Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha
Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory and governing boards of several international organizations, including the European Investment Bank, the International Crisis Group, and GLOBSEC.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss what the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States reveals about America’s crisis of self-confidence, whether America and Europe are converging rather than diverging, and how competition with China will reshape American identity in the decades ahead.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Well, it’s a real pleasure to speak to you every time, Ivan, and today I thought we’d do something slightly unusual, which is that whatever I am, I’m a U.S. citizen at least, but a born European and a Bulgarian citizen are going to do the July 4th episode, the special July 4th episode for the 250th anniversary of the United States. But you’re such a thoughtful thinker about every part of the world, and you obviously know the United States well, that I think it is not asking you too much to play a kind of latter day Alexis de Tocqueville. On this 250th anniversary of the United States, what strikes you most about the state of the country?
Ivan Krastev: We Europeans believe that we know the United States. At the end of the day, we don’t. We understand it immediately when you get out of some of the big cities to which we normally go. But when I look at the United States today, I had the feeling that the country is really trying to reinvent itself and to refound itself, and to decide basically who they are. Now when I’m looking back, my view is that there was a different United States, and it can be seen much easier from outside than from inside. There was an America that came and basically was very much being born of the place which it left, and this was Europe, and this was America as a new world, and is basically all the time comparing itself with Europe and struggling against this European legacy. But this America was very much populated by Europeans, people coming from Europe, immigrants from these countries, being satisfied from the place from which they go. And there was another America, and this was very much the America of the Cold War, where it was not about Europe anymore, where America was mirroring itself with the Soviet Union. It was a much more different ideological America. America as leader of the free world, which it was competing with the Soviets to whom the future belongs.
My feeling is that we are now going to a kind of a third America. America is much more trying to make sense of itself looking at China, trying to understand who we are. From this point of view, what President Trump is doing, for me, paradoxically, is really kind of trying to change American identity on several dimensions. One is that he is dreaming, probably he will not do it, but he’s dreaming to change the territory of the United States. I take it much more seriously, his talk about Greenland or Canada or even Venezuela becoming part of the United States, because he had the feeling that in order to refound and to reinvent the country, first of all, you should change its territory. Secondly, of course, he’s trying to reinvent America very differently from the America of the Cold War that he has inherited, and he does not see America anymore as the champion of liberal causes in the world. He’s seeing a totally different America. But thirdly, and for me this is most striking, unlike any previous Americas, I’m not sure to what extent the American president is self-confident about the America that he sees. So this is what I found particularly interesting. I’m not sure while he talks about America being great again, that he really believes in the greatness of America.
Mounk: So it’s perhaps a sign of his lack of self-confidence, right? It’s often the case psychologically that teenagers who are particularly insecure are also the ones who try to bully their classmates in order to get the external proof that in fact they are somebody and they’re worth something, and they’ve proven their status in this very straightforward and brutal way. We’ve talked enough about the psychology of Donald Trump over the last years, but do you think that at this point this is true of the psychology of the United States more broadly? Is there a kind of quarter millennium crisis of self-confidence that the country suffers from?
Krastev: You had the period around the Civil War, and of course you had the 1970s, which was a very tough period in which America was questioning itself very much. But this idea of America that should reinvent itself, it didn’t start with Trump. Honestly speaking, from a very different ideological perspective, even if you look at the 1619 Project, you’re going to see that suddenly America decided to tell a new story about itself. The idea was that all these cliches that we outside of America have always been thinking about America were not true anymore. But this America, regardless of whether it is the America that wants to face basically slavery and all the other bad things that it has done, or this America that Trump is talking about, is an America which, in my view, has lost this self-confidence of a kind of exceptionalism that does not come simply from the fact that America is powerful, but from the fact that America has a special purpose. Because this was true for all these previous Americas. The America that was running away from Europe in order to create a new world was very much believing in its exceptional nature, and the Cold War America was very much believing in its exceptional nature. In my view, this America which we see now, the America that is facing China, the America that is “America first,” I’m not sure anymore that it is very much believing in its exceptional nature.
