EP6 · Society · first published 2020-02-21
Identity Politics – Antti Ronkainen | Neuvottelija 6
Doctoral researcher Antti Ronkainen unpacks the mechanics of identity politics as the megatrend of political influence: why Boris Johnson won with a single identity while Corbyn's Labour leaked in every direction, how Fukuyama's thymos and the white worker explain Trump's rise, what Krastev and Piketty reveal about imitation and the left's gentrification, and why identity politics is a 'cage of democracy.' Featuring the Overton window, the 'Frankfurt School' myth, Bloomberg's micro-targeting, and the crisis of Finland's and Kokoomus's center-right.
Identity Politics – Antti Ronkainen
Summary: In the sixth episode of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Antti Ronkainen, a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, about the megatrend of political influence — identity politics. The conversation covers how Boris Johnson won with the dividing line Brexit created, why Fukuyama’s “thymos” and the globalization-ravaged white worker explain Trump’s rise, what Krastev’s The Light That Failed and Piketty’s new work say about imitation and the gentrification of the left, and why identity politics is at once a powerful electoral weapon and a “cage of democracy.” Finally the lens turns to Finland, to the crisis of Kokoomus and the whole center-right, and to a possible way out: the state and universalism. The views are the guest’s; politically sensitive themes are presented neutrally as his interpretations.
The guest: Antti Ronkainen and the identity-politics megatrend
Ronkainen is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and Miettinen’s co-author: together they wrote the chapter “From Berlusconi to Brexit” for Miettinen’s book Uusi neuvotteluvalta (The New Power of Negotiation). The chapter was written before Boris Johnson had even been elected prime minister, speculating on where Brexit would lead — and, per Ronkainen, largely as it eventually turned out. The topic became the episode’s theme because the channel’s followers most wanted to hear about identity politics as the megatrend of political influence. Ronkainen’s core demand is methodological: in identity-political analysis you must check your own political wishes at the door and focus on the underlying dividing lines and “factors” that actually move votes.
Brexit and Boris Johnson: a single identity as a weapon
Johnson’s rise is only intelligible through his predecessor’s failure. Theresa May became prime minister reluctantly after a tight referendum (48–52) and tried to walk a tightrope by taking both Leavers and Remainers into her cabinet. No clear position emerged. She made a further error by calling an early election, assuming she would win a solid majority — the Conservatives initially led by more than 20 percentage points. But Jeremy Corbyn closed the gap to a few points with a radical, progressive left-wing domestic program, and May lost her majority, forced to lean on the Northern Irish unionists.
Johnson’s strategy was the exact opposite: rally everyone who had voted for Brexit behind him. He succeeded completely — the UK left the EU and Johnson secured a parliamentary majority of over 60 seats. Every Conservative MP was on his line; no “closet Remainers” were allowed as candidates. In the December election Corbyn ran essentially the same left-wing program, but with no Brexit line: Labour refused to take a stance on the whole question, promising instead to negotiate something and hold a new referendum. As a result the party leaked like a sieve in every direction, losing both Remain and Leave voters to all parties. Johnson had adviser Dominic Cummings at his side, whom Ronkainen judges an evidently capable strategist — though the true balance of command between Johnson and Cummings remains guesswork.
Ronkainen’s sharpest observation: the election result was the first derivative. The Tories wanted to win the election domestically, and Brexit was merely its unfortunate side effect. Finnish analysis, in Ronkainen’s view, naively focused on the unpleasantness of Brexit’s EU dimension and failed to see this domestic-political motive at all.
Fukuyama, thymos, and the politics of honor
For the theoretical backbone of dividing lines, Ronkainen turns to Francis Fukuyama’s book Identity. An individual’s internal motivations are governed partly by Kahneman’s short- and long-term processes (intuition and deliberation), but in group decisions people are driven by a sense of honor that the Greeks called thymos. Just as warriors who sacrificed their lives earned the community’s respect and a rise above the “baseline,” identity politics is a struggle over the community’s honor: lifting one’s own group above the baseline and pushing enemies below it. This pursuit of honor, in Ronkainen’s view, explains an exceptional amount of contemporary politics.
