Identity politics in the United States started on the left, after the Civil Rights era, with specific groups like African Americans, women, s and les… - Francis Fukuyama

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Identity politics in the United States started on the left, after the Civil Rights era, with specific groups like African Americans, women, s and lesbians, indigenous peoples, the disabled. Every one of these groups felt marginalized and disrespected by the dominant white male society that existed... in the early 1960s... [E]ach one of these groups began to demand recognition, not as part of a generic working class, but rather for their particular form of disrespect. ...[T]here's ...a lot to this belief that injustice takes these very specific forms tied to narrow identities. The problem with this is... it began to alienate the traditional working class, which had been the base of the Democratic party, as of every other left wing party in the 20th century... [I]ncreasingly working class whites began to abandon that party because they felt the Democrats were no longer catering to their interests. They're the ones that had lost their jobs to overseas competition. They're the ones who were falling behind in terms of status... income... social respect... [T]hat generated a huge amount of resentment against the elites living in big cities, that had jobs that were secure, that were comfortable in a multicultural, very diverse environment.

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About Francis Fukuyama

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, political economist, and author best known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

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Birth Name: Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama
Alternative Names: Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama Fukuyama

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Additional quotes by Francis Fukuyama

The one on the right concerned the shift from an older understanding of economic liberalism to what is now called "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism is not... a synonym for capitalism. I don't see how you can have any kind of modern economy without a market based economy. Neoliberalism took that basic insight and stretched it to an extreme seeking to deregulate, privatize and basically pull back the role of the state, which many neoliberals regarded as simply obstacles to individuals, to entrepreneurship, to economic growth, and as a result markets did their usual work. They produced a great deal of inequality, as... global corporations searched for very small cost advantages by moving jobs to low cost areas... [T]hey destabilized the global economy in certain important ways by deregulating the financial sector. As a result of the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s and 90s we had an escalating series of financial crises. In the sterling crisis, the Asian financial crisis, Argentina, Russia, and finally culminating in the big American subprime crisis in 2008. The... cumulative effects of this instability were political and they were very serious because many ordinary people were hurt... a lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and the elites that ran these big banks and financial institutions suffered only a momentary disruption in their incomes, and went on to continue to dominate their respective economies... [T]his had a direct impact on the rise of populism in subsequent years, both on the right and on the left.

[A] further threat to liberalism has to do with the mode of cognition that we call modern natural science. The early liberals were very closely aligned with the founders of modern natural science, people like Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who believed that there was an objective world beyond our subjective consciousnesses, that we could perceive this world through the experimental method, and then come to manipulate it. Natural science gave us technology... that made the world much more habitable, by conquering disease, by inventing things that vastly increased human productivity. So... it's closely related to the wealth, and... the safety and comfort of a modern economically developed world.

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The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

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