Book review: Francis Fukuyama on democracy imperilled.
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
Reviewed by Wesley Yang
Fukuyama’s grandfather was an immigrant from Japan. He came to the United States in 1905, when it was still a nation with mostly open borders, to evade the draft for the Russo-Japanese war. He built a successful hardware store in downtown Los Angeles and became a community leader in Little Tokyo. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp by the U. S. government for the duration of World War II. Given two weeks to sell off his business, he did so to a white competitor for virtually nothing. “He basically lost his lifetime’s work,” Fukuyama said. After his release, Fukuyama’s grandfather was never able to establish himself in business again. When he finally became a naturalized citizen, he cast his first vote in the U. S. presidential election of 1964. The vote he cast was for Barry Goldwater….
….Back in 1992, Fukuyama was blithe about the “smallness of actually existing inequalities.” By the early 2010s, he had begun to sound the alarm about the rise of wealthy and powerful elites rigging the political system in their favor. This capture had led to “political decay,” in which special-interest groups were able to block the popular will, including on hot-button issues such as immigration, where polling indicated that a broad consensus existed. He began to call for a renewed left-wing movement to contest the growing consolidation of power.
Reviewed by Wesley Yang
If “The End of History?” was “Marxist” in
its framework, Fukuyama said, his neocon friends had become “Leninist” in
believing the U. S. had the power to hasten the movement of history through
military force. He believes they drew the wrong lessons from the Reagan years,
specifically the belief that undemocratic societies would simply default toward
democracy if we toppled their dictators...
Fukuyama’s grandfather was an immigrant from Japan. He came to the United States in 1905, when it was still a nation with mostly open borders, to evade the draft for the Russo-Japanese war. He built a successful hardware store in downtown Los Angeles and became a community leader in Little Tokyo. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp by the U. S. government for the duration of World War II. Given two weeks to sell off his business, he did so to a white competitor for virtually nothing. “He basically lost his lifetime’s work,” Fukuyama said. After his release, Fukuyama’s grandfather was never able to establish himself in business again. When he finally became a naturalized citizen, he cast his first vote in the U. S. presidential election of 1964. The vote he cast was for Barry Goldwater….
….Back in 1992, Fukuyama was blithe about the “smallness of actually existing inequalities.” By the early 2010s, he had begun to sound the alarm about the rise of wealthy and powerful elites rigging the political system in their favor. This capture had led to “political decay,” in which special-interest groups were able to block the popular will, including on hot-button issues such as immigration, where polling indicated that a broad consensus existed. He began to call for a renewed left-wing movement to contest the growing consolidation of power.
Fukuyama is hardly a
trusted figure among Democrats, though he has, in recent years, taken to
railing against what conservatism has become. He is exasperated with the large
faction of the electorate willing to be persuaded by the crude and dishonest
appeals of a man he took to be “a total idiot completely unqualified to be
president.” But while deploring the remedy to which these voters resorted, he
acknowledges the grievances that fueled their resentments. “Both the financial
crises in the U. S. and the Eurozone and the migrant crises in Europe were
regarded as elite-leadership failures, and rightly so in both cases. They did
screw up.”
Yet traditional parties of the Left have
been hemorrhaging support throughout Europe despite a three-decade rise in
economic inequality in countries all around the globe. Fukuyama noted that the
left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement “marched and demonstrated, then fizzled
out,” while the Tea Party “succeeded in taking over both the Republican Party
and much of Congress.” Instead of articulating an overarching vision of
economic justice, many on the Left seem intent on elaborating ever more
fractionated identity categories demanding recognition—a move that is
intrinsically at cross-purposes to one that seeks change through mass democratic
means. “The Democrats have become the party of minorities, white professionals,
and educated white women,” Fukuyama said, “while the Republicans are the white
people’s party. It’s a moral disaster for American democracy.”..
