We cannot get away from identity or identity politics. Identity is the “powerful moral idea that has come down to us,” in Charles Taylor’s phrase, and it has crossed borders and cultures since it builds on 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.
That the demand for dignity should somehow disappear is neither possible nor desirable. It was the spark that ignited countless popular protests, from the French Revolution to that of the disrespected street vendor in Tunisia. These people wanted to be treated like adults, adults who were able to influence the governments that lorded over them. Liberal democracy is built around the rights given to individuals who are equal in their freedom, that is, who have an equal degree of choice and agency in determining their collective political lives.
But many people are not satisfied with simple equal recognition as generic human beings. The rights one enjoys as a citizen of a democracy are highly valued when one lives under a dictatorship, but come to be taken for granted over time once democracy has been established. Unlike their parents, young people growing up in Eastern Europe today have no personal experience of life under communism, and can take the liberties they enjoy for granted. This allows them to focus on other things: the hidden potentialities that are not being permitted to flourish and the way that they are being held back by the social norms and institutions around them.
Being a citizen of a liberal democracy does not mean, moreover, that people will actually be treated with equal respect either by their government or by other citizens. They are judged on the basis of their skin color, their gender, their national origin, their looks, their ethnicity, or their sexual orientation. Each person and each group experiences disrespect in different ways, and each seeks its own dignity. 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 are ones that bind them to other people. They can be seduced by leaders who tell them that they have been betrayed and disrespected by the existing power structures, and that they are members of important communities whose greatness will again be recognized.
Many modern liberal democracies find themselves at the cusp of an important choice. They have had to accommodate rapid economic and social change and have become far more diverse as a result of globalization. This has created demands for recognition on the part of groups who were previously invisible to the mainstream society. But this has entailed a perceived lowering of the status of the groups they have displaced, leading to a politics of resentment and backlash. The retreat on both sides into ever narrower identities threatens the possibility of deliberation and collective action by the society as a whole. Down this road lies, ultimately, state breakdown and failure.
The nature of modern identity is to be changeable, however. While some individuals may persuade themselves that their identity is based on their biology and is outside their control, the condition of modernity is to have multiple identities, ones that are shaped by our social interactions on any number of levels. We have identities defined by our race, gender, workplace, education, affinities, and nation. For many teenagers, identity forms around the specific subgenre of music that they and their friends listen to.
But if the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative. One does not have to deny the potentialities and lived experiences of individuals to recognize that they can also share values and aspirations with much broader circles of citizens. Erlebnis can aggregate into Erfahrung; lived experience can become just plain experience. So while we will never get away from identity politics in the modern world, we can steer it back to broader forms of mutual respect for dignity that will make democracy more functional.
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 that, there is a larger agenda of integrating smaller groups into larger wholes on which trust and citizenship can be based. We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cultures rejecting democracy’s values.
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.
In the United States, identity politics has fractured the left into a series of identity groups that are home to its most energetic political activists. It has in many respects lost touch with the one identity group that used to be its largest constituency, the white working class. This has spawned the rise of a populist right that feels its own identity to be under threat, abetted by a president whose personal vanity is tied to the degree of anger and polarization he can stoke.
The European agenda must start with redefinitions of national identity embodied in its citizenship laws. Ideally, the EU should create a single citizenship whose requirements would be based on adherence to basic liberal democratic principles, one that would supersede national citizenship laws. This has not been politically possible in the past, and it is much less thinkable now with the rise of populist parties across the Continent. It would help if the EU democratized itself by shifting powers from the Commission to the Parliament and tried to make up for lost time by investing in European identity through the creation of the appropriate symbols and narratives that would be inculcated through a common educational system. This too is likely to be beyond the capability of a union of twenty-eight members, each of which remains jealous of its national prerogatives and stands ready to veto such a program. Any action that takes place will therefore have to happen, for better or worse, on a member-state level.