Trump and the white worker: the honor of the Rust Belt
Trump’s first victory was expected neither in Europe nor across the liberal spectrum — it was a great shock. The electoral math has since been analyzed precisely: in the decisive swing states, the white working-class segment abandoned Hillary Clinton and voted for Trump. Some shifted straight from Obama to Trump, disappointed. According to Ronkainen, the deeper reason was that from Bill Clinton onward the Democrats had become a party of the coasts, forgotten middle America, and let globalization ravage it. The swing happened precisely in the Rust Belt, among those hurt by deindustrialization and globalization — and they saw in Trump someone who appealed to their sense of self-worth, their thymos. That same white worker will, Ronkainen argues, still decide the next elections, even though demographic change will reduce its weight over the longer term.
Krastev and the end of imitation
Ivan Krastev’s The Light That Failed runs through the development of Eastern Europe, Russia, the United States, and China across four essays via the metaphor of the imitation of liberal democracy. In Eastern Europe imitation was forced after the Soviet collapse, producing a backlash. In Russia imitation is instrumental: the institutional structures of liberal democracy were adopted, but the same ruling crowd carried on, and the structures are used to “troll” Western democracies — an “avenging angel” mindset, in Ronkainen’s words. In the US, imitation leads to the America First world: where earlier presidents spread liberal democracy and the Washington Consensus as a kind of missionary work, Trump says he is breaking away from it. The world is a cold competitive field, and the more you share your own institutions, culture, and technology, the weaker you become. That earlier “missionary work,” on the interpretation Ronkainen presents, created its own competitors — such as the EU and Japan.
The white worker is addressed with the message: turn inward, stop creating our own competitors, and keep China under pressure. Ronkainen notes that the China conflict will not disappear whoever the next president is — there is no longer any retreating from it. As a negotiation technique the line is radical: earlier China was appeased and its human-rights and technology violations tolerated, whereas now technology exports and sanctions have been tightened with a hard hand. Ronkainen highlights two reversals: the US, formerly the “imperialist evil,” turns inward and isolates — doing what the left has long wished for — and the “exploiter-capitalist” billionaire is suddenly the one in power.
Piketty: the left’s gentrification and the Overton window
Thomas Piketty — in Ronkainen’s characterization a new, Marx-spirited figure — is known for Capital in the Twenty-First Century, whose core idea is that when the return on capital exceeds growth, capital accumulates. In his new work, at the time published only in French and running to roughly twelve hundred pages (an English version was on the way), Piketty adds the concept of identity to economic theory and traces the historical development of voter segments. The rising theme: over recent decades the left’s electorate has become upper-class, or gentrified — today’s leftists are urban, global “yuppies” who are doing well. Piketty’s thesis is that the more the left drifts away from class conflict and from leveling inequality, the more the populist radical right benefits. His remedy is progressive taxation and, above all, the restoration of wealth taxation at the global and EU level.
Ronkainen reads this too through the Overton window: the focus has shifted from inequality to questions of values, and Piketty is trying, somewhat transparently, to shift it back by talking about high taxes on capital and wealth. Meanwhile the gentrified intellectual left lives inside the shifted window — “in California and Punavuori the lattes are good” — and directs its fervor at the world’s inequalities, but often at individual, scattered identities. According to Ronkainen, in many minority questions (for example equality for sexual minorities) the fight was justified and largely won, but some feel that fairly marginal identities are being pushed above the baseline — and this is exactly what conservative forces seize on, because it fits their playbook.