Many of the things that we think about America also start to look different. For example, normally for us, for Europeans, America was an immigrant nation. This was a place where people go and basically become Americans. Now, if you look at the statistics, you’re going to be surprised to learn that Austrian citizens not born in Austria, as a percent of the population, is a higher percent than American citizens not born in the United States. So in a certain way, you have the feeling that countries and identities are changing places.
From this point of view, President Trump is interesting not simply because of his insecurity, but because he has, in my view, a very special idea of historical time. If you go closer, you’re going to see that he’s not very much interested in those who have been before him, and also I don’t believe that he’s very much interested in who’s going to come after him. He does not think in terms of legacy. If you think in terms of legacy, you want somebody else to build your Arc de Triomphe. No, in my view, he basically managed to reduce time to his individual lifetime. So the world starts with the moment he was born, and in a certain way ends for him politically with the moment when he’s not going to be president anymore. For me, this kind of collapse of time is something that probably partially explains this lack of self-confidence. Because now when America looks at China, first they see a country which is much bigger than any type of challenger or adversary that America has been seeing before. But secondly, it’s a country that is economically producing, having scale. You have the feeling that now America is envying China in the way that Soviets had been envying America in the last decades of the Cold War.
Mounk: I want to get back to China in a few moments, but to start with America’s relationship to Europe, which is obviously fundamental to the country’s identity, certainly when you think about the period of the founding. There’s an argument at the moment, which I think is widely believed in Europe without people having thought about it very much, that Europe and the United States are diverging, that they’re becoming much more dissimilar from each other. When you just compare Donald Trump as the president of the United States to Emmanuel Macron as the president of France, and Friedrich Merz as the chancellor of Germany, it is fair to say that the differences between them are much bigger than the differences between Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, for they certainly had very different biographies, right?
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But I think in other ways, you’re implying an argument that’s quite interesting, on which America and Europe are actually becoming more similar. Part of this is that Europe is Americanizing, and certainly the fact that European societies are now societies of immigrants, have very quickly speed run become extremely diverse societies, but not necessarily with the historical knowledge about how to actually succeed in integrating newcomers and making them feel like Americans historically have managed to, that they truly are just part of the American experiment, for example, does make those countries somewhat more similar to the United States.
Conversely, of course, one way to think about Trump and the broader transformation of the American right over the last 10 or 15 years is that it has Europeanized. The American right has historically been quite striking, at least since the kind of fusionist right from the 1960s, by being a right that accepts the idea of liberal democracy, which was part of the founding creed of the country. Whereas certainly the hard right in Europe was always tempted by fascism, by anti-democratic currents, by a rejection of the idea of liberalism, certainly. So perhaps Europe is Americanizing and America is Europeanizing, and in some ways the two continents are now more similar than they were 50 or 200 years ago.
Krastev: I first of all agree, because I really believe that Europe has been Americanized, and the paradox of Trump’s position is that he starts to dislike Europe exactly because Europe starts to look like America. Paradoxically, for all these years, Americans were kind of telling Europeans, “You do not have this diversity thing that we have. You’re very much closed in your own nationalistic dreams.” And now, when this much more diverse Europe has arrived, basically, at least President Trump was shocked and discovered how much he dislikes it.
But also, in a strange way, I do believe you are right, because on one level, the American left, in economic terms, is more and more fascinated by the European social model. You remember Bernie Sanders dreaming about America becoming like Denmark. Not that many Americans know exactly where Denmark is. On the other side, of course, now the European right is fascinated with Trump. Even some of the leaders who are going to distance themselves as political leaders from Trump, they basically see him as somebody who speaks to their fears and basically speaks to their hopes.
On the other side, what has changed, in my view, is that people of European origin are now a minority in the United States. This type of connection that existed on the level of the individual, of the family, if you go to the American universities, you’re going to see that European studies or European departments are kind of a disappearing species. At the same time, when you look at how the American right and, to a certain extent, even the American left look, they remind me very much of what I see in Latin America. This is why I’m not surprised that President Trump and his agenda are very successful in Latin America, in a way that Trump-supported candidates are winning in Latin America the way they are winning in the red states in the United States. In great respect, this is a right which is less related to this kind of libertarian ethos that was much more typical for the American right. It is less kind of, at the same time, having these very strong liberal credentials, which was typical for the Republican Party. You have something much more difficult, and the American left is also much more about identity politics, different minority groups, and a coalition in a certain way of minorities, which was not the case for the American left before.
