I hate identity politics as much as the next guy, but I think a lot of Fukuyama's takes here are pretty bad. He repeatedly paints massive groups with a large and indiscriminate brush. For instance:
"The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin."
Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants to send immigrants back, it would be illegal and unconstitutional as well as impossible. Now, restricting ILLEGAL immigration on the other hand? Yes, basically everyone on the right supports this. But not wanting illegal immigration is literally on the other side of the map from not wanting any immigration at all and sending back immigrants.
I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992, as other comments have mentioned. But I think just as important as identity politics is defining the opposing side by the worst ideas of its supporters. For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism". There are tons of people on both sides who don't believe in this crap and are dedicated to the core ideals of economic prosperity for all and expansion of opportunities. Tuning these crazies out would go a long way to calming down the discourse in this country, but I don't think essays like this really help the situation.
The key behind understanding the guy is he's always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible.
He's been playing that same song for decades. You already know what his position on everything is and how he'll argue for it. The real amazing thing is how much he's committed to it
Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points? I agree with OP that some of the points are ridiculous, but why assassinate character like this?
> > he's always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible.
> Isn't this an adhominem attack on the person's character without refuting the points?
No - why do you say that?
PP is attacking Fukuyama _based on his ideas_ - that imperialism is the natural course of events, the best for everyone, and inevitable. It is perfectly legitimate to critique someone's ideas.
That is the reverse of ad hominem. A ad hominem argument would go, "Fukuyama is wrong because he's from Harvard/Asian/etc", and of course those arguments are false.
first off who cares you can insult people sometimes it helps.
Anyway it's not "character assassination" if it's true. I don't know enough about this person's work over time but.
> always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible
That does describe some people I can think of, so it's at least possible this is a fair description of his position.
per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't have the proof, the common sense reaction would be to allocate more officers to the zone. I'll bet the officers in the street weren't thrilled.
end result : mental health funding decreased and police funding increased.
So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations
The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much larger trend going on.
The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.
> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations...
Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.
It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.
Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
> Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning,
Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."
I'd argue that this is proof that the refund the police people mean something different.
Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.
When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.
This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.
Good lord a bunch of typos in the first part of that, and now too late to edit (I think I noticed one and fixed it in the wrong place, making things worse...)
Should be
> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different.
> Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.
I think the morale of the story is, people fall for slogans and slogans always turn out shit results. Trump's MAGA, well everyone has a different definition of what it would take to "Make America Great Again." Some might even argue, like myself, that if we say that, we should really take off the "Again" part. I am pretty sure most slogans that get chanted, we could come to the same conclusion, slogans are shit. Trying to have a catch phrase that captures a large and complex idea, is a bad idea.
To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.
It is a possible interpretation. But there are a wide variety of interpretations of that slogan in a crowd of people chanting "defund the police". It isn't really possible to say that this specific interpretation is what the crowd means because in all likelihood even the crowd won't agree on any specific interpretation.
The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
I'd say that "defund" is softer than and different from "ACAB" or "abolish the police".
"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).
ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.
I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.
> For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism".
This is a false equivalence.
On the one hand, the Democratic party has unequivocally rejected “defund the police” on multiple occasions. First in the 2020 primary by electing a presidential candidate who explicitly rejected the slogan, and continues to do so as president; then by excluding it from its platform altogether; and most recently by a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote in the senate to denounce the slogan. So the record is quite clear that Democrats do not in fact stand for “defund the police” beyond a loud minority.
On the other hand, Republican senators have unanimously refused to renew the Voting Rights Act, which
until 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. The VRA is one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement and has been a bulwark in protecting Black citizens in particular from disenfranchisement in the southern states. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the VRA has lapsed, virtually all Republican-controlled states have resurrected the same sweeping restrictions on the right to vote that MLK and others marched against. Let’s not even get into the January 6 attack on the capitol which was instigated and carried out by openly white supremacist organizations and which, to this day, the Republican party refuses to denounce, probably because so many of its own leadership is directly implicated.
So, yes, the Republican party is now defined by white nationalism. This is an established fact, and you being uncomfortable with it does not make it less true.
While I disagree at some level with most of what you've written, I think the most egregious point is that nothing that you wrote is linked to the conclusion you draw.
1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws. It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
> 1) There are reasons other than white nationalism for political parties to play politics with voting laws.
I referred to a very specific piece of legislation for a reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is, to quote Wikipedia, “a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting”. It is the direct result of Martin Luther King Jr marching against Jim Crow laws in the south. Supporting it was a no-brainer Republican policy as recently as 2006 (the last time all its provisions were re-authorized).