Those laws of EU member states still based on jus sanguinis need to be changed to jus soli so as not to privilege one ethnic group over another. It is perfectly legitimate to impose stringent requirements for the naturalization of new citizens, something the United States has done for many years. In the United States, in addition to proving continuous residency in the country for five years, new citizens are expected to be able to read, write, and speak basic English, to have an understanding of U.S. history and government, to be of good moral character (i.e., no criminal record), and to demonstrate an attachment to the principles and ideals of the U.S. Constitution. The latter is undertaken by swearing the naturalization oath of allegiance to the United States of America:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.1
Dual citizenship has become increasingly widespread today as migration levels have increased. For many people who travel or have family in different countries, having multiple passports is a great convenience. But if one takes national identity seriously, it is a rather questionable practice. Different nations have different identities and different interests that can engender potentially conflicting allegiances. The most obvious problem involves military service: if the two countries of which one is a citizen go to war with each other, one’s loyalties are automatically in question. This may seem a moot issue with the reduced likelihood of war in most of the world, but we unfortunately cannot assume that military conflict will not occur in the future. Even short of such contingencies, dual citizenship raises serious political problems. In Germany’s 2017 election, for example, Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, encouraged German citizens of Turkish origin to vote for politicians who would favor Turkish interests, rather than voting for those they thought were best for Germany. Those who were citizens of both countries might have a harder time deciding how to vote than those who had forsworn loyalty to Turkey.2
In addition to changing the formal requirements for citizenship, European countries need to shift their popular understandings of national identity away from those based on ethnicity. In the early 2000s, a German academic of Syrian origin named Bassam Tibi proposed Leitkultur, “leading culture,” as the basis for German national identity.3 Leitkultur was defined in liberal Enlightenment terms as belief in equality and democratic values. Yet his proposal was attacked from the left for suggesting that those values were superior to other cultural values; in doing so the left gave unwitting comfort not just to Islamists, but also to the right that still believed in ethnic identity. Germany needs something precisely like Leitkultur, a normative change that would permit a Turk to speak of him- or herself as German. This is beginning to happen, but slowly.4
Down the road, something like a pan-European identity may someday emerge. Perhaps this needs to happen outside the cumbersome and bureaucratic decision-making structures that constitute the contemporary EU. Europeans have created a remarkable civilization of which they should be proud, one that can encompass people from other cultures even as it remains aware of the distinctiveness of its own.
Compared to Europe, the United States has been far more welcoming of immigrants because it developed a creedal identity early on, based on its long history of immigration. Compared to Europeans, Americans have been proud of their naturalized citizens and typically make a great deal out of the naturalization ceremony, with color guards and hopeful speeches by local politicians. As the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset used to point out, in the United States one can be accused of being “un-American” in a way that one could not be said to be “un-Danish” or “un-Japanese.” Americanism constituted a set of beliefs and a way of life, not an ethnicity; one can deviate from the former but not the latter.
The creedal national identity that emerged in the wake of the American Civil War today needs to be strongly reemphasized and defended from attacks by both the left and the right. On the right, plenty of new white nationalist voices would like to drag the country backward to an identity once again based on race, ethnicity, or religion. It is urgent that these views be firmly rejected as un-American, much as Ben Sasse sought to do.
On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are somehow intrinsic to the country’s DNA. All these things have been and continue to be features of American society, and they need to be confronted in the present. But a progressive narrative can also be told about the overcoming of barriers and the ever-broadening circles of people whose dignity the country has recognized, based on its founding principles. This narrative was part of the “new birth of freedom” envisioned by Abraham Lincoln, and one that Americans celebrate on the holiday he created, Thanksgiving.
While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.
Once a country has defined a proper creedal identity that is open to the de facto diversity of modern societies, the nature of controversies over immigration will inevitably have to change. In both Europe and the United States, that debate is currently polarized between a right that seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send current immigrants back to their countries of origin and a left that asserts a virtually unlimited obligation on the part of liberal democracies to accept migrants. The real focus should instead be on strategies for better assimilating immigrants to a country’s creedal identity. Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society, and the benefits of immigration can be fully realized. Poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute dangerous security threats.
Europeans pay lip service to the need for better assimilation, but fail to follow through with an effective set of policies. The reform agenda here is highly varied since individual European countries approach the problem very differently. Many countries have in place policies that actively impede integration, such as the Dutch system of pillarization. Britain and a number of other European countries provide public funding for Muslim schools, just as they support Christian and Jewish schools. To some extent this simply reflects the geographical concentration of immigrant communities, and was done in the name of equal treatment. If assimilation is the goal, however, this whole structure should be replaced by a system of common schools teaching a standardized curriculum. As in the Netherlands, it is a reach to think that this would be politically feasible, yet that is the kind of approach that would be needed were countries to take integration seriously.5
In France, the problem is somewhat different. The French concept of republican citizenship, like its American counterpart, is creedal, built around the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity coming out of the French Revolution. The 1905 law on laïcité formally separates church and state and makes impossible the kinds of publicly funded religious schools operating in Britain or the Netherlands.6 The French problem is threefold. First, whatever French law says, a lot of discrimination in French society remains, which holds back opportunities from immigrants. Second, the French economy has been under-performing for years, leading to overall unemployment rates that are twice those of neighboring Germany. For France’s immigrant youth, the numbers are reaching 35 percent, compared to 25 for French youth as a whole. One important thing that France needs to do to integrate immigrants is to get them jobs and increase their hope for a better future, for instance by liberalizing the labor market, as Emmanuel Macron has sought to do. Finally, the very idea of French national identity and French culture has been under attack as Islamophobic; assimilation itself is not politically acceptable to many on the left. Defense of republican ideals of universal citizenship should not be left to parties like the National Front.