So we’re coming together in a certain way, and going apart. But the major story is that both Europe and America, in my view, go through this identity crisis. We were not what we used to be before, and we don’t know exactly how to define ourselves even in the relations between ourselves. Because in my view, one thing that has happened, and I could be very wrong on this, is that we see the end of the long 20th century. In the 20th century, America was defined by, as you said, “it never happened here.” Neither communism nor fascism. This was part of American exceptionalism, and there were many explanations for this. One of them also had a lot to do with the problem of race and kind of very much racially based politics, which prevented any type of worker solidarity, which was so important for the early socialist movements and others.
But on the other hand, “it never happened here,” even Americans don’t believe it anymore. Suddenly, I do believe we’re living in a moment in which Americans believe both that their country can go fascist, and this is what half of Americans believe, and also the other half believes that America can go socialist or even communist. Nevertheless, both are not very clear about the meaning of these words anymore.
Mounk: So earlier you were saying that the second phase of American identity was really defined by the competition with the Soviet Union. Perhaps that helped that period of American history revolve in a very explicit way around the American creed, because of course the United States and Soviet Union had one key similarity, which is that they were both universalist political projects, that they both thought the world would be better off if everybody was ruled like they are. I wonder what that tells us about how this third phase, which is significantly going to be defined by competition with China, is going to transform and transmute American identity.
China obviously has roots in very much the same political system that drove the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was informed by Marxism-Leninism for a long time, but has since become a quite notably different thing. One of the things that it does seem to lack historically, though perhaps the stronger it gets, the more that will come to the fore, is that universalist ambition. China, for now, claims that the party has figured out the right way to rule the country. It certainly is somewhat friendly with a few of the regimes that have similar post-Marxist-Leninist political parties in charge. But broadly speaking, it is perfectly happy to make alliances with anybody who is on its side in the broader geopolitical competition with the United States. So what element of American identity is going to be pushed to the fore over the next decades, at least as defined by this competition with China?
Krastev: Great question, because if you look at the end of the Cold War, more and more we’re trying to see how exceptional this period was. You have two superpowers, both of them very much ideological states. They were standing for a certain type of political idea and political philosophy, and both of them were very much obsessed with the idea of the future, of how the future was going to look. They were universalist, exactly what you are saying. All of them believed that the whole world was going to look either like them or like their enemy. There is this character in Updike’s novel who said, “What is the point of being an American if there is no Cold War?” So in a certain way, the Cold War created a very strong identity for the United States, but this identity, America as the free world, was very much connected in opposition to the Soviet Union. For example, the Soviet Union had censorship and tried basically to repress freedom of expression. As a result, the United States decided to make out of freedom of expression, and for example jazz or abstract art, symbols of itself. We can question to what extent a quite culturally conservative America would have made jazz or abstract painting the symbol of its culture if it was not for the Soviet Union. In a certain way, America was doing many things because Americans knew that in the eyes of many other parts of the world, they were compared all the time with the Soviets. This is why all this focus on freedoms, individual freedoms, but also collective freedoms, was so important.
Also, before going to China, for me it’s important that the fact that both the Soviet Union and the United States, I mean their elites, were sure that the future was on their side, explains also why the Cold War did not become hot. Because if you believe that the future is on your side, if we’re going to clash, better to clash tomorrow, because tomorrow I’m going to be in a stronger position. If you’re reading Marxism, you’re going to see that capitalism is going to collapse out of its contradictions. But if you’re going to read George Kennan, you know that containment simply said we should outweigh them. Communism is going to collapse out of its contradictions. So there was this possibility that this fight did not need to become a military clash immediately. It was not simply the nuclear weapon, it was this strong belief that the future belongs to us that made it possible for both sides not to have this clash.
