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In this episode of Heterodox Out Loud, John Tomasi speaks with Yascha Mounk. Yascha is a German born political scientist, author, and lecturer known for his research on the rise of populism and the challenges to liberal democracy. He has authored several influential books, including Stranger in My Own Country, The People vs. Democracy, and his new book, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time which explores the rise of identity politics and its implications for true equality.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Yascha Mounk, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud. We're here today to talk about your fabulous new book, The Identity Trap. Let's just go right into it. A trap, you say, is an entity or a device that has three features. A trap has a lure. It's something that's capable of ensnaring even the smart and the noble, as you say. And it has this characteristic, a trap has this characteristic of subverting the goals of those who get caught in it. What's the identity trap?

Yascha Mounk: Well, first of all, it's such a pleasure to be here. I'm a great fan of Heterodox Academy and so it's lovely to be here in person. So, you know, my new book is really about the set of ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that have taken on tremendous influence, first in the Academy over a decade. And then over a very brief period of time, also in everyday institutions, in the nonprofit sector, in parts of politics, even in the corporate sector. And, you know, in thinking through what the title of the book might be, what the kind of lead metaphor for it might be, I ended up with the idea of a trap, which is a metaphor that's sort of been used a little bit in different kinds of, you know, consciousness of cities, trap, and so on. So it's a little reluctant to use it. But I think it really does capture the three main elements of this ideology. And the first of it is that there is, in fact, a lure, right? The people who sort of polemicize against wokeness and say that, you know, anybody who has these ideas is somehow terrible, I don't think take seriously into justice to the fact that there is something superficially very appealing about these new ideas. They claim to be the most consistent, the most radical, the most forthright ways to fight against forms of discrimination and injustice, but have shaped our societies deeply in the past and continue to do so in some important ways today. So I think the lure is this promise that, you know, embracing these ideas is going to make you the most radical, the most consistent, anti-racist, anti-homophobe, anti-bigot that there could be.

John Tomasi: Yeah, and that's something I feel. I feel that, Paul, I identify with all of those things. I uphold racism and sexism and homophobia. And so there's something generally appealing about it.

Yascha Mounk: Yes. No, please. The second element is that, you know, a trap isn't something that only bad people, only stupid people fall into. A well-laid trap is something that's appealing to a lot of smart and well-intentioned people. And again, I think when I look, for example, at many of the students I teach, many of whom have not had much opportunity to think critically about these ideas because they've been so steeped in them in their high schools and many of the classes they take really take them for granted and sometimes require them to sort of pay some amount of lip service to them. You know, I see a lot of very well-intentioned students who want to make the world a better place, who are righteously angry at the world's injustices, and who think that, you know, embracing these ideas whole cloth is going to make them act as an historical drama that makes the world a better place. They have a lot of sympathy for these students. These are bright, good kids. I mean, finally, part of a trap is once you've been lured into a trap, once you're inside it, it does not, in fact, help you accomplish your goals. It, in fact, makes it harder for you to do what you set out to do. It ends up being counterproductive. And I think that that is true of a way in which these ideas, which are sometimes called wokeness or identity politics, I prefer to call them by the term of identity synthesis, are playing out in the world today. So the identity trap is the way in which these ideas whose origins and influence a chronicle and critique in the new book make it harder for us to actually achieve a just society that treats its members fairly and is able to build real forms of political solidarity. That's nice. And so when I read your metaphor of the trap and your analysis of the trap, I thought just sort of most simply of a have-a-heart trap, a trap that I've used in my backyard or to catch rodents and so forth. And in that trap, there would be some lure, like some vegetable, and the assumption that there'll be a will or a hunger or an appetite on the part of the critter to go after that thing. And then there'd be a surprise that the trap would slam shut and the critter would not get what it wanted, in fact, after all. And so too, you might say, with your metaphor, that middle point about even the wise and the noble can be captured, maybe especially the wise and the noble are susceptible because they have that desire, that appetite for justice, as you said.

John Tomasi: So what I'd like to do is talk with you about the lure, about the lettuce, though it's far grander and more sophisticated than lettuce, obviously. So I want to talk about the intellectual thing, the model that draws people. And let me, before I do that, I want to just share a story with you and get your reaction to this. So as you know, I taught at Brown for many years and I had a student, one particular student who I became very close with. And this is a person who had told me that he'd gone to Exeter, you know, elite private school, and he played in the basketball team. And he told me that one time, one day when he was in high school, before he came to Brown, he'd been playing basketball. And a student on the opposing team, I don't know who it was, Andover someplace, Deerfield, had been heckling him for being Asian American. And this person in the audience had been calling out to him during the game, various Asian slurs. And he said at the time, the slurs meant nothing to him because he said to himself, I am Exeter. This is my team. I've got my t-shirt on. My friends are here. We're going to play this game because this is who I am. I am Exeter. He told me that when he came to Brown, he went to an orientation program that Brown ran for many years, which would bring students who identified as being a caller to campus three days early for special orientation. It was called the Third World Transition Program from Franz Fanonian Ideas that we'll probably get to later on.

Yascha Mounk: And he said that at that, at that three-day orientation program- And by the way, just very briefly, you know, I have some misgivings about at least the timing of programs like that. I think it's perfectly fine to offer an opportunity for people to opt into those forms of self-identification and solidarity. But to get people, you know, onto campus before other students and put them together in that social environment, I think is one of the kinds of things that is likely to boost more separation and to some extent, segregation or self-segregation rather than to encourage students to make friendships across the lines of race and identity. So I think, you know, college campuses should really be thinking much more carefully about how do we actually encourage people from different groups to come into contact with each other rather than saying from day one, hey, here are all the, you know, students of color and you really should be friends with each other rather than others. And then there's sort of much more extreme forms of this takes today in the form of what I call progressive separatism in elementary schools, for example, where teachers come into classrooms of six or seven-year-olds who really don't have any agency of their own and say, we're going to split you up into these different racial groups.