In the United States, an assimilation agenda begins with public education. The teaching of basic civics has been in long-term decline in the United States, not just for immigrants but for native-born Americans, and this needs to be reversed. Like Europe, the United States too has policies that impede assimilation, such as the thirteen or so different languages taught in the New York City public school system. Bi- and multilingual programs have been marketed as ways of speeding the acquisition of the English language by nonnative speakers. But it has developed a constituency of its own, with the educational bureaucracy defending its prerogatives regardless of actual outcomes for English acquisition.7
Assimilation of immigrants may require even more active measures. In recent decades, courts in the United States and other developed democracies have gradually eroded the distinction between citizen and noncitizen.8 Noncitizens rightfully enjoy many legal rights, including rights to due process, speech, association, free exercise of religion, and a range of state services such as education. Noncitizens also share duties with citizens: they are expected to obey the law and must pay taxes, though only citizens are liable for jury duty in the United States. The distinction between noncitizens who are documented and those who are not is sharper, since the latter are liable to deportation, but even the undocumented possess due process rights. The only major right that is conveyed solely by citizenship is the right to vote; in addition, citizens can enter and exit the country freely and can expect support from their government when traveling abroad.
Small as they are, it is important to hold on to these distinctions. Basic human rights are universal, but full enjoyment of rights actively enforced by state power is a reward for membership in a national community and ac ceptance of that community’s rules. The right to vote is particularly important, since it gives individuals a share of state power. As a human being, I may have an abstract right to citizenship and political representation, but as an American citizen I would not expect to be able to vote in Italy or in Ghana, even if I lived in one of those countries.
Contemporary liberal democracies do not demand a lot in return for state protection of their citizens’ rights, and in particular the right to vote. The sense of national community might be strengthened by a universal requirement for national service. Such a mandate would underline the fact that citizenship requires commitment and sacrifice to maintain. One could do it by serving either in the military or in a civilian capacity. This requirement is actually articulated in the American naturalization oath, which enjoins willingness to bear arms on behalf of the country, or to work in a civilian service as required by law. If such service was correctly structured, it would force young people to work together with others from very different social classes, regions, races, and ethnicities, just as military service does today. And like all forms of shared sacrifice, it would be a powerful way of integrating newcomers into the national culture. National service would be a contemporary form of classical republicanism, a form of democracy that encouraged virtue and public-spiritedness rather than simply leaving citizens alone to pursue their private lives.
A policy focus on assimilation also means that levels of immigration and rates of change become important, for both Europe and the United States. Assimilation into a dominant culture becomes much harder as the numbers of immigrants rise relative to the native population. As immigrant communities reach a certain scale, they tend to become self-sufficient and no longer need connections to the groups outside themselves. They can overwhelm public services and strain the capacity of schools and other public institutions to care for them. While immigrants will likely have a positive net effect on public finance in the long run, this will happen only if they get jobs and become taxpaying citizens or legal resident aliens. 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.
Liberal democracies benefit greatly from immigration, both economically and culturally. But they also unquestionably have the right to control their own borders. A democratic political system is based on a contract between government and citizen in which both have obligations. Such a contract makes no sense without delimitation of citizenship and exercise of the franchise. All people have a basic human right to citizenship, something that, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cannot be arbitrarily taken away from them. But that does not mean they have the right to citizenship in any particular country. International law does not, moreover, challenge the right of states to control their borders, or to set criteria for citizenship.9 What refugees are owed is sympathy, compassion, and support. Like all moral obligations, however, these obligations need to be tempered by practical considerations of scarce resources, competing priorities, and the political sustainability of a program of support.
