Mistakes of identity
Patterns and platforms in the year of elections.
In this week’s Not in Dispatches, I was going to write about India’s election, which saw Narendra Modi’s hopes of a supermajority dashed. But in a week of other extraordinary votes – Mexico on Sunday, South Africa last week, and the EU currently – let’s zoom out instead to see if there’s a pattern.
Many have already said the theme of these elections is anti-incumbency.
But Modi, though reduced, still won. And Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is the protégé of the current president. Other recent elections – from Taiwan to Indonesia, not to mention Russia – have also seen incumbents or incumbent-sponsored leaders win.
So, is there a theme beyond 2024 being a big year for elections?
There might be. And while this might not be a novel theory, I think we could be seeing not so much a change in voter behaviour, but an accelerated move to what I’ll call “platform voting”, where today’s voters – the most educated in history and with the greatest access to information – are increasingly aligning not so much on democratic “products” (parties, ideologies), like goods on a shelf, but on democratic “platforms” (nations, identities), like the stores themselves.
To explain, let’s begin at the beginning.
Thinking about the Roman Empire
Marcus Tullius Cicero lived 2,000 years ago in Caesar’s Rome, but remains a relevant theorist today.
He motivated the Reformation (Martin Luther was a fan; Cicero’s De Officiis was Europe's second book printed, after the Gutenberg Bible) and inspired the American Revolution (Thomas Jefferson credited him with the Declaration of Independence). Pundits on the left and right quote him today when discussing populism and disinformation.
Most of all, Cicero, as well as being a statesman, wrote a lot – much of it preserved – so there’s lots to quote. And like other ancient philosophers – Plato, Sun Tzu, Aristotle, Confucius – he has generated a lot of fortune-cookie wisdom.
But Cicero is special because he wrote about the nation at a time when Rome was going from a republic to empire and such concepts were still new. He was not just a theorist, but a theorist of change. Additionally, he was a theorist of identity, and the foundations of legitimacy.
Patria est communis omnium parens – our country is father of us all – might sum it up best.
The nation, the state, is a family. Ethnicity is bound with land. Blood with soil. Your homeland is your fatherland, not just the territory of the ruler, or a common language or god. Political order derives from the earth.
Modern observers, centuries later – the Marxist historian Benedict Anderson comes to mind – would dismiss such concepts as “imagined communities,” socially-constructed myths engineered by the owners of the means of production.
And at the other end of the ideological spectrum, many libertarians and capitalists would shun nationhood as semi-feudal dogma. Another ghost from the past, like monarchy or religion.
Many of those views remain among the political elite. And the scorn is especially deep for those deplorables who cling to their outdated views. Indeed, just this week, Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf wrote that a “resurgent nationalism” built on anti-trade ideology, threatens the world order.
Besides the implied snobbery of such positions, there’s a materialist argument inherent to globalisation (and modernity writ large) that what matters isn’t so much the nation, but the individual economic agent. The consumer in the capitalist worldview, or the worker in the Marxist.
In the words of Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher: “there’s no such thing as society.”
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Where you sit is where you stand
But to borrow another Marxist framing, what is the structure behind these views? Both on identity and of identity? To take another phrase from Cicero: cui bono? – who benefits?
In the nationalist argument, the structure is the nation-state. And that’s what provides the benefits. For the globalists, it’s global capital, experts, and ideas that provide both the correct identity, and the greatest good.
Returning to the idea of platform democracy, you vote for platform that benefits you the most.
If you’re a monoglot tax-payer, reliant on government services, you’ll vote on a nationalist platform. If you’re a cosmopolitan member of the elite – a “citizen of nowhere” in the words of Britain’s second female prime minister, Theresa May – you’ll vote internationalist.
And going back to this week’s result in India, what if you’re at the bottom of the pyramid? Do you vote nationalist?
The answer may seem obvious by now, but to Modi’s surprise (and everyone else’s), they didn’t vote this way. They voted for caste, for welfare, and the village. This sub-nationalist cohort – Indian scholars regularly refer to them as “subaltern” – voted for parties that promoted regional populism, something any British prime minister dealing with English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalism would be familiar with.