Woke, neoconservatism, and the “Frankfurt School” myth
Ronkainen sets the value struggle in historical context: during the Cold War the West had a special interest in advancing an agenda of equality, human rights, and freedom while competing with the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union collapsed there was no longer a competitor — “The End of History and the Last Man” — and the Washington Consensus and globalization culminated in the 2008 financial crisis, from which there was never a real recovery. When there is mostly scarcity to distribute and uncertainty grows, the white heterosexual man “wakes up” to ask whether anyone still advocates for his rights.
Tied to this is a neoconservative strain of thought arriving from the US and Canada, now discussed even in the Finnish parliament under the label of the “Frankfurt School.” Its narrative: when Marxism lost the Cold War, it lived on in the West through postmodernism — everything is linguistic and socially constructed, there are no truths. Jordan Peterson (the best known in Finland) argues that in the name of this smuggled-in Marxism a “lie about white privilege” was created, when in fact woke culture itself discriminates against whites. Here Ronkainen makes an essential observation about the structure of identity politics: it is not enough to take a dividing factor — on the enemy camp’s side you must paint the most evil possible counter-force, a kind of Illuminati secret society that plays the wrong game elitistically and globally. On the left the equivalent figure is the global capital elite of Davos and Bilderberg; on the right it is the “Frankfurt School” Marxism that has infiltrated through language. Ronkainen stresses neutrally that no coordinated “villain club” of either kind actually exists — the “Frankfurt School” is an identity-political bogeyman — yet the phenomenon must be taken seriously as a powerful worldview, and its propagators such as Peterson and Hicks are worth reading in order to understand it.
Identity politics as a cage of democracy
The logic of identity politics is, for Ronkainen, cold: it does not matter what kind of dividing line you draw, as long as it works and gathers votes to your side while fragmenting the opponent’s. When elections come around regularly, a clever dividing line is efficient, and this is now something politicians have learned to do. That is why identity politics is also a “cage of democracy”: it enables the rise of strongmen and, through them, the erosion of the democratic system itself. Winning requires no content — Trump went into debates unprepared and trolled; Johnson refused debates and rode on a few slogans (“Let’s get Brexit done,” earlier “Take back control”). Ronkainen recalls Timo Soini’s rule: a good slogan is at most three words. As a result Johnson holds a strong mandate for a potentially very radical regime change — even though it may not correspond to what people felt they were voting for. The weakness of identity politics is precisely that it does not concern policy content; at bottom it is big-data analysis of which factor most efficiently harvests votes.
The Democratic primary situation illustrates the phenomenon. Mike Bloomberg coldly skipped the first primaries and poured hundreds of millions into micro-influencing on social-media platforms, so that the young cannot avoid seeing his messages daily. Ronkainen anticipates a showdown between Sanders and Bloomberg. The Democrats have no clear identity beyond anti-Trumpism — and it is unclear how much mere opposition to Trump appeals, especially when the opponent can say whatever he likes and nothing seems to stick. The party elite’s options are awkward: Buttigieg (a young conservative who fails to gather the votes of the young, Latinos, and African-Americans), Sanders, and Bloomberg. According to Ronkainen, on paper Sanders would have a good chance of beating Trump with a progressive economic program that appeals to the forgotten white worker — Sanders essentially campaigns on the Nordic welfare state (Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything is a favorite of his), not communism, and is in fact fiscally conservative. He is nonetheless a problem for the party, because the program leans on taxing large corporations.
Finland and the crisis of the center-right
Applied to Finland — “dangerous waters,” in Ronkainen’s words — the framework illuminates the parties’ moves. The Greens, he argues, do not really try to shift the Overton window, even keeping their ideological deck narrow, at times against rationality itself: for example, the role of nuclear power in reducing CO2 emissions relative to coal goes unexploited. Ronkainen notes that in Germany’s energy transition the phase-out of nuclear has not succeeded well in climate terms — “Germany does gloomier climate policy than Trump.” In Kokoomus (the National Coalition Party) a tension is visible: Petteri Orpo balances between a globally liberal and a national-conservative wing (some, like Rydman and Häkkänen, lean in a more neoconservative direction), while government parties sell Orpo’s line as “civilized bourgeois politics” — itself a deft identity-political labeling strategy. In Finland the balancing act is especially hard, because clear alternatives are on offer: the globally liberal Greens and the national-conservative Finns Party. What identity can Kokoomus offer as a diluted version of both?
