No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Contested Past, Contested Future: Identity Politics and Liberal Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2024
Abstract
Events in recent years have underscored the dependence of the liberal international order (LIO) on the domestic fate of liberalism in countries like the United States—where, according to critics such as Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama, liberals have imperiled themselves through an unwise embrace of identity politics. These critics argue that identity politics undermines solidarity and empowers the illiberal right, and that it should be rejected in favor of a unifying creedal nationalism based on common liberal values. This analysis, I argue, overlooks the fact that “common” creedal values have expanded in American history when their meanings were being controversially reinterpreted from identity-based perspectives. If American liberalism is to emerge from its current crisis, it will need to incorporate the claims of identity into a sense of national belonging that can resist the authoritarian, ethnoracial nationalism promoted by the LIO's enemies. The likelihood that such a process will be controversial is reason for liberal critics of identity politics to consider how the claims of identity might be an asset, not an obstacle, to revitalizing liberal democracy against its challengers.
- Type
- Essay
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
Footnotes
*
The views expressed are the author's and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
References
Notes
1 Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 6, 2017), p. ii, www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf.
2 Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 20, 2016, “Sunday Review” sec.
3 Ikenberry, G. John, “The End of Liberal International Order?,” International Affairs 94, no. 1 (January 2018), pp. 7–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 22, 23.
4 Lilla, Mark, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), pp. 10, 9Google Scholar.
5 Fukuyama, Francis, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), pp. 6, xvGoogle Scholar.
6 Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.”
7 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, p. 12.
8 Fukuyama, Identity, pp. 115, 118.
9 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, pp. 120, 121.
10 Ibid., p. 15.
11 Fukuyama, Francis, “Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 5 (September/October 2018), pp. 90–114Google Scholar, at pp. 104–5.
12 Ibid., pp. 106, 108.
13 Ibid., pp. 107, 108.
14 Kazin, Michael and McCartin, Joseph A., introduction to Kazin, Michael and McCartin, Joseph A., eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 1–24, at p. 3Google Scholar.
15 Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 82Google Scholar.
16 Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 187Google Scholar.
17 Fukuyama, “Against Identity Politics,” p. 108.
18 Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 16Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., p. 16.
20 John Pettit, quoted in Pauline Maier, “The Strange History of ‘All Men Are Created Equal,’” Washington and Lee Law Review 56, no. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 873–88, at pp. 883–85. On the resurfacing of opposition to the declaration's language of human equality during the turn of the twentieth century, see Smith, Civic Ideals, pp. 416–17.
21 Smith, Civic Ideals, p. 26.
22 Seyla Benhabib, “Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National, and the Global,” ch. 2 in Seyla Benhabib, with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka, Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 45–81, at p. 47.
23 Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. Rehg, William (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 125, 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Stilz, Anna, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 160Google Scholar.
25 See, for example, this explicit attempt by left-wing thinkers to reclaim the ideal of freedom from the right: Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin, “Freedom Now,” Polity 52, no. 3 (July 2020), pp. 384–98, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708919.
26 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July, 1852,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1: “Speeches, Debates, and Interviews,” vol. 2, 1847–54 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 368.
27 Ralph Ellison, “The Haverford Discussions” (Friday Evening Session, May 30, 1969), in Michael Lackey, ed., The Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), p. 45.
28 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, p. 129.
29 Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, “U.S.” sec., www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.
30 Dana R. Fisher, “The Diversity of the Recent Black Lives Matter Protests Is a Good Sign for Racial Equity,” in “How We Rise,” Brookings, July 8, 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/07/08/the-diversity-of-the-recent-black-lives-matter-protests-is-a-good-sign-for-racial-equity.
31 Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth, and Jeremy Pressman, “The Floyd Protests Are the Broadest in U.S. History—and Are Spreading to White, Small-Town America,” Monkey Cage (blog), Washington Post, June 6, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/06/floyd-protests-are-broadest-us-history-are-spreading-white-small-town-america.
32 Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, and Monica Anderson, Amid Protests, Majorities across Racial and Ethnic Groups Express Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement (Pew Research Center, June 12, 2020), p. 5, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/06/12/amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement.
33 Rashawn Ray, “Black Lives Matter at 10 Years: 8 Ways the Movement Has Been Highly Effective,” Brookings, October 12, 2022, www.brookings.edu/articles/black-lives-matter-at-10-years-what-impact-has-it-had-on-policing/.
34 Juliana Horowitz, Kiley Hurst, and Dana Braga, Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement Has Dropped Considerably From Its Peak in 2020 (Pew Research Center, June 14, 2023), p. 5, www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/06/14/support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-dropped-considerably-from-its-peak-in-2020/.
35 Elizabeth Anderson, “Democracy: Instrumental vs. Non-Instrumental Value,” in Thomas Christiano and John Christman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 213–28, at p. 216.