Ivan Krastev:
“To a certain extent, the Western democracies were quite blind to what extent their existence, their political and social system, was very much preconditioned on the Cold War and the existence of the Soviet Union.
When you have Soviet on the other side claiming that they represent the proletariat, you should very carefully think how your workers are perceiving what is going on.
It’s so important for you, your workers to be on your side. So the welfare state was not simply an economic project. The welfare state was a security project. (…)
The idea that the Russian oligarchs can prevent the war simply because they want to keep their bank accounts shows the fact that we totally eliminated the non-economic motivations of states, of politicians, but also basically of human nature.
So as a result of it, we reduce human nature to the economic activities.
And by the way, we reduced economics to the G.D.P. and to the standard of living, while in front of our eyes, we’re seeing that people were motivated by totally different things.
Most of the big protests that we have seen in the last decade in the world cannot be simply explained in economic terms.
We like to talk dignity, but dignity cannot be explained simply by economic factors. It’s something different.
And here, to be honest, Fukuyama was more interesting than some of his critics because, following Hegel, he really made a strong point that recognition and struggle for recognition is critical to understand what is happening to the world. (…)
So this is where the problem with dissatisfaction goes, because dissatisfaction assumes a meaningful change, a change that you can achieve.
If you don’t believe that you can achieve this change, your goal is this kind of hysterical reactions in one direction or the other, where everything is about expressing how you feel.
And this is what I find kind of dramatically changing, and also this is slightly generational.
Talking about the first round of the French elections — if people older than 65 were not allowed to vote on the French elections, President Macron was not going to reach the second round.
The second round is going to be between the candidate of the far Right and the far Left.
And this type of a centrist politics, which is very much based on compromise, on achieving, on governing, is very much, in my view, replaced by politics of self-expression, where, for me, the most important is how I feel, because this is the only thing that I really believe I can do to express how I feel.
I don’t believe any more in a collective project that can be realized.
And from this point of view, this is the biggest story of identity politics that is going.
And this is also very much in the way we got wrong what Putin will do, because people believe that he’s going to be very much guided by economic considerations.
This is true also in our societies about how people vote.”
Ezra Klein:
“This is a big theme of my book, “Why We’re Polarize.”
If you want to try to predict the way people vote, people always want to go to material incentives.
They always want to go to who’s going to give them the most money. Pundits do.
And that does not describe it. That does not describe the way people vote.
They vote based on who they are and who they want to be seen as in the world. And they vote based on who they think is going to raise up people like them.
And we’ve tested this 100 different ways in many, many countries, and it is always true. Identity trumps policy.”
Ivan Krastev:
“But this is true also on the level of the states, because basically what you see in Ukraine is identity trumps interests, economic interests.
Listen, Russia is going to be economically devastated, regardless of how the war is going to end up.
But basically, the idea to keep your status of a great power, of an imperial nation — the fear of being irrelevant in global politics is the one not simply that is moving what the government is doing.
In my view, it also explains why people are ready to support policy that is going to hurt them.
So from this point of view, we have a global spread of identity politics.”
Source: The Ezra Klein Show: Putin May Not Like How He’s Changed Europe
