Identity

8 THE WRONG ADDRESS

One of the striking characteristics of global politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that the dynamic new forces shaping it are nationalist or religious parties and politicians, the two faces of identity politics, rather than the class-based left-wing parties that were so prominent in the politics of the twentieth century.

Nationalism may have been sparked initially by industrialization and modernization, but it has in no way disappeared from the world, including in those countries that have been industrially developed for generations. A host of new populist nationalist leaders claiming democratic legitimacy via elections have emphasized national sovereignty and national traditions in the interest of “the people.” These leaders include Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Hungary’s Orbán, Poland’s Kaczynski, and finally Donald J. Trump in the United States, whose campaign slogans were Make America Great Again and America First. The Brexit movement in the United Kingdom has not had a clear leader, yet here too the basic impulse was a reassertion of national sovereignty. Populist parties are waiting in the wings in France, the Netherlands, and all over Scandinavia. Nationalist rhetoric has not been limited to these leaders, however; Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and Shinzo Abe of Japan have both been identified with nationalist causes, as has Xi Jinping of China, who has emphasized a socialism with distinctively Chinese characteristics.

At the same time, religion has been on the upswing as a political phenomenon. This is most obviously true in the Arab Middle East, where the 2011 Arab Spring was derailed by Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State. While the latter has been nearly defeated militarily in Syria and Iraq, Islamist movements continue to spread in countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Philippines. In Indonesia, the popular Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok), was attacked for alleged blasphemy by increasingly self-confident Islamist groups and eventually jailed after narrowly losing his reelection bid. Islam is not the only form of politicized religion, however. Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is explicitly based on a Hindu understanding of Indian national identity. A militant form of political Buddhism has been spreading in South and Southeast Asian countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar, where it has clashed with Muslim and Hindu groups. And religious groups form part of the conservative coalition in democracies such as Japan, Poland, and the United States. In Israel, a political order that had been dominated for more than a generation after independence by two European-style ideological parties, Labor and Likud, has seen an ever greater proportion of votes going to religious parties such as Shas or Agudath Israel.

The old class-based left has, by contrast, been in long-term decline around the globe. Communism collapsed in 1989–91, though versions of it hang on in North Korea and Cuba. Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat. The German Social Democrats, who received over 40 percent of the vote in 1998, fell to just over 20 percent by 2016, while the French Socialist Party all but disappeared in 2017. Overall, center-left parties declined from 30 to 24 percent of the vote between 1993 and 2017 in Northern Europe, 36 to 21 percent in Southern Europe, and 25 to 18 percent in Central Europe. They are still major players, but a trend is clear.^{1}

Left-wing parties throughout Europe shifted to the center in the 1990s, accepting the logic of the market economy, and many became hard to distinguish from their coalition partners on the center-right. There were always Communist and other leftist groups in the Middle East during the Cold War; a self-styled Communist regime even came to power in South Yemen. Since then, however, they have been totally marginalized and left behind by Islamist parties. Left-wing populism made a strong showing primarily in parts of Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and the Kirchners in Argentina. But this wave has already retreated, with the self-immolation of Venezuela under Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. The strong showings of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States may be harbingers of a recovery, but parties of the left are nowhere the dominant forces they were through the late twentieth century.

The global weakness of the left is in many ways a surprising outcome, given the rise of global inequality over the past three decades. By global inequality, I am referring to the rise of inequality within individual countries, rather than between countries. The gap between rich and poor countries has closed as high levels of growth have occurred not just in East Asia but in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, within-country inequality around the world has seen a large increase since 1980; contrary to the long-accepted theory of the economist Simon Kuznets, rich-country incomes have been diverging rather than converging.^{2} Hardly a single region of the world has not seen the rise of a new class of oligarchs—billionaires who use their wealth politically to protect their family interests.^{3}

The economist Branko Milanovic has devised a widely cited “elephant graph,” which shows the relative gains in per capita income for different segments of the global income distribution. The world grew much richer through productivity gains and globalization from 1988 to 2008, but these gains were not equally distributed. Those in the twentieth to the seventieth percentiles had substantial increases in income, with even larger ones for those in the ninety-fifth percentile. But the part of the global population around the eightieth percentile experienced either stagnation or else marginal gains. This group largely corresponds to the working class in developed countries—that is, people with a high school education or less. While they remain much better off than those below them, they have lost significant ground to people in the top 10 percent of the distribution. Their relative status, in other words, fell sharply.

Within the developed world, inequality has been the most pronounced in Britain and the United States, the two countries that led the “neoliberal,” pro–free market revolution of the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In the United States, the strong economic growth of the 1980s and ’90s was not evenly distributed, but went overwhelmingly to those with good educations. The old American working class, which thought of itself as the core of the middle class, steadily lost ground. According to a study by the International Monetary Fund, in a hollowing out of the middle class, individuals earning from 50 to 150 percent of median income fell from 58 to 47 percent of the population from 2000 to 2014. Only one-quarter of 1 percent did this by moving up into higher income brackets; an astonishing 3.25 percent moved down the income ladder.^{5} This inequality was intensified by the financial crisis of 2008, in which the machinations and policy choices of the financial sector created an asset bubble whose bursting destroyed jobs and savings for millions of ordinary Americans, as well as countless others around the world.

Under these circumstances, one would expect to see a huge revival of a populist left in those countries experiencing the highest levels of inequality. Since the French Revolution, the left has defined itself as the party of economic equality, willing to use state power to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. Yet the aftermath of the global financial crisis has seen something of the opposite, a rise of right-wing populist nationalist forces across many parts of the developed world. This was nowhere more true than in the United States and Britain, where deindustrialization had ravaged the old working class. In the former, the financial crisis spawned the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement and the right-wing Tea Party. The former marched and demonstrated, then fizzled out, while the latter succeeded in taking over both the Republican Party and much of Congress. In 2016, voters failed to endorse the most left-wing populist candidates, choosing nationalist politicians instead.

How do we explain the failure of the left to capitalize on rising global inequality, and the rise of the nationalist right in its place? This is not a new phenomenon: parties of the left have been losing out to nationalists for well over a hundred years, precisely among those poor or working-class constituencies that should have been their most solid base of support. The European working class lined up not under the banner of the Socialist International in 1914, but with their national governments as World War I began. This failure has befuddled Marxists for years; in the words of Ernest Gellner, they told themselves that

Similarly, in the contemporary Middle East, a letter addressed to classes has been delivered instead to religions.

This postal delivery error occurred because of the way in which economic motivations are intertwined with identity issues in human behavior. To be poor is to be invisible to your fellow human beings, and the indignity of invisibility is often worse than the lack of resources.