're white then you're an oppressor" angle is a gross misapplication of the theory by people who don't understand the difference between individual and systemic effects.
- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working
Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible.
There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past.
If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation.
As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s.
> This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory.
Who said anything about the Frankfurt School? Mao Zedong quite literally tried to invent a new communism, and his Mao Zedong Thought was subverted by Lin Biao and the criminal Gang of Four to launch the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which called on educated youth to "destroy everything that's old and bourgeois and counter-revolutionary" in Chinese culture and society. These ideas were quite impactful among Western lefist radicals in the late-1960s and 1970s, and a zombie version of that Western-Maoist ideology is what survives today as "wokeness".
Did you actually read it, though? He says "there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality."
> But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality.
This is demonstrably untrue though. There's no conspiracy, intersectionality is growing, because it's a useful framework for finding similarity and solidarity across boundaries that used to be sharper like race, language, disability, religion.
The claim makes no sense, this is not how attention works. If more people are thinking and talking about something there will be more energy and attention on it for that time, not less.
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.
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.)
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?
>>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:
“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.
133 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadIn comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.
From what I've read, a lot of people felt similarly in the late era of the Pax Britannia. (Which is a big part of why I think it's just "on pause".)
Okay, it wasn't clear to me that was your view from your comment.
> political science as political philosophy
I think he stepped out of that realm when he tried to make a prediction and justify it as correct.
The period since 1992 was relatively peaceful, that's right. But that's not what Fukuyama's thesis was about, especially since he couldn't know in 1992 what would happen in the next 30 years.
Fukuyama's theory was that mankind has reached its optimal, stable state and that that the further historical changes are very unlikely, because why would people want to mess with perfection :) It was basically very naive optimism, I guess he was still in euphoria after Soviet Union collapse...
Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic. Plenty of historical changes, most of them for worse.
Don't forget rising authoritarianism again, which was one of the characteristics of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history, the fall of totalitarianism with the USSR.
Oh yeah, the web changed nothing. /s
> No major nation has had a revolution.
You are disrespecting Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey... and of course Yugoslavia, which started breaking up in 1991 (Fukuyama started his ramblings in 1989) and didn't end until 2001 - if you can consider the current fragile peace an end, which it really isn't. Plus, most South American countries continue to "tweak" their constitutions every few years, one way or the other. And if you go to Africa, well, have I got news for you...
> There have been no major wars between nation-states.
The US literally invaded and occupied two sovereign countries since then, in both cases continuing major operations for more than a decade. But if we consider "nation-states" only Western states or superpowers, there has been no such war in the 30 years before 1992 either. That's because conventional "top-quality" nation-state conflicts have been made impractical by nuclear weapons and MAD, well before 1992. What we have now is asymmetrical warfare (superpower vs minnow) or proxy warfare. That doesn't mean these conflicts don't make history or don't change things significantly - they very much do.
> No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down.
The techno-utopianism that the internet generated is an ideology in itself, and the backlash has only just started. Same for conspiracy-theorism as a way of life, climate change, identity politics... just because they don't make people wear the same shirt and march in the streets, it doesn't mean they are not deeply-ideological movements. You can argue that they were "invented" before 1992, but 1) inevitably these things take time, 2) they didn't really have that much traction until the '00s.
> Nothing historical has happened
That's such a sheltered viewpoint. I'm sure quite a few people in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Ukraine, Tunisia, Lybia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Liberia, Mali, etc etc, would have something to say.
History is very much grinding all around us, it's just a question of whether we actually want to look at it or we'd rather pretend it didn't exist.
EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.
It pretty clear that in the last forty years, politics has primarily focused on the needs of the wealthy[0], to the detriment of the needs of the general populous. This has led to a massive discontentment in the populace that - in my opinion - was the driving factor in the election of Donald Trump. (The Democrats were able to bring their populist wing under control, otherwise it could well have been Bernie.)
So, all in all I think it is the misguided attempts by the elites to somehow divert the plebes from the realization that they have been screwed over that's breaking the USA. On the right this is done using white-grievance politics and xenophobic propaganda, on the left using identity politics.
