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Contested Past, Contested Future: Identity Politics and Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2024

Nathan Pippenger Open the ORCID record for Nathan Pippenger [Opens in a new window]
Nathan Pippenger*
Affiliation:
United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, United States (pippenge@usna.edu)
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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.

Keywords

identity politicsdemocracyliberalismnationalism

Information

Type
Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , Winter 2023 , pp. 391 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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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

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2 Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 20, 2016, “Sunday Review” sec.

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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.

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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.

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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.