The story with China is, and I believe this is really interesting, the Chinese obviously try to increase their global influence. We can say that they want to dominate the world, but they’re not interested, like the Soviets, in exporting their own model, probably because they believe that their model is too good and others cannot adopt it. But also what is very important is they’re competing with the United States on the field which Americans always believe they’re strongest at, and this is economy. Suddenly, basically, the Chinese are doing fine, particularly when it comes to industrial production. They’re producing much more than America is producing these days, and this puts America in a very difficult position, because not simply the free market, but industrial economic power was so important for America, by the way, so important for America during the Cold War. Now this is the moment in which the United States is not anymore, in my view, convinced of its own economic power.
While there is a lot of talk about innovation, and rightly so, fascination with what Silicon Valley is doing, you can see some statistics, and you’re also going to see the story of this clash. For example, the famous book about America and China describes a clash between a society run by lawyers and a society run by engineers. You can see that suddenly many people in America start to fear that if we’re in a new Cold War, America starts to look like the Soviet Union when it comes to economic development. In my view, this is very new. Americans were always very optimistic about themselves. They were very optimistic about the direction in which the world was going, and this was lost. Paradoxically, Trump, who talks about “America first” and “we’re going to be great again,” became the symbol of this kind of crisis of self-confidence. Because while he talks so much about “America first,” you can see the extent to which he, in a way, envies China. He envies the absolute power of the Chinese leader. He envies the industrialization of China. So the idea of reindustrialization is to make America look more like China than it is looking now. So in my view, this is the new moment, and this is why the competition with China, like the competition with the Soviet Union, really became a question for American self-confidence.
Mounk: One of the things that I sometimes say as a quip, but I think really does say something about the current situation in China, is that the country works reasonably well in practice, but is a mess in theory. What I mean by that is that there were historically many political regime types that didn’t necessarily work very well in practice, but certainly were much less good than the Chinese system at delivering wealth and affluence for its people and so on, but in which it was quite clear what the system was, and you could go and impose that system on another country if you were able to influence it. In China, the country is based on a very long tradition of a meritocratic civil service, selected through public examinations. It has such deep state capacity because it is a country that in very complicated permutations and variations has existed for many thousands of years. But if you tried to actually take the model and impose it on Nigeria or on Zimbabwe, it’s just really unclear what that would actually mean and entail. I think this creates a weird situation where at some theoretical level, the aspirations of a Communist Party are always universalist. But in practice, I don’t think that people in Beijing are particularly interested in universalizing the rule, because they recognize something about the fact that the system is not easily exportable.
But I actually want to take the conversation in a different direction, which is that the deepest reasons for the crisis of confidence in the United States, I think, are not the competition with China or anything like that. It’s a kind of crisis of conviction about America’s own self-perception. You said earlier that there were historically three kinds of ways that Americans thought about themselves. The first we might associate with its most impressive contemporary articulator, Barack Obama: a nation that was flawed from its inception because of slavery and other injustices, but in which nothing that’s wrong about the country might not be fixed, and what is right about the country, the guiding ideals of its founding, is what allowed us to overcome many, though not all, of these injustices, and that should spur us on to do even better in the future.
Then there is a kind of right-wing rejection of that idea, which says, no, this was never a universalist nation. It was a nation of white Anglo-Saxons, and it was a nation of Christians, and if we lose that part of our nature, then what is special about the United States is going to be lost. And then, of course, there’s the left’s rejection of this narrative, which is to say that the country was not defined by 1776, the holiday we’re celebrating today. It was defined by 1619. It was defined not by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It was defined by the first day that slaves arrived on American shores. Are you an Obamaist in this juxtaposition, or do you think that way of contrasting the three different options is somehow too simple, or do you embrace one or the other two?
Krastev: I do believe that you are right, but all three in a certain way are talking about different types of exceptionalism. One is America being exceptionally bad, and by the way, this was always part of Americans’ discourse about America. Being critical about America was one of the important things in how American democracy was functioning, and you can see it very much on the left. And you also have the exceptionalism of America as a country with a purpose, as a city on the hill, and it can have all these different types of incarnation. What was interesting about Obama’s view is that in a certain way, he believes that America is exceptional but also very normal. He tries to integrate it into a world which is not so America-centered. It was not simply about American power, but in a certain way he believes, probably rightly, that we’re going to see much more divergence, that all the different nations are going to try to find their own way.
