Is the age of identity politics in the West over—or just mutating into something fiercer and more dangerous? As Trumpism rages in the US and populism gains ground in Europe, we asked three leading thinkers for their views. Sociologist Andreas Wimmer argues that disillusionment with the global liberal order is fueling a rejection of identity politics and its replacement with a new form of nationalism—inter-ethnic and driven by economic anxiety and national self-interest. Critical theorist Richard Ford, meanwhile, sees identity politics giving way to a deeper ideological divide: not black vs. white or male vs female, but tradition vs. progress and cultural nostalgia vs. progressive modernism. You can read Jean-Paul Faguet’s response here.

Andreas Wimmer

Has identity politics peaked? It may very well have

Predicting the long-term future is next to impossible. Attempts to do so are unsurprisingly and notoriously unsuccessful. Usually, people who seek to peek into the future simply extrapolate contemporary trends, assuming we will see more of what is already unfolding in the present. More complex forecasts (e.g. in economics) are often based on the idea that change is cyclical and that trends (such as economic growth) will peak and must eventually reverse (giving rise to a recession). If you accept this cyclical view of history, the tricky question becomes to predict when we will reach the peak and how high it will be. For the fun of the intellectual exercise, I will pursue this approach here and offer a prediction that identity politics has peaked, well knowing that predicting long-term developments is, strictly speaking, impossible.

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The current success of right-wing populism will lead politicians to “ride the wave” and to de-emphasize sub-national identity categories such as race and gender and to emphasize national cleavages instead

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Let’s assume that identity politics comes and goes in modern societies in generational cycles. Modern history provides some support for this assumption. The liberal, economically integrated world order (combined with illiberal colonialism in the global South) that prevailed between the 1870s and the First World War gave way to the populist nationalist (both left-wing and fascist) regimes between the First World War and the end of the Second World War. Next, a hegemonic liberal order established itself in the West (contrasted by an illiberal, Communist world in Eastern Europe and the Far East) from the 1960s to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. If the assumption of cyclicality is right, then we may already have reached or will soon reach another peak, where the trend of increasing relevance of sub-national identities—such as race or gender or ethnicity—that became part of this liberal canon will reverse.

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The reasons are straightforward. The current success of right-wing populism will lead politicians to “ride the wave” and to de-emphasize sub-national identity categories such as race and gender and to emphasize national cleavages instead, which run largely parallel to boundaries between country populations. This resurgence of nationalism may be associated with ethnic majoritarianism in some cases (such as contemporary India, or the fascist regimes of the interwar period), which leads to a heightened salience of majority-minority divides. But in other cases, perhaps including Trump’s MAGA movement, right-wing populists merely foreground national commonality without claiming primacy for any racial, ethnic, or religious group and restrict the salience, including in the legal system, of these sub-national divides.

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Ideas of national solidarity, superiority, and primacy will replace globalist ideals about a universal set of equality principles tied to identity categories.

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