What they use in the end doesn't matter, as long as they manage to divide the plebs.
Unfortunately, the spiral of escalating language has now reached a point where the 'other' side is so railed up that legitimate elections are being questioned. I hope the elites are smart enough to turn it around before they totally wreck the country.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
This is so bizarre I can only assume I'm reading it wrong.
> 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
Well, it depends. A lot of real-world identity politics amounts to malicious, overt marginalization of "market-dominant" or "model" minorities who, despite their marginalized status, have better educational and economic outcomes than the relevant majority group.
This is the story of, e.g. Asians in the U.S. but also of recent African immigrants from subcultures like the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba with a focus on education and cultural development, who get marginalized in Black communities throughout the West for supposedly "acting white" or, more diplomatically stated, "pursuing respectability politics".
Because they aren't "disproportionately excluded from the education, economic and other systems of society due to, for example, racism or sexism." Being a minority does not automatically make one marginalized and one does not need to be a minority to be marginalized.
Of course they are, this is pretty much what marginalization means. My point is precisely that real-world marginalization can be an outcome of identity politics, especially when minorities differ in their overall attitudes towards education or economic development.
Then we can't agree on that premise. I don't think they are even remotely marginalized to the same extent. If they were, they would suffer the same consequences. To be clear, I'm not saying that anti-Asian racism doesn't exist; obviously it does, it's just not on the level that anti-Black racism is on.
> My point is precisely that real-world marginalization can be an outcome of identity politics
Sure, it can, Ethiopia is repeatedly a great example of that. Asians in America aren't. None of those that Fukuyama listed are either.
I never said that anti-Asian attitudes are "on the level" that anti-Black ones are. What I'm saying is that such things should point us towards a far more nuanced understanding of how "identity politics" might play out in the real world.
Edit: like I get the economism here feels reductive to you, I think, but I just think it would at least be equally absurd to say they were predominantly defined by identity issues. As is shown in the essay, our concept of identity is intractable from globalism and modernity. So I'm just not sure what the obvious issue is here. If we admit that it is nuanced, then you have to explain where the lines of that nuance are obvious, and economism is a good tool for that.
The US civil rights movement and the creation of its modern political dichotomy. Islamism. Arabism & the Arab league. Apartheid. Post-apartheid SA. Post colonialism. The Rwanda genocide. Yugoslavia's demise.
And then as other posters have mentioned - hundreds of national independence movements - almost all based on a national identity
It isn't even obvious that "identity politics" is tethered exclusively to left-wing politics. Plenty has been written about the group of people that invaded the Capitol last year, and the only consistent characteristic of that group was being white. No, it has nothing to do with economics. It included a doctor making $ 650,000 p. a. as well as a group that traveled to DC on a private jet.
Hell, the major group of young reactionaries in Europe (until recently) had "Identity" in their name.
This text just seems entirely out of place, and I was wondering if I missed the (2008) in the title while reading it. There's nothing new in it, and it wouldn't get much attention if it weren't for the name.
People forget this a lot - and try to ignore it consistently.
"Anthropology" is a field that so thoroughly discredited itself by political advocacy that no one to the right of Trotsky could possibly take it seriously. These are the people who trashed Napoleon Chagnon, who actually lived with the Yanomani, for the audacity of reporting what they were like, which wasn't what they like to hear.
From the NYT obituary:
Dr. Chagnon dismissed as “Marxist” the widespread anthropological belief that warfare in tribal life was usually provoked by disputes over access to scarce resources.
“The whole purpose and design of the social structure of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive- age females,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Noble Savages.”
Other anthropologists rejected these assertions as exaggerated and even racist, saying they could do harm to the tribe by casting it in a bad light. Many argued that human behavior was best explained not by genetics and evolution but by the social and natural environments in which people live.
"By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science tribe of America."
"during the late 1960s and early 1970s Chagnon had served as a jungle advance man and blood collector."
"Chagnon inscribed these indelible identification numbers on people's arms--barely 20 years after World War II."