For Europe, this implies that the EU as a whole needs to be able to control its external borders better than it does, which in practice means giving countries such as Italy and Greece both material help and stronger authority to regulate the flow of migrants into Europe. The organization charged with doing this, Frontex, is understaffed, underfunded, and lacks strong political support from the very member states most concerned with keeping migrants out. The Schengen system of free internal movement will not be politically sustainable unless the problem of Europe’s outer borders is somehow solved.
The situation in the United States is somewhat different. The country has been very inconsistent in the enforcement of its immigration laws over the years. This enforcement is not impossible, but is a matter of political will. While levels of deportations began rising under the Obama administration, the often arbitrary nature of these actions does not make for a sustainable long-term policy. Enforcement does not require a border wall; a huge proportion of undocumented aliens have entered the country legally but have remained on expired visas. Rather, the rules could be better enforced through a system of employer sanctions, which requires a national identification system that will tell employers who is legitimately in the country. This has not happened because too many employers benefit from the cheap labor that immigrants provide and do not want to act as enforcement agents. It has also not come about because of a uniquely American opposition to a national ID system, based on a suspicion of government shared by left and right alike.
As a result, the United States now hosts a population of some 11–12 million undocumented aliens. The vast majority of these people have been in the country for years and are doing useful work, raising families, and otherwise behaving as law-abiding citizens. The idea that they are all criminals because they violated U.S. law to enter the country is ridiculous, though some within this population are criminals, just as within the native-born population. It is also ridiculous to think that the United States could ever force all these people to leave the country and return to their countries of origin. A project on that scale would be worthy of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
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,” and pro-immigrant groups are opposed to stricter enforcement of existing rules. The polarization and dysfunction of the American political system has made this bargain unachievable for many years. I have elsewhere labeled instances of this sort American vetocracy, by which minority views can easily block majority consensus.11
If the United States is serious about assimilating immigrants, then it needs to reform its immigration system along the lines just outlined. Acquiring U.S. citizenship and swearing the naturalization oath are critical and poignant markers of assimilation. Some object that giving undocumented aliens a path to citizenship rewards them for breaking U.S. law and allows them to jump the queue ahead of legal aliens seeking naturalization. A public service requirement might help ease such concerns. The country is creating an unnecessary obstacle to assimilation under the fantasy that the millions of undocumented aliens living peacefully and productively in the country will ultimately be deported back to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, America’s inability to enforce existing laws ensures that this problem will persist.
Public policies that focus on the successful assimilation of foreigners might help take the wind out of the sails of the current populist upsurge both in Europe and in the United States. The new groups vociferously opposing immigration are actually coalitions of people with different concerns. A hard-core group are driven by racism and bigotry; little can be done to change their minds. They should not be catered to, but simply opposed on moral grounds. But others are concerned whether newcomers will ultimately assimilate. They worry less about there being immigration than about numbers, speed of change, and the carrying capacity of existing institutions to accommodate these changes. A policy focus on assimilation might ease their concerns and peel them away from the simple bigots. Whether or not this happens, a policy focusing on assimilation would be good for national cohesion.
Policies related to immigrants, refugees, and citizenship are at the heart of current identity debates, but the issue is much broader than that. Identity politics is rooted in a world in which the poor and marginalized are invisible to their peers, as Adam Smith remarked. Resentment over lost status starts with real economic distress, and one way of muting the resentment is to mitigate concerns over jobs, incomes, and security.
Particularly in the United States, much of the left stopped thinking several decades ago about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality. 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.
Identity politics has made the crafting of such ambitious policies more difficult. For much of the twentieth century, politics in liberal democracies revolved around broad economic policy issues. The progressive left wanted to protect ordinary people from the vagaries of the market, and to use the power of the state to more fairly distribute resources. The right for its part wanted to protect the free enterprise system and the ability of everyone to participate in market exchange. Communist, socialist, social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties all arrayed themselves on a spectrum from left to right that could be measured by the desired degree of state intervention, and commitment alternatively to equality or to individual freedom. There were important identity groups as well, including parties whose agendas were nationalist, religious, or regional in scope. 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.
This consensus now represents an old establishment that is being hotly contested by new parties firmly rooted in identity issues. This constitutes a big challenge for the future of democratic politics. While fights over economic policy produced sharp polarization early in the twentieth century, democracies found that opposing economic visions could often split the difference and compromise. Identity issues, by contrast, are harder to reconcile: either you recognize me or you don’t. Resentment over lost dignity or invisibility often has economic roots, but fights over identity often distract us from focusing on policies that could concretely remedy those issues. In countries such as the United States, South Africa, or India, with racial, ethnic, and religious stratifications, it has been harder to create broad working-class coalitions to fight for redistribution because the higher-status identity groups did not want to make common cause with those below them, and vice versa.
