Twentieth-century politics was organized along a left-right spectrum
defined by economic issues, the left wanting more equality and the right
demanding greater freedom. Progressive politics centered around
workers, their trade unions, and social-democratic parties that sought
better social protections and economic redistribution. The right, by
contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government
and promoting the private sector.
In the second decade of the
twenty-first century, that spectrum appears to be giving way in many
regions to one defined by identity. The left has focused less on broad
economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety
of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women,
Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right,
meanwhile, is redefining itself as a collection of patriots who seek to
protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often
explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.
A long tradition dating back at least as far as Karl Marx sees
political struggles as a reflection of economic conflicts, essentially
as fights over shares of the pie. Indeed, this is part of the story of
the 2010s, with globalization producing significant numbers of people
left behind by the overall growth that occurred around the world. But
despite the importance of material self-interest, human beings are
motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the
disparate events of the present. These motives give rise to what might
be called the politics of resentment.
In a wide variety of
cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception
that a group’s dignity has been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise
disregarded. This resentment engenders demands [End Page 5]
for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A
humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more
emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.
Thus, Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy
of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the
United States took advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to
drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral
superiority shown by Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated
not, as former U.S. president Barack Obama once said, as a weak
regional player, but as a great power.
The Chinese government of Xi
Jinping has talked at length about China’s “one-hundred years of
humiliation,” and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were
trying to prevent its return to the great-power status it had enjoyed
over millennia of history. Resentment at indignities is a powerful force
in democratic countries as well. In the United States, it has animated
developments as varied as the Black Lives Matter movement against police
brutality, the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment and assault,
and the strong support of rural voters for the presidential candidacy of
Donald Trump.
These are all cases in which a group, whether a great power such as
Russia or China or an assemblage of citizens in a democracy, believes
that it has an identity that is not being given adequate
recognition—either by the outside world, in the case of a nation, or by
other members of the same society. Those identities can be and are
incredibly varied, based on nation, religion, ethnicity, sexual
orientation, or gender. They are all manifestations of a common
phenomenon, that of identity politics.
The terms identity and identity politics are of
fairly recent provenance, the former having been popularized by the
psychologist Erik Erikson during the 1950s, and the latter coming into
view only in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Identity has a
wide number of meanings today, in some cases referring simply to social
categories or roles, in others to basic information about oneself (as
in “my identity was stolen”). Used in this fashion, identities have
always existed.
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