I’m saying this because going back to what you said about China, in my view, in a certain way, it rhymes with what we are talking about now. In the 1970s, the Chinese were exporting ideology more than the Soviets. Mao and Maoism was so powerful in the Third World because basically his idea of peasants being the major driving force of the revolution was fitting much more easily to the reality of Third World countries outside of the West, than the communist idea of the working class, the classical Marxism. And then it failed, and I do believe that this was the moment in which suddenly the Chinese decided that dominating the world and exporting your model are not necessarily the same thing.
Here is the point which for me is critical: America and China know the world in two different ways. America was the melting pot. America knows the world to the extent that for over 250 years, people from all over the world were coming to the United States, and they were becoming Americans. The melting pot was about this: you know the world because you know how to transform others. America was always perceiving itself not simply as an exceptional, but as a transformative power. China was not thinking in terms of a melting pot, but in terms of the Chinatown. Chinese go to the world, and they are not trying to transform the places that they go, but they try to keep their identity and also try economically to benefit and to dominate the place where they are. Chinatowns also are not trying to spread, but they are trying, of course, to prosper and to become much more powerful, particularly in economic terms.
Now, when this is happening, I have the feeling that the Chinese are happy with the power, and of course their regime can collapse like any political regime. But then the Americans are saying, if we don’t have this special purpose, if, like President Trump, who believes that America is the victim of the fact that it tried to be exceptional and particularly exceptional in its liberalism, then comes the story of what it means to be an American. You’re right about Obama, but one of the interesting things that happened after the end of the Cold War, and this is when the idea of the future became problematic in the American story, was that suddenly, at the end of history, you have the feeling that the future has arrived and America was the future. Everybody started trying to copy the United States in one way or another: to speak American, to play golf, to read the Founding Fathers. The moment when you have been the future for others, you in a certain way lose the perspective of the future for yourself and start asking yourself tough questions.
If you’re, for example, going to read Huntington’s Who Are We?, one of the interesting stories, and his particular resentment towards many of the new migrants coming from Mexico and other places, was that before, coming to America was a one-way ticket. You go across the ocean and you cannot go back. You either become American or you’re doomed. Now it was so easy to cross the borders in all directions, so suddenly this decision to come to America is not a decision anymore to become American forever. I do believe that this is the paradox. In the age of migration, suddenly the particularity of America as a migrant nation was put into question.
Mounk: That is very interesting, and it does go to the challenge that the right perhaps has always historically had with the American story, and that has come to the fore with Donald Trump: whether America is defined by its values, by the ideas in the Constitution, or whether it has actually historically only worked because it was in some ways a cultural and religious product. It’s a question that in America is posed as whether or not the United States is a Christian nation, just as Narendra Modi is trying to relitigate in India the question of whether or not India is a Hindu nation. Of course, these religions in both of these contexts go beyond faith. I mean, they are markers for an ethno-religious identity that is setting itself up against another, against the significant Muslim minority in India, and against a kind of broader set of people who are coming to the country in the United States.
Now, of course, part of what that story gets slightly wrong is who it is who’s actually challenging the Americanness of a country and some of the ideas and values that we could take for granted. I’m a great admirer of Samuel Huntington. I think he’s made astonishing contributions to political science, from Soldier and the State to Clash of Civilizations, even though I’ve often disagreed with him. I think the one book that it’s hard to take seriously is exactly the one that you’ve criticized, Who Are We?, because I think the idea that Latinos are somehow undermining the true nature of America was probably silly at the time and seems much more silly today. That’s because I think most Latinos who’ve been in the United States for a little while are quite clearly very American. In an ironic turn, it is often the liberal arts, college-educated scions of the Mayflower that seem to be rejecting many aspects of what America is.