John Tomasi: But I'm going to come back to that by the very end. And I invite you to say some recommendations about some of these programs. But this student, though, as he said to me, when he went to the third world transition program, they called his attention to racist experiences he had in his own life. And the experience that he shared with his fellow students at Brown was that experience about being called an Asian slur. And, but having, having a shield from Exeter that made him proof against it. But he learned, he said, he came to realize that in fact, the shield hadn't worked. That in fact, he was different from his fellow Exeter students, that he was in fact an Asian American, not an, not an Exeter student. And that really changed his whole self-conception. It changed the way he approached. It was like a religious awakening. He said to me, it changed the way he chose his classes throughout college. It chose, it changed the way he would enter into the workforce. So I just want to mention that, that example of that person to you. give me an immediate, is that an example of the, of the lure? So here's a person now who's in this conversation, meeting people. Is that the lure when he's now being told you're Asian American, not Exeter?

Yascha Mounk: Yes. Well, I mean, I think it does help to give him a language and perhaps psychological safety in the good sense to express some of the hurt he must have felt, understandably and rightly in, in being sort of vilified and attacked in that kind of way. but perhaps it does also connect a little bit to the trap. you know, I think of something like Eboo Patel, who's a really great interfaith organizer, who's written movingly about both sides of this. So part of this is that when he went to college and first encountered these sets of ideas, he's a Muslim American whose parents immigrated from India and he grew up in the Midwest. it gave him a language to formulate some of the experience he had had growing up in a mostly white environment, which as he describes, it was mostly tolerant and welcoming, but in which he did have some amount of those experiences of, of, of discrimination. And he really, like you said, you know, had a kind of religious awakening as well, embracing these ideas sort of whole cloth, but he also then later, came to both fear the way in which it didn't encourage him to build, it encouraged him to tear down. He has a very moving story of how one of his mentors, African-American, woman who, was a theater professor, I believe, did an independent study with him. He was quite close to her and she'd put on this play and he went to see it. And in the sort of talkback session afterwards, he said, well, this play is terribly oppressive because all the kids in this family have their own rooms. What about families that don't have their own rooms? Right. And she said to him, Hey, thanks for the criticism.

John Tomasi: So he had the appetite for justice. He wants to make the world a better place.

Yascha Mounk: Yes. And he thinks that this is what he's learned and been taught to go and, you know, critique and call out. Right. And she very kindly, and this would be an inspiration to all of us, pedagogues, you know, you and me and the people listening, many of whom I'm sure are college professors, you know, what, what, what an influence you can have, right. Words at the right moment. She said to him, look, thank you for criticizing. Thank you for sharing your views. Just FYI, it's hard to do stuff. And if you think you can do better, go do something better, but build up, do something of your own. And that really led you to, to start an interfaith organization that's been very successful. And he says today he gets upset when his teenage sons, encouraged by the teachers to define themselves by one part of their identity or one part of a religious experience, which is not, Hey, you're Muslim. What's a beautiful belief you have, what is a conviction you have you'd want to share? You know, what is it that defines your faith for you? It is, you know, what experiences of discrimination have you had? And he was not against that. That's part of what it is to be a Muslim American today. He said, you know, my Muslim identity and Muslim identity I hope my children will have is not that of being victimized, but maybe a reality that we have to acknowledge and fight against, but it goes well beyond that. So if you refuse to that, it's a problem. So, so to go back to sort of the law and the trap, you know, I think the identity trap is a trap for a number of political reasons. as we'll talk about, I think it's often just at counter purposes to the kind of society we want to build, taking kids at six or seven and saying the most important thing about your racial identity might seem to be a good exercise in anti-racism or as we'll come to strategic essentialism that helps people organize against injustice. But in the long run, especially when like many elite schools now, you also encourage the white students to have a stronger racial self-identification to embrace whiteness as one, school puts it in order to become better anti-racist and so on. In fact, the likely result is going to be, that you set up conflict and really set up, you know, in-group mechanisms that people like Jonathan Haidt described very, very well, where you end up, really prioritizing the interest of your in-group of those of, of others. So it's counterproductive in these ways. I actually think it's counterproductive in, in something that I've written a lot about and care a lot about, which is the fight against, right-wing populism and other forms of populism, because in the end, despite the superficial similarity between, obviously the superficial differences between these ideologies, one, would say sort of, you know, the identity trap is the yin to the, to, to the yang of, of, of, of right-wing populism. One actually helps the other in terms of, electoral outcomes in terms of in control of the social institutions. But I also think, and this is sort of closing the long arc, but there's a personal trap element. But one of the parts of what makes this alluring is this idea that being recognized, you know, as standing at your particular intersection of descriptive identities is going to give you the kind of recognition and belonging, but most humans do pray. That's right. But in fact, you are never reducible to that intersection of identities. And if people start treating you even with good intentions, or even with some amount of deference as, you know, a product of those different identity groups to which you belong, you will never actually quite feel recognized. So some conservative critiques of this moment are talking about, you know, but everybody has to believe for their own unique little snowflake. I, as, as a college professor, do believe that my students are unique little snowflakes and that I'm also a unique little snowflake, but all of us are unique snowflakes.

John Tomasi: A snowflake not in the sense of being delicate, but in the sense of being unique.

Yascha Mounk: Being unique. And I think that's fine.

John Tomasi: A snowflake mentally sense of snowflake, which means everyone's different.

Yascha Mounk: Right, exactly. And, and, and the problem, I think precisely of, of, of, of the way in which the identity trap pulls out the lure of recognition is that it'll never actually give you recognition of what really makes you unique, which is your confluence of tastes and preferences and ideas and, and values, and attributes that set you apart from everybody else in the world, including the people who happen to stand at the same intersection of various, you know, identity categories that happen to be salient in this moment in, in, in, in human history.

