This interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education is certainly worth reading. The content: Evan Goldstein interviews Francis Fukuyama, political scientist and writer whose achievements are summarized this way in Wikipedia (note: in the Chronicle interview Fukuyama is definitely not a neo-conservative, going hard after “President Trump”):

Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.

Fukuyama has a new book coming out September 11 whose subject is identity politics (click on screenshot just below to go to its Amazon site). The Amazon summary includes the following:

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state

. . . Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

The last bit, about how to usefully weave the need for recognizing people’s identity into the fabric of a functioning democracy, is especially intriguing, because although identity politics permeates both the American Right and Left, it’s hardly led to any progress.

I often think about this, and engage in self-examination about why modern identity politics irks me. After all, the call for group rights has historically identified and rectified great injustices, bringing about things like women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. I’d like to think I’m sympathetic to genuine oppression and would try to identify it and call it out; and believe me, there’s plenty of oppression and bigotry still around!

So what bothers me about the increasing balkanization of the electorate? I suppose I see much of it as “me-centered”: a narrative about personal victimhood that can not only overcome a drive for social progress, but also leads to suppression of speech and to the demonization of one’s opponents. A lot of identity politics is excessive—the blather about “cultural appropriation” is a notable example—and it’s created a hierarchy of victimhood that leads not to progress but to finger-pointing. (Seriously, does boycotting a show of kimonos in which viewers are invited to try on the garment accomplish anything?) Too, identity politics sometimes degenerates into unproductive Pecksniffery: does it really push America forward, for instance, to censor books like To Kill a Mockingbird? Is it productive to decry all police as racist, even when the cops are black? And I worry, as I often do here, that the excesses of Leftist identity politics give the Right an excuse to not just mock progressives, but to buttress support for autocratic buffoons like Trump and his Republican minions.

Thus I’m ambivalent about the constant cries of oppression. Some of them are justified, but it’s often hard to weed out genuine wrongs from groups using an oppression narrative for other purposes. This has become harder since certain groups on the Left have tried to silence any criticism, much less discussion, by calling critics “racists”, “Nazis,” and so on. Since liberals are deathly afraid of such labels, they’ve driven some of us straight into the arms of regressives. In this sense the Left has borrowed from the playbook of Islamists, who have learned well the use of bandying about the term “Islamophobia.” None of us want to be Islamophobes, so we avoid criticizing the faith and the actions it provokes. The result: liberals and feminists wind up coddling one of the world’s most regressive and oppressive religions, embracing a double standard based on the bigotry of low expectations.

You can see Fukuyama’s own ambivalence in the article below, which I highly recommend. I’ll put a few excerpts below the title.

Fukuyama on Trump:

Q. Let’s start where you start Identity: Donald Trump. The book is a response to his election. He also made an appearance in The End of History and the Last Man.

A. One of the arguments I made in The End of History was that it’s good to have a democracy linked to a market economy because it acts as a sponge for the ambitious energies of people who could otherwise become Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler. That’s the context in which I mention Donald Trump. Our political system has to absorb such people and render them safe. At that time, it looked like our system was doing that. He could be a real-estate developer or, later, an entertainer. That wasn’t enough for him, and he went into politics. Now we’ve got a real problem. Our constitutional system was designed to prevent the rise of fantastically ambitious individuals, to limit them through a system of checks and balances. That’s the test we’re up against right now.

Fukuyama’s ambivalence:

Q. Is there anything inherently problematic about minority groups’ demanding recognition?

A. Absolutely not. Every single one of these struggles is justified. The problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society. In the 20th century, for example, the left was based around the working class and economic exploitation rather than the exploitation of specific identity groups. That has a lot of implications for possible solutions to injustice. For example, one of the problems of making poverty a characteristic of a specific group is that it weakens support for the welfare state. Take something like Obamacare, which I think was an important policy. A lot of its opponents interpreted it as a race-specific policy: This was the black president doing something for his black constituents. We need to get back to a narrative that’s focused less on narrow groups and more on larger collectivities, particularly the collectivity called the American people.

The role of college campuses:

Q. To what extent is this fragmentation in our politics exacerbated by certain tendencies on campus?

A. This is a complicated question because specific incidents are picked up by conservative media and blown up to be representative of higher education. Friends of mine say: It’s obvious there is no freedom of speech left in universities. That seems excessive. The question is important, however. What happens in universities sets the tone for a lot of other elite institutions. What happens on campus ultimately does filter down to the rest of society.

The last sentence, with which I agree (just look at The New Yorker and the New York Times these days), explains why I devote so much space on this site to campuses. And I’ll continue to do so despite some folks telling me in no uncertain terms that I should stop writing about college politics and concentrate on the nastiness of the Trump Administration. (My response is that everybody’s going after Trump, but criticism of college politics has been largely the domain of the Right.)

The interview continues:

Q. You tie some campus developments to a therapeutic turn in American life.

A. It began to unfold back in the ’60s and ’70s, when identity came to the forefront. People felt unfulfilled. They felt they had these true selves that weren’t being recognized. In the absence of a common cultural framework previously set by religion, people were at a loss. Psychology and psychiatry stepped into that breach. In the medical profession, treating mental health has a therapeutic mission, and it became legitimate to say the objective of society ought to be improving people’s sense of self-esteem.

This became part of the mission of universities, which made it difficult to set educational criteria as opposed to therapeutic criteria aimed at making students feel good about themselves. This is what led to many of the conflicts over multiculturalism. This played out in a vivid way at Stanford.

Q. In the book, you quote a leader of Stanford’s Black Student Union in the late ’80s arguing that the university’s Western-civ curriculum “hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.”

A. Instead of saying we want to read authors that are outside the canon because they’re important educationally and historically and culturally, the way it’s framed by that student leader is that the exclusion of those authors hurts people’s self-esteem: Because my people are not equally represented, I feel less good about myself. That is part of the motive that drives administrators and professors to expand the curriculum, to fulfill an understandably therapeutic mission. But I think it can get in the way of universities’ fulfilling their educational missions. What makes students feel good about themselves is not necessarily what’s most useful to their education.

Pay attention to that last sentence, which carries a lot of wisdom about the mission of universities.

Q. A majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents now think higher education has a negative effect on the country. Is higher ed to blame for this perception problem?

“We’re a university, we’re dedicated to the free debate of ideas, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

A. When faced with the sort of threats to free speech that trigger conservative reactions, a lot of professors and administrators tend not to be outspoken. And they ought to be. I admire the president of the University of Chicago [Robert Zimmer], who has been out front on these issues. We need more presidents like him. They should say they’re not going along with any of this nonsense. We’re a university, we’re dedicated to the free debate of ideas, so that’s what we’re going to do.

On social media:

Q. What about the role of social media?

A. Social media is perfectly made for identity politics. It allows you to close yourself off in an identity group, get affirmation of everything you say, and not have to argue with people who think differently. It’s hard to tell what’s cause and effect. I used to think that the driver was society itself, and that technology only accelerated it. But I’m beginning to think causality moves the other way: that we wouldn’t be where we are if not for the internet and social media. This is something future historians will have to unpack.

Amen. All of the interview makes me want to read Fukuyama’s book, and I will.