Identity

Francis Fukuyama wrote this book in response to two electoral shocks of 2016: Britain's vote to leave the European Union (EU) and Donald Trump's election as president of the United States. Both events, he argues, were symptoms of a broader global shift toward populist nationalism that threatened the liberal democratic order. Fukuyama's central thesis is that the demand for recognition of one's dignity, not economic self-interest alone, is the master concept unifying contemporary political upheaval, from populist movements in Europe and America to politicized Islam and identity-based activism.

Fukuyama begins by surveying the liberal world order that took shape between the 1970s and mid-2000s. During this period, electoral democracies grew from roughly 35 to over 110, globalization expanded trade, and extreme poverty and child mortality declined sharply. Yet these gains were unevenly distributed. Inequality within developed democracies rose, with benefits flowing mainly to educated elites while manufacturing moved to low-cost regions. Two financial crises, the 2008 U.S. subprime collapse and the European sovereign debt crisis, damaged liberal democracy's reputation and ushered in what scholar Larry Diamond has called a "democratic recession." Authoritarian regimes in China and Russia grew more assertive, democracies in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland slid backward, and the Arab Spring, the wave of anti-authoritarian uprisings that swept Arab states beginning in 2010, gave way largely to civil war.

Fukuyama observes that twentieth-century politics, organized along a left-right economic spectrum, is yielding to a spectrum defined by identity. He acknowledges that material grievances are real but insists that a deeper force is at work: a politics of resentment in which leaders mobilize followers around the perception that their group's dignity has been disrespected. He illustrates this across diverse cases, from Russian president Vladimir Putin's resentment over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Western military alliance, to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's rhetoric about Hungary reclaiming its self-esteem. He points as well to China's invocation of a "century of humiliation," a national narrative of subjugation by foreign powers; to the Black Lives Matter movement protesting anti-Black police violence in the United States; and to the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and abuse. What unifies these disparate phenomena is a demand for public recognition of worth that economic measures alone cannot satisfy.

To explain why recognition matters so deeply, Fukuyama turns to Plato's Republic and the concept of thymos, the third part of the soul alongside desire and reason. Thymos is the seat of judgments about one's own worth; when people live up to their standards, they feel pride, and when they fail, they feel shame or anger. Fukuyama distinguishes megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior, from isothymia, the desire to be recognized as equal. The rise of modern democracy, he argues, is the historical story of isothymia displacing megalothymia. Yet a tension persists: The quest for equal recognition can slide into demands for group superiority.

Fukuyama traces the intellectual origins of the modern concept of identity through several key thinkers. Martin Luther was the first major Western figure to valorize the inner self over external social convention, arguing that faith alone could justify a person before God. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau deepened and secularized this interiority, arguing that humans were originally good and that unhappiness began with society, private property, and the impulse to compare oneself with others. His concept of the "sentiment of existence" would later evolve into the notion of "lived experience" central to contemporary identity politics. The philosopher Immanuel Kant grounded human worth in the capacity for moral choice, while the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel placed recognition at the center, arguing in The Phenomenology of Spirit that history was driven by a struggle for recognition resolvable only through mutual acknowledgment of shared human dignity.

Fukuyama uses the Arab Spring and Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, the 2013 Euromaidan protest movement against government corruption and a pro-Russia political turn, as illustrations that struggles for dignity continue to drive upheaval. From the French Revolution onward, he identifies two diverging streams. The individualist stream led to liberal democracies protecting autonomy, eventually expanding into "expressive individualism," the idea that liberty means defining one's own meaning and values. The collectivist stream led to nationalism and politicized religion. Using a fictional Saxon peasant named Hans who migrates to an industrializing city, Fukuyama shows how the shift from village community to anonymous urban society bred identity confusion that nationalist ideologues exploited. He argues that Islamism, or politicized Islam seeking to organize society around Islamic law and identity, operates through a parallel mechanism, offering community and dignity to Muslims dislocated by modernization.

Fukuyama asks why nationalist and religious movements have captured constituencies that should, by economic logic, have supported left-wing parties. He documents the class-based left's global decline and the paradox that this decline coincides with rising inequality. Invoking the nationalism scholar Ernest Gellner's metaphor that the "awakening message" intended for classes was "by some terrible postal error" delivered to nations instead (79–80), he argues that economic motivations are intertwined with identity: to be poor is to be invisible, and the indignity of invisibility is often worse than the lack of resources. Drawing on the moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith, the economist Robert Frank's concept of "positional goods" (goods valued for relative rather than absolute worth), and studies by political scientist Katherine Cramer and sociologist Arlie Hochschild, Fukuyama contends that perceived loss of middle-class status, not absolute deprivation, drives populist resentment. The nationalist right succeeds by translating economic loss into loss of identity and status, telling voters they are core members of a great nation held down by foreigners, immigrants, and elites.

The book's second half examines identity politics within liberal democracies. Fukuyama traces a "therapeutic turn" in American culture, in which psychotherapy and the promotion of self-esteem replaced shared religious morality as the framework for personal fulfillment. This model, he argues, midwifed modern identity politics. Beginning in the 1960s, movements for the rights of African Americans, women, gay and lesbian people, and others demanded recognition for groups previously invisible. Over time, these movements shifted from demanding equal treatment, as in the early civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to asserting separate group identities with distinct "lived experiences" inaccessible to outsiders. Fukuyama acknowledges these movements' achievements but identifies serious problems: Identity politics serves as a substitute for policies addressing socioeconomic inequality, diverts attention from the white working class's decline, threatens free speech by privileging subjective feeling over reasoned deliberation, and has stimulated identity politics on the right, which adopts the left's framework of victimization while centering identities around white ethnicity, Christian religiosity, and rural values.

In his final chapters, Fukuyama argues that national identity is essential for functioning states and democracies, using Syria's civil war as a stark illustration of what happens when a country lacks a shared sense of nationhood. National identity provides security, good governance, economic development, trust, social safety nets, and the democratic legitimacy on which self-government depends. He warns against both ethno-nationalism and the view that national identity is obsolete. His policy prescriptions include reforming European citizenship laws from jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) to jus soli (citizenship by birth on territory), investing in assimilation through common schools, defending creedal national identities built around liberal democratic principles, and pursuing a grand bargain on immigration in the United States that pairs enforcement with a path to citizenship for undocumented residents. He also advocates universal national service to build solidarity across social divisions. Fukuyama closes by warning that the internet and social media have accelerated fragmentation into narrow identity groups, invoking dystopian fiction such as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which imagined a fragmented America of identity-based enclaves. Identity can be used to divide, he concludes, but it can also be used to integrate, and steering it toward broader, more inclusive forms of mutual respect is the remedy for the populist politics of the present.