I would guess that most Latino families in the United States are enjoying some form of celebration or barbecue about July 4th today, and even if many of them have all kinds of misgivings about the current state of our country, I think most of them are actually quite patriotic. I think there are a lot more people who both can take advantage of some of the things that the United States offers its citizens, including still the most remarkable middle-class economy in the world, and who may actually have many more historical ties to the generation of the founders, than the people who may be sitting around rolling their eyes and saying, really, we shouldn’t be celebrating any of this.
Krastev: The American dream is something that was really important for the way at least those of us outside of America were seeing America. You go there, and you can succeed in one generation. You can succeed in two generations. There was this incredible social mobility that was so important in the way, for example, Europeans were trying to compare America with themselves. We are also forgetting that particularly after the end of World War II, America was so powerful but also so prosperous and so rich. When you read basically anything, the diaries or memoirs of the Europeans talking about American soldiers or any type of American that they were going to see in Europe in the late 1940s, 1950s, you have this totally devastated continent, and then you have all these people who are coming, and they were rich, and they’re prosperous, but also they were self-confident. They were really representing this new world.
I’m saying this because suddenly the American dream is becoming a challenge within the United States. On one level, this is a challenge because of the thing that everybody is seeing: ` this fear that the next generation is not going to be able to live better than their parents. I do believe this was really important for the United States, because America depended on social mobility much more than traditional European societies. But secondly, it is something that you said: if we are going to a world of civilizations, if the Chinese are going to become a civilization which tries to dominate but doesn’t want to export its model, if Indians are going to define themselves as a civilizational state, if Russians are struggling to do the same, not particularly successfully, then which is the American civilization? Is Europe part of it?
For example, in Europe in the 19th century, words like race and nation were synonymous. This kind of a ratio, the idea of whiteness, was very much an American invention. The interesting story about the current type of talk about this is that America was changing demographically not simply because new people were coming, but because people were being redefined. For example, Bulgarians or Jews in the late 19th century were not defined as white, but there was a moment in which they became white, and we know from sociology how the Irish became white. I do believe this is what is going to happen with Latinos and others. But then how are we going to define this civilization to which Europe belongs, America belongs? If it is on racial terms, who is going to be white and how is it going to be white?
In my view, this is one of the biggest problems that is coming from some of the right-wing attempts to redefine basically European American civilization simply on racial terms. Because the moment you’re going to do it, you’re starting to realize how historically constructed and how differently constructed race was in different periods. In a certain way, paradoxically, whiteness came as the result of trying to reconcile the differences between people coming from different European countries, Germans and Brits, people coming from different religious traditions, because religious divisions were so important in Europe in the beginning. So strangely enough, whiteness was the way to try to reconcile all this diversity of American society, and after that, it basically became one of the sources of confrontation. I’m saying this because as a result of it, 250 years after its founding, America is kind of forced to reread and reinterpret all of its traditions, because the world in which it is living is not allowing it to coexist easily with the previous identities that it was telling itself.
Mounk: There is a strange set of paradoxes about the role that the idea of race plays in the American imagination at the moment. Of course, the history of the country has, because of slavery and other things, been deeply defined by some imagination of race all along. But one of the fights of this moment, I think, is whether you will get a further broadening of the idea of who’s white. Some sociologists claim that this is already happening, that there’s going to be a kind of mainstream society that sees itself in the broadest sense as white, and it is going to include a lot of Latinos and probably a lot of Asian Americans, and it may even in some ways include middle and upper-middle-class Black Americans. So whiteness becomes a kind of strange multiracial category, with some kind of a racialized remainder that is based on some mix of ethnic origin and socioeconomic status.
Or whether you actually do the opposite, and the idea is that you get the kind of overarching category of “person of color,” the term that was used incredibly often over the last five or six years, but is now, I think, slightly declining in salience, and you’re pitting them against this kind of remainder category of whites. Of course, ironically, whereas for the vast majority of American history you would enjoy a higher status and you would want to be counted in the category of whites rather than the category of people excluded from whites, which is why, according to the sociological accounts, which I don’t always fully agree with, Jews and Irish Americans and so on fought to be included in the category of white, today, in some senses, you might wish for the opposite. In many contexts, to be white is supposed to be a negative thing, and there may actually be negative consequences for college admissions or for your ability to garner some kind of contract from your local government if you are counted within that category.