In other words, the VRA is no ordinary law: it is the quintessential anti-Jim Crow law. When the modern Republican party took the unprecedented step of removing these protections against Jim Crow laws, they effectively made themselves the champions of Jim Crow - the champions of white nationalism.
> It is overwhelmingly likely that these changes target Democrat voters rather than minority voters.
No, it absolutely is not. Civil rights organization like the NAACP and SPLC systematically challenge these laws on the grounds that they are disguised racial discrimination - and they win. The problem is that the legal process takes too long and enforcement is easily dodged by the states. This is why the VRA was crucial: it required federal pre-approval of voting laws, and allowed proper enforcement against states that persisted in racial discrimination.
This is not only well documented legislative fact, it is actually tought in History class. It is mind-boggling to me that it is even a point of debate. The only excuse for your argument is ignorance.
> 2) If this is the best a party of white nationalists can manage - marginal changes to try and tip tight elections in their favour - then the situation seems to seem very much under control from the perspective of all the non-white non-nationalists. It is hardly a defining policy.
Large scale voter suppression is a serious matter. MLK and countless other Americans shed blood marching to secure the VRA, and now their work is undone. That is a grave threat to our democratic institutions. I am optimistic that the white nationalists will lose, but it will be a difficult and uncertain fight ahead.
But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
> But you tell me. Assuming you vote for Republicans: what do you believe they stand for beyond white nationalism? And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
I'm not American and there is even a fair chance I wouldn't vote for the Republicans if I were, I'd likely be trying to split the right wing vote for the libertarian party to force the Republicans to adopt more acceptable policies.
Political parties are large and complex beasts. If you want some aspects of the Republicans that could define them, probably the obvious one is a heavy focus on individual identity over group identity when assigning credit/blame. They also tend to adopt more aggressive policies of individual liberty, and are more oriented towards rules and order.
> And how do you reconcile your support with their efforts to undo legislation that Martin Luther King Jr fought for?
They think it is likely to hurt their chances in an election. That is why I'm telling you it isn't white nationalism; white nationalists don't get especially excited about the details around how close elections get decided. If it was white nationalism you'd be leading with policies where they wanted to expel non-white people. Which you aren't so I assume they don't have any that you think would stand up to scrutiny.
During the last administration, a leading Republican senator brought forth a bill to cut legal immigration by 50%. Many, many Republicans, or at least their elected representatives, want to restrict both legal and illegal immigration.
The most relevant aim of that bill was to introduce a "points system" following the Canadian model, to encourage skilled immigration and easier integration of immigrants within mainstream society. This can sustain far greater volumes of migration in the long-term than the current mix of legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. It's the closest thing to "open borders" that can actually work without significant social disruption. And Canada proves it, because they've made it work.
Yeah that’s a bad take, though it’s true that even for legal migration the right is generally cooler on it than the left. They wouldn’t cut it all off, but they’d probably restrict it more.
> I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992
I'm not sure why people jump on this so much - it very well could have ended if the US had better leadership & strategy... If the US had Marshal plan equivalent for the former USSR & a realist China strategy, things would have been different. But sure Huntington's book is better.
Fukuyama isn't worried about facts. Factually, Obama and now Biden have deported far more people than Trump or Bush. Obama was even known as "the deporter in chief."
Here is a quote from Fukuyama's essay about exactly that:
> Doing little to prevent millions of people from entering and staying in the country unlawfully and then engaging in sporadic and seemingly arbitrary bouts of deportation—which were a feature of Obama’s time in office—is hardly a sustainable long-term policy.
They "seek to" cut off immigration altogether, and work towards it. They "would like to" send immigrants back to their countries of origin, but know it's not going to happen. The sentence seems carefully constructed to me.
"The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin."
Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants to send immigrants back, it would be illegal and unconstitutional as well as impossible. Now, restricting ILLEGAL immigration on the other hand? Yes, basically everyone on the right supports this. But not wanting illegal immigration is literally on the other side of the map from not wanting any immigration at all and sending back immigrants.
I don't lend much credence to this guy anyway, considering that he thought history ended in 1992, as other comments have mentioned. But I think just as important as identity politics is defining the opposing side by the worst ideas of its supporters. For example, defining Democrats by "defund the police", or defining Republicans as the party of "white nationalism". There are tons of people on both sides who don't believe in this crap and are dedicated to the core ideals of economic prosperity for all and expansion of opportunities. Tuning these crazies out would go a long way to calming down the discourse in this country, but I don't think essays like this really help the situation.