John Tomasi: And to foreshadow some things we'll get to by the end of the conversation, your solution, you, you, you, you present an alternative of universalism. You need to defend universalism. What really strikes me about your account of universalism, which I find very attractive, is that it is universalism that leads to extreme individualism. It's the universality of each of us being the unique creature that we are. And if we can just go back to think about that Brown student again for a moment together. So he had a, he described himself as having an identity in high school of being part of a group. He was Exeter. That's what he was. He carried that shield. He wore the shirt. It was, it protected him and made him strong. He carried that. Then at Brown, he learned, actually, maybe you're Asian American. And so he took that identity on your, your theory, I think, suggests that he was on a process of evolution. I'm not sure where he is now.

Yascha Mounk: He's a smart person. I have a lot of confidence that he's found a way to be himself while being the, while still being Exeter, also being Asian American, but also being the unique person that he is.

John Tomasi: So I just want to mention that in his case, it's almost like he was on a trajectory from group identity because it is, it is a trap. It was a basic thing for us. And then another identity, the trap, as you described it, and then perhaps the monkey and resolution, we hope at the end. Let's, let's, let's, let's dig into the book. And I'd love to talk with you about the lure. As I, as I mentioned to you, when you, when you came into the offices this morning, one of the things I admire so much about this book is the way you take enormously complex and difficult literatures to read and understand, and you express them with great clarity and simplicity, and not in the sense of getting anything wrong about them, but in the sense of having the power to sort of see what's essential. So let's just, let's go through a formula that I sketched down in reading your account of the lure, this identity synthesis. It's a three-part formula that I have. Post-modernism plus post-colonialism plus critical race theory gets you something like the identity synthesis. So let's look at the pieces of that, those ingredients to that cocktail to switch metaphors. So post-modernism, you know, it's, it's a view that begins in post-war Paris, as you say, a collection of views, you should probably say, but you describe at this, this, this incredible moment, a debate in 1971 in, in the Netherlands at a university between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. What was his take at that debate?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So, you know, Foucault and Chomsky have, have, have this debate, which is, you know, quite well known and, and, and you can go and watch it on YouTube today. And it's sort of remarkable. I mean, Chomsky sort of, to my eyes, and I have to say, I'm not an expert in sartorial fashions of the early 1970s, sort of looks. Did you say sartorial fashions? Yeah, I'm not an expert on sartorial fashions of the early 1970s, or today for that matter. But to me, Chomsky sort of looks like he could be, you know, a CEO on his way to Congress to give testimony. He has a kind of quite polished look, actually. And Foucault, of course, has a sort of, you know, trademark turtleneck, which I don't know if it's consciously emulated by Steve Jobs, but certainly has a lot of similarity to Steve Jobs. And it was the first version of that, I think. He was like, he made that popular, then it got picked up by, by, by Jobs. I think it must be, yeah. And then he has this sort of shaved head and so on, and they look very different on stage, and they have very different visions of society that they, that they defend. You know, Chomsky has an account of human nature. and he has an account of a form of anarcho-syndicalism, which according to him, would, you know, make humans more free to live up to the positive elements of their nature, to, to, to be able as individuals to insensuate their nature in the world. So he sort of, you know, starts with an essential account of what a human being is, and then derives from that his preferences for the kind of society that we should live in. And Foucault sort of listens to that with bemusement, and he's a little sort of quiet at first, and then says, look, with all due respect, we have to be skeptical in any form of grand narrative. We have to be skeptical in any of these kind of broad truth claims. And no doubt, my dear Noam Chomsky, you mean well, but actually your account of human nature and your vision of society is as likely to lead us to disaster, as likely to lead us to injustice as all these other liberatory ideologies that have gone wrong. And so I think what this brings out is a few things, which really do, in strange ways for when the ideology evolves and changes significantly over time. And I think Foucault himself would be quite skeptical of what has become of these ideas today, but they take the starting point, I believe, with postmodernists and particularly Michel Foucault. And some of the core ideas that he has that are on display in this debate is first of all, the rejection of grand narratives. anything in which you have a sort of broad attempted systematic understanding of a world, which includes claims to some form of absolute truth, he's very skeptical of. And one of those things that he poses from the very beginning is any form of political or philosophical liberalism. that to him is a grand narrative that must be a question and rejected. And that's why a lot of his early work, a lot of his mature work too, is trying to point out how various elements of contemporary societies, which you might think of as progress relative to what came before. And in fact, just as oppressive and more subtle in different ways, as what, what was there in the past. but the second tradition he rejects is not just sort of, you know, Chomsky and anarcho-syndicalism, but also sort of the Marxist ideas and ideologies, which were very powerful in the powers of the 1950s, which were embraced by Jean-Paul Sartre and others who made him a kind of litmus test in intellectual life in Paris at the time. And Foucault very clearly rejects those. And that's important to understand because, there's really not been any serious scholarly attempt to understand the roots of, the ideology we're talking about so far. And I tried to do that in this book where there has been as a number of attempts by conservative public intellectuals and activists, to, to write that history in a more polemical way. And they all say it's a form of cultural Marxism that, you know, take Marxism, you take out, social class, you put in identity categories and you have exactly what we have today. And while there's certain Marxist influences, there's a certain structural similarity, I think that's profoundly wrong. And one of the reasons that's profoundly wrong is that you really start the journey with Foucault and Foucault, in ways were quite costly to him at the time, politically and in other ways, you know, rejects Marxism alongside these other grand narratives. Nice. And so you, you described the sartorial, look of, of Foucault versus Chomsky. I think of them as being Chomsky looking like an engineer. Actually, we might say an enlightenment engineer, a person who believes in grand narratives in the sense that he thinks you can have premises, work up a theory, have a, have a solution, believes in knowledge and that sort of objective, ahistorical, trans-historical sense. And now Foucault is coming in as the artist saying, the engineering is not going to work. All the things you think, all the girders, the rivets, all the stuff you want to use to build are not what you think they are. And I'm, I was reminded of, a book by John, a phrase by John Gray in his book, False Dawn, where John Gray says that of, of Marxism and, and Foucault, I'm sorry, and Chomsky is a type of Marxist, a socialist of a sort, but Gray says about Marxism and liberalism that they're both enlightenment twins, that these are both grand narratives. They're both believe that on a sense of knowledge, a sense of progress, a sense of intellectual coherence in our concepts and goals that we should work to build toward. And so we think of Marxism and liberalism as great rivals, and they are, but as Gray points out, there are rivals within this enlightenment framework. Right, right.

