4 February 2019 — 0318 mst
Stacy Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, and identity politics
Stacy Abrams, who lost Georgia’s gubernatorial election last year, will deliver the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s state of the union address tomorrow night. Some Democrats see her as a candidate who could beat Republican Sen. David Perdue, who is up for re-election in 2020. That may be why she’s getting the response gig.
Perhaps she’ll do well, but most SOTU responses fall flat. The last effective Democratic response was delivered in 2007 by Jim Webb, who had just been elected to the Senate from Virginia. A well regarded novelist and writer, he reportedly tore up the string of cliches speech the Democratic National Committee drafted for him and instead wrote his own remarks.
The choice of Abrams is a backhanded endorsement of identity politics, the divisive politics that Abrams endorses, advocates, and practices. Writing in Foreign Affairs recently, responding to an essay on idenity politics by Francis Fukuyama, she leaves no doubt regarding her position on the practice. It will be interesting to see how much of her manifesto in Foreign Affairs turns up in her SOTU response.
Here’s what Fukuyama wrote that Abrams found offensive:
Liberal democracy cannot exist without a national identity that defines what citizens hold in common with one another. Given the de facto multiculturalism of contemporary democracies, that identity needs to be civic or creedal. That is, it needs to be based on liberal political ideas that are accessible to people of different cultural backgrounds rather than on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or religion. I thought that the United States had arrived at such a creedal identity in the wake of the civil rights movement, but that accomplishment is now being threatened by right-wing identitarians, led by Trump, who would like to drag Americans backward to identities based on ethnicity and religion.
Fukuyama’s analysis is compelling. The whole of the Democratic Party has become less than the sum of its identity caucuses. Although identitarians speak a language of inclusion, they exclude by default those not identified as worthy of inclusion. Or worse, like Hillary Clinton, they decry the alleged shortcomings of so-called deplorables, such as the white working class voters that once were the core of the Democratic Party. In her response to President Trump, will Abrams gather her party’s disparate identity groups under the unifying tent of a transcendent identity, the American, or to use Fukuyama’s term, creedal, identity, or will she present herself, and her party, as the advocate for the divisive identity politics now tearing apart the Democratic Party?