The rise of the politics of identity has been facilitated by technological change. When the internet first became a platform for mass communication in the 1990s, many observers (myself included) believed that it would be an important force for promoting democratic values. Information is a form of power, and if the internet increased everyone’s access to information, it should also have distributed power more broadly. Moreover, the rise of social media in particular seemed likely to be a useful mobilization tool, allowing like-minded groups to coalesce around issues of common concern. The peer-to-peer nature of the internet would eliminate the tyranny of hierarchical gatekeepers of all sorts, who curated the nature of information to which people had access.
And so it was: any number of antiauthoritarian uprisings, from the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine to the failed Green Revolution in Iran to the Tunisian revolt and the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt, were powered by social media and the internet. Government operations were much harder to keep secret once ordinary people had technological means of publicizing abuses; Black Lives Matter would likely not have taken off in the absence of ubiquitous cell phones and video recordings.
But over time, authoritarian governments such as that of China figured out how to control use of the internet for their own populations and to make it politically harmless, while Russia learned how to turn social media into a weapon that would weaken its democratic rivals.12 But even absent these external players, social media has succeeded in accelerating the fragmentation of liberal societies by playing into the hands of identity groups. It connected like-minded people with one another, freed from the tyranny of geography. It permitted them to communicate, and to wall themselves off from people and views that they didn’t like, in “filter bubbles.” In most face-to-face communities, the number of people believing a given outlandish conspiracy theory would be very limited; online, one could discover thousands of fellow believers. By undermining traditional media’s editors, fact-checkers, and professional codes, it facilitated the circulation of bad information and deliberate efforts to smear and undermine political opponents. And its anonymity removed existing restraints on civility. Not only did it support society’s willingness to see itself in identity terms; it promoted new identities through online communities, as countless subreddits have done.
Fears about the future are often best expressed through fiction, particularly science fiction that tries to imagine future worlds based on new kinds of technology. In the first half of the twentieth century, many of those forward-looking fears centered around big, centralized, bureaucratic tyrannies that snuffed out individuality and privacy. George Orwell’s 1984 foresaw Big Brother controlling individuals through the telescreen, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World saw the state using biotechnology to stratify and control society. But the nature of imagined dystopias began to change in the later decades of the century, when environmental collapse and out-of-control viruses took center stage.
However, one particular strand spoke to the anxieties raised by identity politics. Cyberpunk authors such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson saw a future dominated not by centralized dictatorships, but by uncontrolled social fragmentation that was facilitated by a new emerging technology called the internet. Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash posited a ubiquitous virtual “metaverse” in which individuals could adopt avatars, interact, and change their identities at will. The United States had broken down into “burbclaves,” suburban subdivisions catering to narrow identities such as New South Africa for the racists with their Confederate flags, or Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong for Chinese immigrants. Passports and visas were required to travel from one neighborhood to the other. The CIA was privatized, and the USS Enterprise had become a floating home for refugees. The authority of the federal government shrank to encompass only the land on which federal buildings were located.13
Our present world is simultaneously moving toward the opposing dystopias of hypercentralization and endless fragmentation. China, for instance, is building a massive dictatorship in which the government collects data on the daily transactions of every one of its citizens and uses big-data techniques and a social credit system to control its population. On the other hand, different parts of the world are seeing the breakdown of centralized institutions, the emergence of failed states, polarization, and a growing lack of consensus over common ends. Social media and the internet have facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity.
The nice thing about dystopian fiction is that it almost never comes true. That we can imagine how current trends will play themselves out in an ever more exaggerated fashion serves as a useful warning: 1984 became a potent symbol of a totalitarian future we wanted to avoid and helped inoculate us from it. We can imagine better places to be in, which take account of our societies’ increasing diversity, yet present a vision for how that diversity will still serve common ends and support rather than undermine liberal democracy.
Identity is the theme that underlies many political phenomena today, from new populist nationalist movements, to Islamist fighters, to the controversies taking place on university campuses. We will not escape from thinking about ourselves and our society in identity terms. But we need to remember that the identities dwelling deep inside us are neither fixed nor necessarily given to us by our accidents of birth. Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate. That in the end will be the remedy for the populist politics of the present.