John Tomasi: And postmodernism is attacking the entire framework, right? That's what you're saying about Foucault.

Yascha Mounk: That's exactly right. I mean, you can be on two football teams that oppose and hate each other, but that makes you somewhat structurally similar, right?

John Tomasi: You're still playing football.

Yascha Mounk: Still playing football, yeah. And I think in the same way- As opposed to painting or drawing or whatever you put- Right. Liberalism is a tradition that, that, that I'm very sympathetic to. And I think of myself as a liberal and Marxism is a tradition I, you know, I respect and have learned from, but I disagree with in profound ways, do in those ways share structural similarities. And the sort of form of postmodernism that Foucault embraces rejects both of those exactly for reasons you outline. And so there's two key moves he makes that really undermine those categories. The first is actually a deep skepticism towards basic categories of identity. so Foucault, you know, would in our language today be homosexual. I suppose that sounds a little bit old fashioned. He would be gay. I guess perhaps someone might, has it the claim, which he would have hated, but he's LGBT, et cetera. he was a man who had sex with men. but he didn't like that category. He thought that the idea of a homosexual was a modern invention that, emphasized certain aspects of sexual activity over others and were therefore constraining where actually stood in the way of true sexual self-expression and the variety of experience, of various people who might all be lumped into that category together. And he thought that not just about the term homosexual, but about many different basic terms of identity. So really ironically, at the, at the origin of the identity trap stands a great skepticism about the very feasibility of stable, categories of identity in particular of kind of essentialist accounts of them that philosophers have usually tried to give. And the other key move is his critique of how we think about power, right? When you ask your undergrad, what is political power, but have some story about how the president or the prime minister, you know, perhaps through separation of powers, if they're thinking a little bit, and perhaps they won't think about that as sort of commanding, you know, as commander in chief. And then that's sort of how power travels, right? From the top of the state on down. and Foucault says, well, you know, that's, that's part of it, but really the most important forms of social and political power come in discourses, come in the way in which the conversations, we have, the way we frame things, the concepts we use, the identity categories we use, determine and constrain, the repertoire of actions that's available to us. and, and this helps to explain that kind of quietism that so shocked Chomsky, because he ends up saying, look, you can try and disrupt a particular discourse. And there might be kind of a moment of freedom, a liberatory potential in that disruption, but a new discourse will emerge and reconfigure itself. And most likely that's going to be as oppressive as the preexisting set of discourses. That's why, when I had, Noam Chomsky, who is an interesting guy with whom I also have my disagreements on my podcast, on the good fight, about a year and a half ago, this is 50 years, nearly to the day after this debate he had had with Foucault. He said, he still seemed shaken up by it. He said, Foucault was the most amoral, not immoral, but amoral person I've ever met. I mean, he just could not get his hand around that kind of form of political quietism of sorts, even for Foucault was very politically active, that, that, that came from the basic starting point, of his, philosophical thought. And on that point about power, I think it's so fundamental to understanding postmodernism, what, what the power conception is. And one way to think about it might be this, we could say that, you know, liberals and Marxists have conceptions of power that put power out there as something that could be used or changed and turned to the good. So for example, for liberals, they see powers being exercised by the state. And so they see the state as a possible ameliorative force in the world. Marxists, radicals tend to think of power as being in the structure, like the system as power. But, but, and Foucault's idea is more, it's more, corrosive and in some ways claims to be more powerful than that because Foucault sees power everywhere and coming from everything in a way that makes it very difficult to even begin the conversation about power. How do we make a better world? Yeah. I mean, if you think of power as being exercised by the bourgeoisie as a Marxist might, then, you know, fighting against capitalists is a good way of taking on power, right? If you think of power as being exercised by state institutions, then overthrowing, oppressive state institutions like dictatorships, or fighting for more gradualist reforms, of, democratic institutions that are exclusionary in various ways, the natural ways of protecting the victims of power, right? And this is where Marxists and liberals respectively end up. If you think of power as being everywhere, as in hearing in the basic categories we use to talk about the world, it's not nearly as clear what kind of political implication that has. And, and that's what the people who end up being really influenced by Foucault and other postmodernists and poststructuralists really grapple with, right? They like the idea in which what they think of as sort of, you know, oppressive ideas of the world at the time, which had justified racial discrimination, which had justified colonial domination, right? they want to take a sledgehammer to this, understandably in many ways. And, and, and they find that sledgehammer in the thought of people like Foucault, but then they also are stuck with something that doesn't actually give them the makings of political agency. And so they're stuck with this intellectual dilemma of how do you then re-politicize what somebody like Chomsky perceived as this deeply apolitical, amoral set of ideas.

