Home > Work > Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
61 " creedal, built around the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity "
― Francis Fukuyama , Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
62 " Large numbers of newcomers can also weaken support for generous welfare benefits on the part of native-born citizens, a factor in both the European and the American immigration debates. "
63 " Enforcement does not require a border wall; a huge proportion of undocumented aliens have entered the country legally but have remained on expired visas. "
64 " So the possibility of a basic bargain on immigration reform has existed for some time. In a trade, the government would undertake serious enforcement measures to control its borders, in return for an agreement to give undocumented aliens without criminal records a path toward citizenship.10 This bargain might actually receive majority support among the American public, but hard-core immigration opponents are dead set against any form of “amnesty "
65 " Between 2000 and 2016, half of Americans saw no gains to their real incomes; the proportion of national output going to the top 1 percent went from 9 percent of GDP in 1974 to 24 percent in 2008.5 "
66 " Uno de los hallazgos claros de la economía conductual experimental es que las personas son mucho más sensibles a las pérdidas que a las ganancias. "
67 " The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness... "
68 " The End of History and the Last Man in 1992,3 I have regularly been asked whether event X didn’t invalidate my thesis. X could be a coup in Peru, war in the Balkans, the September 11 attacks, the global financial crisis, or, most recently, Donald Trump’s election and the wave of populist nationalism described above. "
69 " To propel themselves forward, such figures latched onto the resentments of ordinary people who felt that their nation or religion or way of life was being disrespected. Megalothymia and isothymia thus joined hands. "
70 " the universal human psychology of thymos. This moral idea tells us that we have authentic inner selves that are not being recognized and suggests that the whole of external society may be false and repressive. It focuses our natural demand for recognition of our dignity and gives us a language for expressing the resentments that arise when such recognition is not forthcoming. "
71 " Identity politics thus engenders its own dynamic, by which societies divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups by virtue of their particular “lived experience” of victimization. Confusion over identity arises as a condition of living in the modern world. Modernization means constant change and disruption, and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. It is mobile, fluid, and complex. This fluidity is by and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have been fleeing villages and traditional societies that do not offer them choices, in favor of ones that do. But the freedom and degree of choice that exist in a modern liberal society can also leave people unhappy and disconnected from their fellow human beings. They find themselves nostalgic for the community and structured life they think they have lost, or that their ancestors supposedly once possessed. The authentic identities they are seeking "
72 " How do we translate these abstract ideas into concrete policies at the current moment? We can start by trying to counter the specific abuses that have driven assertions of identity, such as unwarranted police violence against minorities or sexual assault and sexual harrassment in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. No critique of identity politics should imply that these are not real and urgent problems that need concrete solutions. Beyond "
73 " Over recent decades, the European left had come to support a form of multiculturalism that downplayed the importance of integrating immigrants into the national culture. Under the banner of antiracism it looked the other way from evidence that assimilation wasn’t working. The new populist right, for its part, looks back nostalgically at a fading national culture that was based on ethnicity or religion, a culture that was largely free of immigrants or significant diversities. "
74 " In democratic societies we assert, with the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet historically, we have disagreed on who qualifies as “all men.” At the time that the declaration was signed, this circle did not include white men without property, black slaves, indigenous Americans, or women. "
75 " A major exception was President Obama, whose Affordable Care Act was a milestone in U.S. social policy. The ACA’s opponents tried to frame it as an identity issue, suggesting sotto voce that the policy was designed by a black president to help his black constituents. But it was in fact a national policy designed to help less well-off Americans, regardless of their race or identity. Many of the law’s beneficiaries include rural whites in the South who have nonetheless been persuaded to vote for Republican politicians vowing to repeal the ACA. "
76 " But the stability of democratic politics in the period from the end of World War II up to the present revolved around dominant center-left and center-right parties that largely agreed on the legitimacy of a democratic welfare state. "
77 " This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016. "
78 " Trump represented a broader trend in international politics, toward what has been labeled populist nationalism. "
79 " The inner self is the basis of human dignity, "
80 " It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence. "