And yet the future is all about Identity politics. It's an optimization problem really. Recent crises show that liberal democracy can no longer serve the needs of individuals that have increasingly more freedoms (partly thanks to technology) and who are no longer willing to compromise with large groups. The challenge is going to be how to build political systems that simultaneously cater to all the various identity dimensions of citizens, while at the same time avoiding the oppression of 50% by the other 50%, as happens in democracies. This is a technological problem (after all democracy itself was technology), and interestingly many of the decentralized projects aim to solve parts of it. What seems to be lacking is an integrated understanding of all such parts.
And is the argument really about 'identity', or just 'status'?
IMHO, economics is flawed at it's core, because people do not just value material wealth, but relative, social wealth, aka status, in fact, almost above all. That also explains twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.
But, and I see it all the time, people will in many cases, not only not work together for mutual gain, but will actually choose actions that harm their own material wellbeing, if they harm their close rivals more.
People care about their relative status, not absolute wealth.
"The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin."
Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants to send immigrants back, it would be illegal and unconstitutional as well as impossible. Now, restricting ILLEGAL immigration on the other hand? Yes, basically everyone on the right supports this. But not wanting illegal immigration is literally on the other side of the map from not wanting any immigration at all and sending back immigrants.
I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992, as other comments have mentioned. But I think just as important as identity politics is defining the opposing side by the worst ideas of its supporters. For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism". There are tons of people on both sides who don't believe in this crap and are dedicated to the core ideals of economic prosperity for all and expansion of opportunities. Tuning these crazies out would go a long way to calming down the discourse in this country, but I don't think essays like this really help the situation.
I'm not sure why people jump on this so much - it very well could have ended if the US had better leadership & strategy... If the US had Marshal plan equivalent for the former USSR & a realist China strategy, things would have been different. But sure Huntington's book is better.
end result : mental health funding decreased and police funding increased.
So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations
[1] https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psych...
Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.
It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.
Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).
ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.
I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.
Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."
Interesting. What form would you expect this to take? Maybe an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.
Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.
When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.
This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.
Should be
> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different. > Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
If that wasn't obvious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/state-and-local-...
> Doing little to prevent millions of people from entering and staying in the country unlawfully and then engaging in sporadic and seemingly arbitrary bouts of deportation—which were a feature of Obama’s time in office—is hardly a sustainable long-term policy.
He's been playing that same song for decades. You already know what his position on everything is and how he'll argue for it. The real amazing thing is how much he's committed to it
Anyway it's not "character assassination" if it's true. I don't know enough about this person's work over time but.
> always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible
That does describe some people I can think of, so it's at least possible this is a fair description of his position.
> Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points?
No - why do you say that?
PP is attacking Fukuyama _based on his ideas_ - that imperialism is the natural course of events, the best for everyone, and inevitable. It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
That is the reverse of ad hominem. A ad hominem argument would go, "Fukuyama is wrong because he's from Harvard/Asian/etc", and of course those arguments are false.
> It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
I totally agree.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act
This is a false equivalence.
On the one hand, the Democratic party has unequivocally rejected “defund the police” on multiple occasions. First in the 2020 primary by electing a presidential candidate who explicitly rejected the slogan, and continues to do so as president; then by excluding it from its platform altogether; and most recently by a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote in the senate to denounce the slogan. So the record is quite clear that Democrats do not in fact stand for “defund the police” beyond a loud minority.
On the other hand, Republican senators have unanimously refused to renew the Voting Rights Act, which until 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. The VRA is one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement and has been a bulwark in protecting Black citizens in particular from disenfranchisement in the southern states. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the VRA has lapsed, virtually all Republican-controlled states have resurrected the same sweeping restrictions on the right to vote that MLK and others marched against. Let’s not even get into the January 6 attack on the capitol which was instigated and carried out by openly white supremacist organizations and which, to this day, the Republican party refuses to denounce, probably because so many of its own leadership is directly implicated.
So, yes, the Republican party is now defined by white nationalism. This is an established fact, and you being uncomfortable with it does not make it less true.