Remarkably, this is not even an ethnic example. The state of California has now included a mandate for the boards of companies in California to have some representation from the LGBT community, and if you falsely claim to be gay, then the state may prosecute you, not for being gay as it might have done 100 or 200 years ago in many countries in the West, but for falsely claiming to be gay, which is a kind of remarkable thing. So what do you think is going to be the way that people think about their identity in a little bit of time? To raise the stakes here, Ivan, let’s imagine that we’re talking on the 500th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. How do you think Americans will think about the role of these kinds of forms of identity and of race 250 years from now?
Krastev: If we’re going to talk on the 500th anniversary, which means that we are going to embrace the idea of individual immortality, then probably everything is going to be different for everybody. But you are making a very important point, and the important point is that suddenly being part of a majority means that you do not have an identity. Identity comes only from being part of different minorities, and you can try to be one type or another type of minority, but there was something wrong about the idea of the majority as a whole. I do believe this is a very new idea. Normally, minorities try to be integrated into certain political majorities, and this was why, for example, political parties, ideologies, and elections were so important, because by being part of the majority, you have the feeling that you are integrated into the country. Now the story is that suddenly being a majority means being oppressive. Being a minority becomes a privilege, and this is the paradox. By the way, this is one of the paradoxes that is very much used by the right, who say, how did this happen? Is it not that in a democracy the privilege is to be part of a bigger group? Does it mean that basically everything depends on us?
I’m saying this because I do believe in a democracy there are two different ideas of a majority. One is the idea of the historical majority that created the state, and in a certain way, in the case of America, this was the Europeans who basically came to the continent and wrote the Constitution and put in their rules and basically their tradition. Then there is the majority which is born on the night of the elections, and this majority does not have a particular color. It has much more of a political identity than any type of ethnic or religious identity. But the idea was that this second majority should not contest the first one, and this is happening because of the demographic changes. Suddenly, you can see that either we’re going to redefine what it means to be white, or you’re going to end up with all the fears that have been captured by Huntington, with his idea that WASP America is disappearing and it is not going to be the same anymore. These identities are not going to work well if they’re not going to be redefined.
I do believe we’re living in this interesting moment in which everything is too fluid, and too much is possible, and this is why nobody has the feeling that he lives at home. This is not true only about America. I do believe we see the same in Europe, because home is the place that you feel you understand and where you feel understood, where there is this intuitive understanding that you know how the system works, you know basically how institutions work. In this case, America was always very different than Europe, because this sense of home as a much more ethnically and culturally homogeneous place was much more typical for Europe, and for Europeans, home was like speaking a native language, a language that you speak before knowing the grammar, a language that naturally comes to you. In America, even if you come from England, you should learn a new language, because American was this new language that everybody, even English speakers, should learn, because America, from this point of view, was always different from the classical European nation-states.
But now, if there is no American dream, and if there is not a dream that we should all become much more similar, that we are not going to be so much defined by our ethnic or racial identity, I do believe that suddenly the country starts to have this feeling of tension and civil political polarization, of a civil war. Paradoxically, I do believe that there is one conflict, and I could be wrong, that probably if you’re going to look from the future, probably not so distant, like the next 20 to 150 years, you’re going to see that in current America, the generational conflict can turn out to be politically more important than some of the class conflicts that we know from before, or even the type of identity conflicts that we are talking about. Because paradoxically, for the first time in modern history, young people in the world, but particularly now in the United States, are a minority. This is a minority which does not feel represented enough in politics, and as a result of it, starts to contest democracy, and because they start to contest democracy, they start to contest the basic American values.
In my view, this is an interesting story, because the gap of wealth between the population, the fact that we are living much longer, and for the first time you’re going to have not three but probably five generations living next to each other, the fact that we don’t have many kids, and suddenly the generational pyramid is turning on its head, all of this, in my view, is going to restructure American politics to the extent that the identities that we talk about now, which are very much race-based and ethnically based, may turn out to be less important than they look today.
In the rest of this conversation, Ivan and Yascha discuss their personal perceptions of how the United States has changed, and how Donald Trump will be remembered. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