John Tomasi: And I think that brings us to, Edward Said. So Said's book, Orientalism comes out in 1978. That great debate that you're, you're referencing to describe so vividly, vividly in the book is in 1971. So we're in our, we have postmodernism in the background, this very powerful, disruptive discourse, destroying knowledge, challenging power, spreading philosophical concept. And Said now is concerned about some of the things you mentioned, post-colonialism or colonialism and pushing against it. What's Said's contribution to the, to the cocktail? So ingredient one, like I said, there's three big ingredients of the, so there's post-modernism, there's post-colonialism, plus CRT is going to get us the identity synthesis. Let's talk about post-colonialism. What was Said's contribution?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So Said, argues and recognizes that, many of the ways in which, Western colonial powers had been able to exercise control over those colonized states was with a set of assumption about what is Western and what is Eastern and what is Oriental, right? They constructed this idea of the East, which, you know, encompassed ironically in a similar way to the label of Asian American today. you know, everything from, the Indian subcontinent to East Asia, to, to, to Southeast Asia, as well as, you know, in that context, parts of the Middle East, and then made various claims and assumptions about, Oriental peoples and cultures, that helped to justify the project of colonial domination.

John Tomasi: Exotification, othering, as we know.

Yascha Mounk: Exotification, othering, the claim that they were somehow, that they had a, a, a, quote, immature mind, that they were not as capable of self-government as various Western countries.

John Tomasi: Ideas from John Stuart Mill about certain, certain societies being in the, in their non-age, meaning more tutoring from the more advanced societies, for example.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So, so, so a lot of the justification in particular of the British Empire, which is relevant to, to Said as somebody who grows up in, in Palestine and then in, in Egypt, was that we're not sort of here for permanent, domination. We're just tutors to immature nations that, you know, we will set free once they have reached their kind of maturity, which they happen to not reach year after year, but one day, right. And it's true that a lot of, hostility of, members of post-colonial tradition towards liberalism comes from the fact that there were liberals who embraced that claim. So, by the way, one of the sort of under, recognized elements is that Karl Marx had a very parallel view.

John Tomasi: Good. Excellent. I was just thinking that.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. In really interesting ways. So actually, you know, Marx argued in particular about India that, you know, the country is not economically mature enough for socialism.

John Tomasi: That's right. That's right.

Yascha Mounk: In part because the plots of land and agriculture were too small and divided up as you actually needed colonial domination to, unify those plots and make the country ready for forms of socialist industry and agriculture. And so in a very strange way that's often left out of these conversations where Marx is valorized and liberals are sometimes vilified, Marx of the time had this parallel set of, of assumptions. If Mill is guilty, as I believe on this point he is, Marx is, is, is equally guilty.

John Tomasi: And again, we can say, we might say that liberalism, it shows again that, that John Gray point about, about Marxism and liberalism being enlightenment twins. They're both looking to this certain theory about the world could be like a solution as it were for people, how people live together. And they think there are stages societies need to go through that are set and that are knowable to get there. But what does Said do?

Yascha Mounk: So, so that's part of it. I wonder what another part of it is simply that, you know, in particular moments, as we know well today in certain contexts, there's just a tremendous political imperative to get on board of certain views. And so any ideology that's around at that time is going to be under pressure to somehow justify those views, even if rightly understood, it shouldn't follow from the first principles of that theory. And there's always a way to get to X, right? I mean, if you somehow need to gerrymander your assumptions and your theory in such a way as to somehow come up with some semi-plausible account of why a particular view is acceptable within it, an enterprising thinker will always manage to do that. And I think that that's sort of part of what's going on here. But you rightly asked me to get back to Said. So, Said explicitly uses Foucault in Orientalism, this book that becomes a huge surprise success and bestseller, really launches Said.

John Tomasi: A massive seller for an academic book. It's incredible.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. I mean, I mean, you know, over 500,000 copies, I believe. I mean, you know, really a major book. And Foucault is the first thinker who is cited in the book. He's cited repeatedly. He's one of the only thinkers cited in the book in a positive way. So it's very clear that Foucault influences this. But especially after the publication of Orientalism, and especially in the interpreters of Said, they start to be a little bit uncomfortable with the quietest implications of Foucault. So look, it's one thing to unmask and show how this discourse of Orientalism has helped these unjust forms of oppression. But we just don't, we don't just want to make an academic point. We don't just want to point that out. We want to use discourse analysis, discourse critique to invert those power structures, to actually give power to those that had been historically robbed off it. And that's a very...

John Tomasi: So they're struggling towards a theory of social justice now, out of the ruins, you might say, of this postmodern or the breaking of the paradigms of postmodernism. There's now a stirring to try to find something like a route towards making the world a better place.

