Yascha Mounk: The rise of the identity ideology—and why I think it spells trouble

Nowadays, you probably could predict which political party somebody votes for by asking about a cultural question

How do you feel about immigration? Or how do you feel about trans rights? And of course, people on both sides of the spectrum, but also certainly on the right

have tried to exploit issues of identity in order to win votes

I'm not concerned in general about the fact that we might talk about identity

I certainly am not against people asking for equal rights and equal treatment for full inclusion in society when they've historically been marginalized

Where I start to worry is in the rise of a specific new ideology on significant parts of the left that no longer believes that we overcome those injustices by living up to universal principles that stand at the core of our political system

but rather say we should rip out those principles and make how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us

explicitly depend on the kind of group into which we are born

My name is Jascha Munk. I'm a professor of a practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University

the founder of Persuasion and the host of A Good Fight Podcast. And my latest book is called The Identity Trap, A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

In The Identity Trap, I write about the rise of this new ideology

Some people call it identity politics, but that I think is too broad to describe it

I suggested the identity synthesis because this new set of ideas is essentially about the kind of role that identity categories

like race and gender and sexual orientation, should have in our society

And these ideas, I argue, are a synthesis of different intellectual strains, different intellectual origins

including postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. One of the really striking things is that there have barely been any serious attempts

to tell the story of where these ideas come from. So I argue that this starts with the thought of Michel Foucault

a French thinker who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s in Paris

He thinks political power comes from political discourses, from the way we talk about things

And that is the way to challenge political power. Now, what was striking about this initial ideology is that you ended up with a lot of skepticism

Skepticism even about basic identity categories. And that skepticism was really appealing to a lot of thinkers whom Foucault inspired

You saw the thought of Indian literary scholar Gayatri Spivak. Spivak too was deeply influenced by postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers but she became quite worried about the rejection of identity in many of these works When Michel Foucault in an exchange with another famous French intellectual

said that intellectuals should no longer speak for others, that the workers in Paris can speak for themselves

Spivak was very worried about this because she said, look, that might be true of workers in Paris who have gone to school

who have some money, who have some political resources, that the most oppressed people in the world, the most marginalized

somebody has to speak for them. And to be able to speak for them, we need identity categories

And so Spiva comes up with a slightly puzzling but very influential idea that philosophically speaking, because we know your identity

we know something essential, something important about you, might be wrong, might be suspect

But for practical political purposes, we have to act as though they were true

We have to embrace what she called a form of strategic essentialism. And that, again, has come to be very influential in our politics today

Now, one thing I would add here is that Spivak came to be quite critical of

quite concerned about the way in which people used their ideas. ideas. And I also worry particularly when we engage in extreme forms of strategic essentialism

Pedagogical practices, like teachers in many American private schools, coming into classrooms

when kids are eight or seven or six years old and splitting them up by identity groups, telling

African-American kids to go into one classroom, Asian-American kids to go into a second classroom

Latino kids to go into a third-class room and white kids to go into a fourth-class room

in order to think of themselves as, quote-unquote, racial beings. The hope might be, when it comes to white kids, for example

to turn them into great anti-racist activists who are conscious of a white privilege

But I think everything we know about history and everything we've learned in the social sciences

suggests to us that the opposite is likely to be the case

But once I think of you as part of my in-group and that person over there as part of my out-group

I'm much more likely to treat you well and I'm much more likely to treat the other person badly

One of the big surprises to me over the last 10 years is that these ideas that I started to encounter

in the seminar room and in conferences and in academic papers suddenly take on this life of their own

suddenly became repackaged in a memified form that became deeply popular and very influential

over the course of a short span of time. There's a few reasons for that

One reason has to do with the rise of social media. It encouraged people to think of themselves

through a lens of identity, to connect with people who are as much like them as possible

Those ideas then started to spread and eventually were taken up in mainstream media

A second mechanism had to do with what I call the short march through the institutions with the fact that students especially at the most elite universities in this country

started to be steeped in the ideas of the identity synthesis in the seminar room

and very often in orientation trainings and other sessions hosted by administrators

So as those students went out into the workforce, they started to change and remodel

many of the non-profit organizations, but also tech companies, professional firms, increasingly even S&P 500 corporations that they were hired into

And then the third important step was the election of Donald Trump in 2016

At first, the left reacted by protesting against Trump, by hoping that there might be ways of limiting his power

or of removing him from office. But when those hopes started to fade

and some people started to go home and return to their daily lives

a certain segment of activists redirected their anger, their ire, towards their own communities

Started to say, if we can't take out Trump, at least we can get rid of the one person

in our own context that isn't politically pure, that we think is problematic

Because at least that person we have power over. And so this was the moment in which the necessary hygiene of any political movement

started to go out of the window, in which it became really difficult for me as somebody on

the left, for example, to criticize bad ideas on the left for fear of being painted as somebody

who's secretly on the side of Donald Trump, who's secretly running interference for him

As the identity synthesis became more influential, we also saw the rise of two sets of ideas in particular

each associated with famous thinker, that made it extremely difficult or impossible to disagree with these ideas

The first of these is Robin DiAngelo, the white diversity trainer who was one of the best-selling authors of 2020

According to DiAngelo, if you disagree with her particular view of how racism works in the United States, for example

that is simply proof that you suffer from what she calls white fragility

So any attempt to argue against her view of the world is just proof that in order to preserve your own racial privileges, you're not willing to deal with the realities of race in the United States

The other is Ibram X. Kendi, who claimed that there's no such thing as being not racist

That either you're racist or you're anti-racist. That your bowling league your kids soccer club any institution any idea any principle in the world unless it is actively dismantling inequalities between African Americans and white Americans

it is racist. And taken together, these two ideas, I think, made it much harder to push back

against some of the core claims of the identity synthesis. The problem with an overinflation of what we call racist

is that the term racist is actually an important category of ysis

When somebody truly is racist, that is something that we should know and understand

in order to fight against that injustice. But if we start to call practically anything racist

if we say the entire United States Constitution and all of capitalism

and also your local soccer league are all racist without that really being well-founded

then there's no way to call out those who actually perpetuate particular forms of harm

What's important to understand about this ideology is just how extreme it is

It's to understand that the founders of critical race theory, for example, explicitly saw themselves

as attacking the mainstream tradition of black American thought. So why is that

Well, for most of the tradition of black American fought, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr

to people like Barack Obama, it was obvious that America has always failed to live up on its universal promises

As Frederick Douglass points out in his most important speech commemorating the 4th of July

his compatriots were being hypocritical when we celebrated the idea that all men are born equal

at a time when many African Americans were held in chains. But he did not want to rip up the Constitution as a result

He said that we would make progress by living up to it. But the identity synthesis rejects this tradition

It says that we haven't been able to make any progress, that, as Derek Bell claims, America in the year 2000s

was as racist as it was in 1950 or 1850. And that therefore what we have to do is to get rid of universal values, get rid of those neutral rules and make how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us explicitly depend on the kind of racial, religious, sexual groups into which we are born

That, I think, is a mistake. The way to remedy the injustices that remain in our society, which are serious

is to keep fighting, to live up more and more fully to the universal values

like the idea that all men are created equal. Want to dive deeper

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