The competing platforms of identity – global, national, sub-national – aren’t entirely new. Groups throughout history have formed and broken apart on identities of religion, language, ideology, and race. But what’s different about 2024 is that such identities are more fluid, being mediated by the internet and pop culture beyond any communities imagined by Benedict Anderson.
Right now, in the US, the Republicans are clearly the party of the nationalist identity – whether America First or traditional patriotism. The Democrats, meanwhile, are a coalition of educated globalists and sub-nationalist identities (claiming to represent minorities of race, gender, and sexuality).
Yet this is not always the case. Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters could be described as subaltern – the left-behinds of Hillbilly Elegy. And these are not just the white working class, either, as Trump’s rally in The Bronx showed last month.
In Europe, where the EU parliamentary election is currently underway, the division is a little more complex, perhaps reflecting the superstate's more layered identities.
First, we have cosmopolitan identities of ‘Europeanness’ under the banners of the Renew, Greens, and the Socialists and Democrats groups. A more traditional Christian Europeanness is meanwhile seen under the European People's Party of Ursula von der Leyen. And a nationalist European identity – both pan-European and individual to European nation-states – comes under the Identity and Democracy Group, as well as the European Conservatives and Reformists. Finally, the Left and various minor groups – some advocating subaltern identities below the nation-state – may pick up a few seats but these aren’t currently a major factor.
Two recent elections illustrate the power of combining or dividing these identity platforms.
In Mexico, we saw an emphatic victory for Sheinbaum thanks to her party’s ability to fuse nationalist and sub-nationalist/subaltern voices.
In South Africa, we saw the African National Congress’s worst result thanks to former president Jacob Zuma peeling off a majority of ethnic-Zulu votes, which could see him become kingmaker. The larger Democratic Alliance – a fusion of globalists and disaffected minorities – won some seats but barely budged overall.
Ask not what you can do for your country
Cicero may have the last word on platform democracy: Patria est, ubicunque est bene – our country is wherever we are best off.
People have interpreted this in different ways, but to me, it says our identity – our nationality, or preferred platform – is that which delivers the most advantage to us, which answers the question of cui bono.
If you’re a patrician, like Cicero, it’s the Republic, led by the Senate. If you’re a rural voter from Uttar Pradesh, it’s the party that makes the case for your caste. If you’re a young, progressive, New Yorker, it’s likely the Democrats. Main Street USA? We’ll see in October.
But what’s just as interesting about this idea is not who votes for which platform, but how each platform can use this idea to its advantage.
How does the institution of the nation-state, or the nationalists who champion it, become more relevant to the platform voter? How do superstate institutions like the EU make themselves more appealing (as it has tried through the slogan “a Europe that protects”)? How can a fluid political brand become a primary identity?
More fundamentally, how can leaders and organisations respond to what is unlikely to be a temporary adjustment, but a fundamental basis for how people think, act, and vote into the future?
These aren’t just important questions for democracies, but for businesses, markets and geopolitics. And these aren’t just useful ways to frame events, but can help us anticipate future developments.
Indeed, beyond allowing us to see voter blocs and voter identities being sorted by the cui bono of platform, we can begin to see from afar the emergence of other types of blocs and identities, of power, of ideology, and of governments themselves.
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Identity crisis
At the end of the Cold War, when the US emerged as global hegemon – in culture, military prowess, and economic might – there was a sense that identity would fade away, John Lennon style, and all the people would live as one.
Certainly, this spoke to the ideal in American multiculturalism – where identity is about food and music, not fighting or territory – but the thing about identity is that it’s fundamental to the human condition. Like the Mel Brooks skit about the first national anthem (“let ‘em all go to hell, except cave 76”), if we didn’t have identities, we’d make them up.
Businesses know this of course.
Branding and identity aren’t just core to marketing; they’re core to culture and the very concept of the firm. Likewise, for people, few can exist without an identity. For Cicero, it was essential to individual virtue and civic functioning. For Freud, without a mediating identity – the ego – we’d be overtaken by our unconscious.
There have been debates about identity in politics since before Cicero and it’s easy to imagine these debates in another 2,000 years.
But in the year 2024, by examining how platform identities shape our politics and our world, we can better understand the present and anticipate the future. Particularly after electoral weeks like the one we’ve just had.
Michael Feller is Chief Strategist at Geopolitical Strategy. LinkedIn.