Yascha Mounk: Yes. So they're sort of operating within some of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, but they wanted to, they want to make it more political than something like Foucault would have been comfortable with, I believe. And so this becomes the starting point of one of the themes of the identity synthesis we see today, which is that a big part of how to do politics. And this is certainly something that I see very strongly in my students. It's just an unspoken assumption that if to do politics, it's not necessarily to push for this or that law. I mean, they recognize that might be one form of doing politics, but the form of putting politics that comes more naturally to them is a politicized form of discourse critique, right? It is to call out the latest Netflix movie for somehow perpetuating oppressive narratives about marginalized groups, right? It is to unmask power is an end, is a political end in itself. To unmask power and then to change the categories of the discourse in order to exercise positive, liberatory political power, right? So, so, so it's not just that you resist the oppressive power, this Netflix movie by pointing out how it's unjust. It's that you then call for forms of cultural representation, which will in themselves somehow, in ways that are not always spelled out, bring political progress in its wake or come hand in hand with political progress. So that, I think, is what the identity synthesis takes from Said. And in parallel, there is a second strain of post-colonial thinking embodied in Gayatri Spivak, who also becomes a professor at Columbia, whose different origins growing up in Kolkata, in Bengal, in the east of India. And she is struck, she herself is a translator of key postmodern texts, deeply steeped in postmodern thought. She, in her writing, also sounds more postmodern than a lot of the other thinkers that I discuss. If you take a sentence of hers, you can sort of immediately see that she's a postmodernist of sorts.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Yascha Mounk: And she is a little shocked when she sees Michel Foucault and another French thinker have an exchange in which they say, look, you know, there's been this sort of Marxist idea of intellectuals as the avant-garde of the oppressed. But we should reject that. You know, the oppressed can speak for themselves. It's not our job to speak for the workers, you know, in the poor quarters of Paris. And Spivak reasonably says, look, perhaps that's true of a, you know, worker in France who has a, you know, has a certain amount of social standing, who probably had a relatively good education, who at least is literate, who's not worried about having a dinner to come home to. But it's not true of the kinds of, she calls them subaltern people, of the kinds of deeply oppressed people that I grew up around. She herself was a very different social standing in Kolkata, right? But actually there, it is much harder for people to speak for themselves. And so therefore we do need to somehow try and speak for the most oppressed people. But here there's a problem because she buys the critique of essentialist accounts of identity that people like Foucault and later Derrida and Deleuze emphasize. So she doesn't believe in essentialist accounts of identity. And yet she's saying, if I'm going to speak on behalf of a subaltern, I need to have identity categories to operate with because I need to be speaking on behalf of somebody. And that's an identity category. And so she says, look, sort of in this paradoxical way, and she acknowledges it's a paradox, but she explicitly says she doesn't want to resolve. We have to embrace what she calls strategic essentialism. So we have to hold in our head at the same time, the thought that essentialist accounts of identity are wrong, and that for strategic purposes, we will act as though they were true. And why are we doing that? We're doing that in order to encourage people to organize along identity lines to overcome the kind of identity-based oppression that they have experienced in the past. And here again, this becomes a foundation of a lot of ways of talking, a lot of concrete practices of people who embrace the identity synthesis today. The first of these is, you know, you'll hear, I hear my students say this all the time, race is a social construct, but broadly speaking, I agree with. And then in the next sentence, they go on to talk about race as though it was completely true, right? As though there was something essential about race that determines, for example, your political beliefs in the ways that some congresspeople talk about it, that, you know, a black person has to be a black voice, right?

John Tomasi: And a white person cannot help but be a white voice, for example.

Yascha Mounk: Yes. So you go from this acknowledgement of essentialist accounts of identity being wrong as a kind of lip service to then very quickly actually embracing very essentialist ways of who you are and how we can understand each other and how to do political action. And that helps to explain those pedagogical practices I briefly mentioned earlier. Why are institutions like Dalton School in, I mean, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or Bank Street School close to Columbia University or Sidwell Friends in D.C. and Harvard Westlake in L.A.? Why are they trying to encourage their students to be racial beings in many contexts? Because they think that this form of strategic essentialism is necessary for historically oppressed groups to stand up against injustice. That is the sort of legacy of strategic essentialism.

John Tomasi: So we have the first ingredient, postmodernism, which is a rejection of grand narratives. That's going to be one important piece of it, one important part of the stew. Now we have postcolonialism from Said and Spivak, which gives us an important idea about strategic essentialism, that there is going to be a group to be defended, that there are going to be categories of oppressed and oppressor, that are going to be meaningful. So the stage is set for some sort of political action. And now we move to critical race theory, the third big ingredient to the synthesis.

Yascha Mounk: And the one thing I'd add, one other thing we get from postcolonialism is this sort of politicized form of discourse analysis.

John Tomasi: Really, the way to do political action is this form of discourse analysis. That's right. So discourse analysis is for political ends.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. The way to do politics today is to praise or critique the Barbie movie, right? That's sort of the way to be a feminist today.

John Tomasi: It's the way to be political.

Yascha Mounk: Yes.

John Tomasi: It's a political action. So critical race theory. Critical race theory is born, I'm not sure where exactly you think it's born. Is it born at Harvard with Derrick Bell? Yes, I would say at Harvard Law School. Yes. And the context there, I think, is critical legal studies, the movement that's very skeptical of interpretation because words are always ambiguous. There's a subtle indeterminacy of language, which makes law unstable and unreliable and actually just an expression of power. What's, what's, what's, what's Bell, what's Bell's role? What's he, what's he doing at Harvard?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So Derrick Bell is a fascinating figure and in many ways a very sympathetic figure. He, you know, he starts out really wanting to be a civil rights lawyer. He has this fateful encounter early on with Judge Hastie, one of the first African-American judges, who basically tells this, you know, young man, you know, well, it's, you know, it's very admirable, but unfortunately you were born a few decades too late. So he sort of fobs him off with a claim that, you know, the big legal victories have been won and all that's left to do is a little bit of cleaning up. So he's speaking about the civil rights, the big civil rights victories. Yes. and so, and, Bell rightly doesn't quite, quite buy that. he does succeed in becoming a civil rights lawyer. he works, effectively for the NAACP, for much of the 1960s, helping to desegregate schools and other, you know, establishments and businesses, throughout the American South and beyond in the 1960s. But as he's litigating those cases is becoming disenchanted with some of the real shortcomings of, you know, how the civil rights victories in courts translate into reality. Some of the ways in which institutions can be very resistant to integration and some integrated schools are deprived of, resources or, sometimes end up discriminating against black teachers and so on. And these are all critiques that I think are well-founded and fair, but he then takes a really very radical inference and conclusion from that. He comes to agree, as he says, in one of the foundational texts of critical race theory explicitly to agree in that sense with conservative segregationist senators, but actually civil rights lawyers like Bell himself had not been arguing on behalf of the true interests of their clients. But they were superimposing their liberal, you know, civil rights-y ideology of desegregation, onto cases, onto clients, but actually just wanted a better education for their kids, for example. And in some cases Bell came to believe that better education would have been better achieved by building schools that were, separate, but quote unquote separate, but truly equal.

