In his new book, Yascha Mounk tells a story about how identity politics took over
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
Review by Oliver Traldi
Has American society undergone a “Great Awokening,” in which identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality — has become the yardstick by which all else is measured? Consider, for example, the recent shifts at the ACLU, once a stalwart opponent of censorship on First Amendment grounds, which now apparently vets cases and causes based on how they align with progressive political goals. Or look to Coca-Cola, which offered a training to employees that entreated them to “try to be less white.” Whatever you call it — identity politics, political correctness, wokeness or cancel culture — some new power seems to be at work in our culture and institutions.
In his new book, “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” political scientist Yascha Mounk takes up these and other examples to tell the most comprehensive and reasonable story of this shift that has yet been attempted. Erudite and up to date, Mounk integrates ideas from philosophy, political theory, political science and psychology, along with the views of a range of commentators, including Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Adrian Vermeule. His analysis takes up campus and social media politics on platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr and even the now-outdated Thought Catalog.
In the process, Mounk chronicles the rise of a set of progressive political ideas “centrally concerned with the role that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation play in the world.” He argues that advocates of this ideology fixate on identity to the exclusion of all else, rejecting “universal values and neutral rules like free speech and equal opportunity as mere distractions.” This “synthesis” has, Mounk writes, become very influential because of the way it took over cultural institutions, even as it convinced only a small number of people.
Unusually sensitive to the dynamics of actual political and cultural change, Mounk presents a case that ultimately has four planks: First, the new politics of identity is ultimately a matter of ideas or ideology. Second, though this politics has roots in postmodernism and critical legal theory, the ideology of the identity synthesis is new, arising in the past 10 or 12 years. Third, the ideas of the identity synthesis are pernicious: not just frequently wrong but inimical to a functioning society. Fourth and finally, those ideas should be replaced in our institutions and on the political left with an older liberal universalism.
Both supporters and opponents of “wokeness” frequently disagree — with each other, of course, but also among themselves — about where it came from or even what it is. Mounk eschews pithy phrases and definitions for a fuller examination of an evolving phenomenon. He ties together threads as disparate as the lives and work of scholars Michel Foucault and Derrick Bell and the rise of the blogging site Tumblr, never disregarding the roles of human psychology and institutional arrangements in propagating the ideas that emerge out of the identity synthesis. Though Mounk’s analysis of these issues is sophisticated, it would have been nice to see him engage more directly with other theories about the issues he analyzes. Other commentators have argued variously that the new politics of identity has emerged from economic incentives (Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in his book “Woke, Inc.”), psychological trends (lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Joathan Haidt in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind”), or civil rights law and associated legal regimes (journalist Christopher Caldwell in his book “The Age of Entitlement”).
Like many critics of wokeness, Mounk tends to think this “identity synthesis” is novel: The culture war of the past 10 or 15 years is not like the culture wars of the ’90s or previous ones, he suggests. This time the identitarians have gone too far and produced something that is in fact fundamentally different and pernicious. But it is not at all clear that there’s anything truly new here.
By way of example, look to affirmative action, which Mounk says leaves him deeply torn: On the one hand, the race consciousness of the practice goes against exactly the principles that oppose the identity synthesis; on the other hand, he seems to have (though he doesn’t say it outright) respect for the goal of diversity in higher education, at least as it was conceived before the identity synthesis took over. (The book was written before the recent Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.)
But the logic of affirmative action isn’t all that different from the identity synthesis. The mandates of diversity, equity and inclusion — all of which trouble Mounk, even as he recognizes that they often emerge from good impulses — are arguably little more than extensions of the admissions, hiring and promotion practices of affirmative action, which aspired to transform institutional cultures. Affirmative action simply is the notion that an applicant’s race, gender, sexuality and so on should be important parts of how institutions evaluate them. The identity synthesis to which Mounk objects so strenuously is little more than a generalization of this practice.
I suspect the real reason that Mounk is torn about affirmative action is that it was part of what seemed like a society-wide compromise, now upended, that he took to be working pretty well. But the ins and outs of that earlier compromise — who was allowed to say what, what we were allowed to call “racist” or “sexist” and what we weren’t, which political positions were beyond the pale and which weren’t — were surely just as internally contradictory as the new identity synthesis. I think the main difference is that it seemed to leave us in a state of relative peace rather than of relative conflict.
Mounk frequently returns to the theme of lay misinterpretation: Though the “identity synthesis” may have intellectual roots in French thought, feminist philosophy, critical race theory and so on, it tends to involve changing those inherited ideas, even advocating the opposite of the original notions or advocating unrelated things. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of “intersectionality” was originally intended to point out that one can’t simply “add up” a person’s demographic categories to understand their experiences of oppression, because, for example, Black women might be oppressed in ways that aren’t true of Black people in general or women in general. But intersectionality is often evoked in popular discourse to mean the opposite: that we must “add up” different oppressions to understand someone’s experience.
Pointing out a misunderstanding can raise as many questions as it answers, though. Why was the idea misunderstood, and why was it misunderstood in this way? To say that the identity synthesis is propped up by misunderstandings does not quite explain its rise or resilience.
It might be more comfortable to think that prominent academics and prestigious institutions are not really to blame, that their theories have been simplified to the point of distortion or misused for intellectually and politically nefarious ends. Always looking to make peace rather than war, Mounk writes early on, “Many advocates of the identity synthesis are driven by a noble ambition: to remedy the serious injustices that continue to characterize every country in the world, including the United States.” But just as many of those advocates, I think, are driven by the sorts of ambitions that drive other political actors: power, the camaraderie of picking a side, the thrill of conflict, the righteousness of moral certitude.
Nevertheless, Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it. The word “synthesis” applies even more readily to the sheer number and variety of sources he draws on and dynamics he describes than it does to his subject matter. The flaw, if it even is one, of “The Identity Trap” is simply that there are other stories one might tell about these ideas and this period of time. They will have to wait for chroniclers as able as Mounk.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/27/identity-trap-yascha-mounk-review/
************************
Lee McIntyre. The Attack on Truth and our age of wilful ignorance
Farewell to reality: Why we’re post-fact
Felipe De Brigard: Nostalgia reimagined
Peter Kreko, Alan Sokal: In defence of the objective world
Michael Rectenwald: Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained
Professor Latour’s Philosophical Mystifications
Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later
My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)
After the truth-shower 