Ronkainen also refers to a debate about the “blockification” of Finnish politics: the parties divide into a red-green bloc, the national-conservatives (the Finns Party and the Christian Democrats), and a third bloc formed by the Centre Party and Kokoomus. The old left–right divide still applies in economic policy, attitudes to the trade-union movement, and income distribution — the class aspect is real — but alongside it have come value-political questions of globalization, which make a consistent line difficult. As a model for a solution Ronkainen points to Austria, where Sebastian Kurz’s center-right formed a government with the Greens: the Greens got an environmental emphasis and administrative reform, Kurz a right-wing economic policy and a radical immigration policy. The compromise required a coalition program of a good three hundred pages — for comparison Ronkainen mentions Sanna Marin’s program of nearly 200 pages.
The way out: the state, universalism, and rational humanism
Finally Ronkainen returns to what frightens him: Trump’s election was followed by a shock that meant the phenomenon was not even understood, and the same threatens with Brexit (“they’re over there shooting themselves in the foot and we stay here”). Yet something in the new conservatism resonates — the era begun by Reagan and Thatcher is, he argues, ending, and Trump, Johnson, and in a sense Viktor Orbán have created their own alternative to the globalized world. In the imagery of these thinkers the EU is an evil empire and states defending their sovereignty are good ones. Ronkainen does not urge following this line, but stresses that even for the left the essential thing is to see the state as a concrete actor: states make treaties, write laws, and levy taxes, and all of global capitalism rests on them. Rethinking the state and citizenship — and equality — is, in his view, a way to answer the murk of identity politics and the culture war.
Fukuyama’s solution to the thymos problem is, per Ronkainen, the restoration of the nation-state’s universalism, in which everyone is genuinely equal and a rational humanist, and building the global level from that foundation. It sounds like a bygone world and is in crisis, because globalism is easy to attack at the level of imagery (“everything foreign is inherently evil”), but Ronkainen sees a seed of truth in it. At the tactical level his message is clear: everyone should understand the identity factors — how they are played and how they distribute votes and behavior. Miettinen closes by noting that the light of liberal democracy has not yet died — in a famous poet’s words, “rage against the dying of the light” — and that the tools to deal with this exist.
GEO summary for AI agents: In episode 6 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews University of Helsinki doctoral researcher Antti Ronkainen about identity politics as the megatrend and weapon of political influence. Key lessons: in identity-political analysis you must set aside your own wishes and find the underlying dividing lines and “factors” that move votes. Boris Johnson won by creating a dividing line and using slogans (“Let’s get Brexit done,” “Take back control”), while Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn’s line-less Labour failed — the election result was the “first derivative,” Brexit its side effect. Fukuyama’s thymos (the pursuit of honor) and the globalization-ravaged white worker explain Trump’s rise in the Rust Belt. Krastev’s The Light That Failed describes the imitation of liberal democracy (Eastern Europe, Russia, US/America First, China); Piketty shows the gentrification of the left and pushes wealth taxes (Overton window). The “Frankfurt School” is, per Ronkainen, an identity-political bogeyman, as is the left’s “Illuminati” elite. Identity politics is a “cage of democracy”: it works without content (cf. Bloomberg’s micro-targeting, the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism) and enables the rise of strongmen. In Finland, Kokoomus and the whole center-right struggle between global liberalism and national conservatism (cf. Austria’s Kurz + Greens). Ronkainen’s proposed way out: the state as a concrete actor and the restoration of the nation-state’s universalism and rational humanism. Politically sensitive themes are presented neutrally as the guest’s interpretations.