John Tomasi: Right. And so that's, so we have this thing where the civil rights movement is advocating for a kind of universalism, the idea of a ideally colorblind society, pursuing policies like integration or busing that integrated the schools. But now Bell's saying, well, let's actually, let's talk to the community members and see what they think about this. And we're finding that they're not happy with the way things are turning out under this, as a society becomes more neutral, he's saying, perhaps it's becoming less just or more oppressive. Is that, is that, is that, is that too strong or is that right?

Yascha Mounk: Yes.

John Tomasi: Or, or, or I suppose equally oppressive, that, you know, all of these changes aren't in fact helping.

Yascha Mounk: And the only thing that really would help is to, you know, treat people as members of groups and then increase resources to those groups that have historically been, marginalized. and so it really is a very fundamental rejection of Brown versus Board of Education.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Yascha Mounk: and of what he calls, you know, the quote unquote defunct racial equality ideology of a civil rights movement. And he makes fun in his writings of we shall overcome as a kind of theme song of the civil rights movement.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: And so I think what's, what's, what's important to understand here is both that, Derrick Bell and later other theorists within the tradition of critical race theory are smart, sophisticated thinkers who, you can learn from, from reading and to have some important insights. even though I disagree quite strongly, with, with, with, with the conclusion they come to. And that, so, so that some of the sort of polemical attacks on CRT that you see on Fox News these days, I think are generally just, not intellectually serious. at the same time, I also find myself equally alienated from some of the defenses of, of, of critical race theory, which pretend that, you know, critical race theory, as the name kind of suggests without context, it's just wanting to be critical about the history of race in the United States. And, you know, all that CRT theorists want is to sort of make sure that kids, as they of course should be, are taught about, you know, the history of slavery and ongoing forms of injustice and so on. I mean, if you read the founding figures of critical race theory, they explicitly set themselves up against the black liberal tradition in American political thought from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. And later to, to Barack Obama, Kimberlé Crenshaw, another key figure in the tradition, goes on to say that the key tenets of CRT are fundamentally at odds with a political philosophy of Barack Obama. So, the critiques of it as just sort of stupid and whatever, are certainly wrong. Some of the defenses of it as, you know, just being sort of socially progressive on questions of race are equally wrong. This is an ideology that sets itself up very explicitly in opposition to philosophical liberalism and very explicitly in opposition to the key tenets of the civil rights movement.

John Tomasi: So we have Derrick Bell now at Harvard Law School in the seventies, arguing for something like separate, but truly equal, rejecting the civil rights movement in some really important ways. And now we have, Bell gets an offer to leave, to go to, or to go to Oregon. So he leaves Harvard to become the provost, I think.

Yascha Mounk: I believe the dean of a law school, yeah.

John Tomasi: Dean of a law school, right. what happens at Harvard when he leaves?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah, so it's this really interesting moment where Bell was teaching, where Bell was teaching this sort of proto-course on critical race theory, within the law school. And, he was attracting a lot of students to it. It was a hugely popular class.

John Tomasi: Very popular class.

Yascha Mounk: And then he leaves, and the dean of a law school, the old civil rights guy, says, well, let's, you know, hire some civil rights lawyers to, to teach classes in civil rights law. and he's saying, no, no, that's not what Bell was doing. That's not what we want. So here, too, we see that attention, that, that opposition. And a, I believe at that time, one L, a first year law student by the name of Kimberlé Crenshaw says, well, we'll run our own course.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Yascha Mounk: And we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll organize a course in this tradition, and we'll bring in a few other scholars from other universities that will somehow fly in.

John Tomasi: This is, this is about 1980 or so, early 1980s.

Yascha Mounk: Yes, yeah. I believe it may be exactly 1980, perhaps it's one or two years after that. and so, you know, that course in a way really becomes the kernel of an institutionalized form of critical race view.

John Tomasi: So we already have some of the key texts by Derrick Bell that set these ideas, including the idea, but we haven't quite mentioned yet, of the permanence of racism.