1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws. It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
I referred to a very specific piece of legislation for a reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is, to quote Wikipedia, “a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting”. It is the direct result of Martin Luther King Jr marching against Jim Crow laws in the south. Supporting it was a no-brainer Republican policy as recently as 2006 (the last time all its provisions were re-authorized).
In other words, the VRA is no ordinary law: it is the quintessential anti-Jim Crow law. When the modern Republican party took the unprecedented step of removing these protections against Jim Crow laws, they effectively made themselves the champions of Jim Crow - the champions of white nationalism.
> It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
No, it absolutely is not. Civil rights organization like the NAACP and SPLC systematically challenge these laws on the grounds that they are disguised racial discrimination - and they win. The problem is that the legal process takes too long and enforcement is easily dodged by the states. This is why the VRA was crucial: it required federal pre-approval of voting laws, and allowed proper enforcement against states that persisted in racial discrimination.
This is not only well documented legislative fact, it is actually tought in History class. It is mind-boggling to me that it is even a point of debate. The only excuse for your argument is ignorance.
> 2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
Large scale voter suppression is a serious matter. MLK and countless other Americans shed blood marching to secure the VRA, and now their work is undone. That is a grave threat to our democratic institutions. I am optimistic that the white nationalists will lose, but it will be a difficult and uncertain fight ahead.
But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
I'm not American and there is even a fair chance I wouldn't vote for the Republicans if I were, I'd likely be trying to split the right wing vote for the libertarian party to force the Republicans to adopt more acceptable policies.
Political parties are large and complex beasts. If you want some aspects of the Republicans that could define them, probably the obvious one is a heavy focus on individual identity over group identity when assigning credit/blame. They also tend to adopt more aggressive policies of individual liberty, and are more oriented towards rules and order.
> And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
They think it is likely to hurt their chances in an election. That is why I'm telling you it isn't white nationalism; white nationalists don't get especially excited about the details around how close elections get decided. If it was white nationalism you'd be leading with policies where they wanted to expel non-white people. Which you aren't so I assume they don't have any that you think would stand up to scrutiny.
(That's why the title is terrible: It dissuades anyone left of Joe Biden from reading.)
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.
Lots of Hispanics and Blacks in that group, who surprisingly aren't that keen on Trump
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/latino-poll-virgini...
There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past.
If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation.
As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s.
[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Who said anything about the Frankfurt School? Mao Zedong quite literally tried to invent a new communism, and his Mao Zedong Thought was subverted by Lin Biao and the criminal Gang of Four to launch the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which called on educated youth to "destroy everything that's old and bourgeois and counter-revolutionary" in Chinese culture and society. These ideas were quite impactful among Western lefist radicals in the late-1960s and 1970s, and a zombie version of that Western-Maoist ideology is what survives today as "wokeness".
This is demonstrably untrue though. There's no conspiracy, intersectionality is growing, because it's a useful framework for finding similarity and solidarity across boundaries that used to be sharper like race, language, disability, religion.
The claim makes no sense, this is not how attention works. If more people are thinking and talking about something there will be more energy and attention on it for that time, not less.
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.
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.)
https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=udansk
>>By turning a spotlight on narrower experiences of injustice, identity politics has brought about welcome changes in cultural norms and has produced concrete public policies that have helped many people. The Black Lives Matter movement has made police departments across the United States much more conscious of the way they treat minorities, even though police abuse still persists.
This is another false, politically correct account.
The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, on black lives, has been devastating.
What this racial justice movement led to is riots, wherein 18 people were murdered in one night in Chicago:
https://forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/08/18-people-were...
And massively less aggressive policing, which led to 1,003 homicides in Chicago in 2021, twice that of 2019.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Report-paints-grim-...
The reason is that police are arresting fewer people, and solving fewer homicides:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/1/3/22858995/chicago...
“Many of our officers are not arresting people, are letting crimes that happen right in front of them go by because they don’t want to be misconstrued as being racist or being held liable for any kind of misconceived notions of brutality or whatever,” he said."
Consequently, revenge killings, where one gang retaliates against another for a previous, unsolved, homicide, have skyrocketed.