Successful politicians on the right and left often use anger and resentment to build support for their campaigns. "A lot of our politics is dignity politics," argues Stanford political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, our guest in this episode. "It's one group saying, 'look, you are not taking us seriously. You disregard our rights and we demand a different kind of world.'"
We discuss whether identity politics are damaging our democracy at a time of deep polarization when many national and global institutions struggle to respond to growing challenges.
"We have shifted from arguing about economic policies to arguing about identities," Fukuyama tells us. In his book, "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and The Politics of Resentment," he warns that unless we forge a clear understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
Francis Fukuyama is probably best-known for "The End of History and the Last Man", published after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His other major works include "The Origins of Political Order" and "America at the Crossroads".
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