Yes, the world has gotten better for hundreds of millions. But Fukuyama reminds us that across much of the West, people have suffered dislocation and elites have captured the fruits ... Unlike many avuncular critics of identity politics, Fukuyama is sympathetic to the good such politics does—above all, making the privileged aware of their effect on marginalized groups ... Fukuyama does have his criticisms, however ... Fukuyama worries that the 'woke' the left gets on identity issues, the weaker it gets on offering a critique of capitalism ... A low-key shortcoming of Fukuyama’s book is that...it is a book about books about books. On the one hand, theorists gotta theorize. On the other, with an issue so fraught and a world so full of rage, [the] author could have made good use of a rental car and the Voice Memos app ... [the book] lack[ed] the earth and funk and complexity of dreaming, hurting human beings.

The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the 'master concept' that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order ... Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it? Not well ... A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption...that Western thought is universal thought ... He also thinks that people on the left have become obsessed with cultural and identitarian politics, and have abandoned social policy. But he has surprisingly few policy suggestions himself. He has no interest in the solution that liberals typically adopt to accommodate diversity: pluralism and multiculturalism ... It’s unfortunate that Fukuyama has hung his authorial hat on meta-historical claims.

Identity is Fukuyama’s attempt to grant noneconomic politics a history and a future. Yet, in doing so, he falls prey to the same error that he charges identity politics with committing. His origin tale, based in thymos, for what he views as noneconomic politics leads him to continually misconstrue the element of economics, which is as crucial to thymotic 'struggles for recognition' as thymos itself is crucial to human nature ... In fact there is no example cited by Identity as a potent manifestation of identity politics that is not strongly linked to economics—even the activists mobilizing around injured dignity at elite universities can be properly seen as trying to get their money’s worth ... It is a testament to Fukuyama’s intelligence and the depth of his commitment to democracy that, despite beginning from the incoherent, crumbling premises of centrist punditry, the political program that emerges from his recent publications can only be described as a concerted push for socioeconomic justice.

Fukuyama’s analysis is flawed in several ways. Three decades ago, he argued that the human desire for respect and recognition was the driving force behind the universal embrace of liberal democracy. Today, he depicts the human desire for respect and recognition as the driving force behind the repudiation of liberal democracy. The reader’s hope for some account, or even mention, of this extraordinary volte face goes unfulfilled. Nor does Fukuyama squarely address the impossibility of explaining recent ups and downs in the prestige of liberal democracy by invoking an eternal longing of the human soul. What’s more, he fails to consider the possibility that after 1989 the obligation for ex-Communist countries to imitate the West, which was how his End-of-History thesis was put into practice, might itself have been experienced in countries like Hungary and Poland as a source of humiliation and subordination destined to excite antiliberal resentment and an aggressive reassertion of nationalism. Similarly, to blame the rise of white nationalism in America chiefly on the left’s profligate attentiveness to marginalized groups is to deemphasize the multiplicity of factors involved ... Finally, Fukuyama’s occasional suggestion that white nationalism reflects a rational concern that new immigrants will not successfully assimilate can also be questioned. Could not extreme nationalists be more afraid that newcomers will successfully assimilate? After all, the implication of successful assimilation is that the identity of natives is something wholly superficial and not really an indelible inheritance that connects them profoundly to their dead forefathers.

Mr. Fukuyama’s attempt to explain the theoretical basis of dignity is a bit of a mess ... Readers may wonder if the connections between Luther and Rousseau go any deeper than the simple notion of introspection, how Rousseau’s ideas jumped all the way to Burma and Iran, and how it was that the American civil-rights movement was inspired by the ideals of the French rather than the American Revolution. Mr. Fukuyama’s breezy account doesn’t stop long enough to ask these sorts of questions ... He does make a persuasive case that modern identity politics arose out of post-Freudian therapeutic worldviews of midcentury America ... Mr. Fukuyama displays an unaccountable need to sound as if he’s above ideology and faulting both sides for their excesses. That’s a tough sell on the topic of identity politics, which is overwhelmingly a creation of the left ... More interesting is his proposal of a mandatory-service program to require the young to work for common national goals. That may still fail to bring us together, but historically the only thing certain to accomplish the aim of national unity is large-scale war against an aggressor—and nobody wants that.

While there is much that is commendable in Fukuyama’s analysis, not every particular is persuasive ... Ultimately, Identity is an important contribution to the conversation on this timely and important topic. Progressives and conservatives alike would benefit from wrestling with Fukuyama’s perspectives as they think about how best to organize the norms and values of our political discussions and, more broadly, our common life.

Fukuyama’s new pessimism is far deeper than his discarded optimism. The left-right dichotomy that formerly polarized liberal democracy dealt with the question of the proper size of government; compromise, at least in theory, was always possible. Today, he argues, we are dealing with problems of recognition and resentment, and they are more difficult to resolve. As Fukuyama pithily puts it: either you recognize me, or you don’t.' On this key point, I believe, Fukuyama is incorrect ... Almost nothing in Fukuyama’s book is new ... Identity summarizes arguments that already seem dated. It is, moreover, primarily concerned with the recent past, and when it ventures to make a prediction, it simply carries current trends into the future. What, moreover, are we to do with the political conflicts raised by identity politics? Here too Fukuyama’s analysis is disappointing ... Simply being wrong, however, is not Identity’s major problem ... Identity...both begins and ends with a whimper. Nothing is startling and little is gained ... I am willing to bet that in five years, Fukuyama’s Identity will be all but forgotten.

There is a certain banality in this analysis, which recurs throughout the book ... The book’s 14 chapters consist of potted intellectual history interspersed with thumbnail sketches of recent political events ... Though there is nothing novel in this story it contains some useful insights. Fukuyama is perceptive on the rise of national identities ... Where Fukuyama falls down is in having no credible account of the rise of identity politics ... At this point an inconvenient question suggests itself. What if plural identities survive and thrive best not in modern nation states but in some of the antique institutions that preceded them? How curious if a cosmopolitan civilization...should turn out to be in the past.

Leading political theorist Fukuyama...suggests that liberal democracy is in global crisis because of knotty, interrelated problems having to do with thymos, the human desire for dignity and respect ... The solution, suggests Fukuyama, is not rejection of identity politics, but rather a reinvigorated 'creedal' identity—in which national identity is tied to shared values as opposed to race, ethnicity, or religion—so that thymos is channeled into constructive ends, like civic engagement. Keenly thought-provoking and timely.

He faults the left for failing to build solidarity around large collectivities (the working class, for example), instead focusing on 'every smaller' marginalized group. To counter this fragmentation, Fukuyama advises that 'successful assimilation of foreigners' might curb vociferous populism, required national service could encourage 'virtue and public spiritedness,' and basic civics must become a strong part of public education to foster informed, open-minded citizens. A cogent analysis of dire threats to democracy.

Political scientist Fukuyama...makes an ambitious and provocative critique of identity politics ... He draws from philosophers such as Hegel and Marx; traces the ascendancy of modern liberal democracies, specifically the French Revolution; and turns a critical lens on the Arab Spring, Europe’s immigrant crisis, and Donald Trump ... his erudite work is likely to spark debate.