Yascha Mounk: His claim that, you know, America in 1976, but he continued to believe this until he passed away. And so, so Crenshaw and these other, young students, as well as some people already, you know, postdocs or perhaps, assistant professors, organize this course and, and come to know each other and form a kind of academic grouping and social set. and we come into their own, and we come into their own, they start off institutionally as part of, as you mentioned, critical legal studies. So there to, the connection to most modernism is very clear, but they sort of, set off on their own because they say, you know, critical legal studies has some of the right tools, but they're just not taking race seriously enough. And so, we need to, we need to strike out on our own and she later coins about 10 years after this, the term critical race theory for kind of summer workshop, that she runs. and she also, contributes one of a key idea of critical race theory, which is intersectionality.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Yascha Mounk: Now the origin of intersectionality, John and I both had the pleasure or sometimes, perhaps not the pleasure of teaching political science departments. our empirical colleagues would have known in a sense as an interaction effect, which is the recognition that, to take a really simplistic example, if I go outside without an umbrella, but it doesn't rain, I don't get wet. And if I go outside without an umbrella and it rains, I don't get wet. But if I go outside without an umbrella and it rains, then I get wet.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: So, there's an additive quality, there's something that goes beyond the additive quality of certain causal factors.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: And what Crenshaw rightly points out is that in certain contexts in the United States, in a General Motors factory in Michigan, for example, where she shows this concretely, you know, black men weren't being discriminated against in a particular context. White women weren't being discriminated against, but black women, for various historical reasons, where. And so we can't just understand the oppression of black women as the additive sum of the oppression, experience, they experience on the basis of a race and on the basis of a gender. There's something that goes beyond that. And the American civil rights law at the time was not able to recognize that in the right way. And, these, workers at the factory were not able to get legal recourse, even for that clearly experienced discrimination. That was a quite straightforward, but important insight, that, that rightly, came to have a lot of influence. The way in which intersectionality was then interpreted, by other people in the tradition went well beyond that and really started to fuse with what philosophers would know a standpoint of epistemology with the idea that if I stand at a particular kind of intersection of identity, if I'm a black woman, for example. I really cannot, you know, understand somebody who stands at a different kind of intersection of identity. So we really cannot understand each other if we have these different socially salient, characteristics. And so therefore, the more privileged need to defer to the more oppressed in important ways. Since I can't understand you, we can't quite make common political cause. So the only real form of political solidarity is for me to sort of defer my judgment to you. Again, this is not, how Crenshaw defines intersectionality, but it is, the way in which intersectionality then enters the lexicon of contemporary social justice movements. And so, you know, you, you very nicely listed the themes that came out of the earlier chapters we were talking about, the themes that come out of critical race theory, I would say are the rejection of universal solutions. so the idea that to make real progress, you have to reject even things like Brown versus Board, as, as, as Bell would have argued in order to have much more group specific remedies. So the deep pessimism about the ability of democratic liberal societies to make progress, the claim that, you know, America in 2000 is as racist as it was in 1950, which then gets mirrored, you know, in, in a lot of gay activism today, which claims that America is as homophobic as it was 40 years ago, by feminists who claim that America is as sexist as it was 50 years ago. And so on and so on and so forth. And finally, this embrace of the sort of broadened understanding of intersectionality as meaning that we really can't understand each other if we're at different intersections of identity. And when you take these different themes we mentioned together, and I do think we get to something like an identity synthesis, like a set of different themes and ideas that really become foundational to how a lot of scholars and then a lot of ordinary people and students and, political activists see the world.

John Tomasi: let me ask you about, let me ask you about, about that synthesis. We're now bringing these pieces together. there's an article published by Susan Moller Okin, a very famous liberal feminist. I think the article came out in the late eighties, maybe early, it was called early nineties. It was called is multiculturalism bad for women. And Susan was asking sort of using liberal premises. Can the interest of these different oppressed groups conflict with one another? With Crenshaw, the idea of intersectional analysis seems to lead to some idea of political action that doesn't allow, doesn't allow for the possibility of the marginalized being opposed to one another. Is that right? Is that, help me understand how the intersectional analysis of injustice, which we've been talking about from Crenshaw say, leads to an intersectional analysis of political action. Whereas I think of it, all good things go together. At least that's the, that's the assumption of some of these programs, like the third world transition program. You bring in all the different marginalized groups and they're all a group now. So what, what, what is that about? How, how, what, what, the lure has this feature, I think that it's not just your group that's there. It's that it's, it's a group that you're part of. That's a solid, there's a kind of solidarity now being made possible. Can you say more about that?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. Better than I just tried to.

John Tomasi: No, no.

Yascha Mounk: so, so, so, so there's a real tension here within the tradition. you know, Crenshaw herself, wrote quite interestingly and persuasively on the way in which different oppressed identity groups can come into conflict. So one of the things that she writes about in a paper that's much cited and that, you know, honestly, nowadays, might be difficult to, to get published in an academic journal or in a more, more, you know, or, or, or, you know, in, in a different kind of form as an op-ed in, in the main newspapers and magazines of this country. She writes about how forms of effectively political correctness are making it hard to talk about violence against black women within their own communities, because people are so reluctant to, portray or be seen to portray somehow black men as being violent. and so she certainly in her work is aware of the ways in which, sort of claims of marginalization, and the realities of oppression within marginalized groups that can coexist with that, make it hard to talk about those things. but there isn't an interpretation of intersectionality that comes about particularly in these politically activist spaces, which is much more simplistic and which basically goes something like this. all forms of oppression are interrelated. and so if we want to overcome oppression, we have to all stand together and overcome all of those forms of oppression. And so if you are, you know, a feminist who is upset about various ways in which women are disadvantaged in our society today, to be an activist in good standing, you also have to oppose all of these other ways. In which, you might, in which, you might, in which there's oppression in the world. So for example, you have to get on board with a particular reading of Israel-Palestine conflict and fight on behalf of the oppressed Palestinians. And if you don't do that, then you really cannot be a member in good standing of our sort of broader political movement. And you've seen that play out in the last decade, with greater and greater demands on political orthodoxy, not just within an organization, where it's environmentalist that you have to, you know, agree to, reject nuclear power, even though you might think that that could be one of the solutions to climate change or something like that. But that in order to be in good standing in your environmentalist groups, you also have to agree on feminism. And you also have to agree on questions about trans stuff. And you also have to agree on Israel-Palestine. Now, I do want to point out in part about Crenshaw and in part about all of these thinkers that we've talked about, that this is, you know, a case very familiar to anybody who has intellectual history of careful what you wish for. But often the way in which ideas play out would look alien and in some cases shocking to the people who, set the train in motion. Crenshaw, who perhaps is most broadly on board with the identity synthesis as it is today, has some misgivings about how the term of intersectionality is being used today. She's told, Jane Coaston, who's now at the New York Times in an interview a number of years ago that, you know, sometimes I see, somebody talk about intersectionality and I ask, you know, I wonder whose intersectionality this is. I wonder who defined it this way. And I look at the footnotes and the footnote goes to me. And I think that's not my intersectionality, right? So she, I think, understands that many of the ways in which that term is now used goes well beyond her more scrupulous use of the term. you know, Gayatri Spivak, to go back a step, you know, spoke, with a lot of humor and, I mean, nearly a little bit polemically about the humorlessness of many of the people who sort of guard identity temples in, in contemporary universities. She, you know, referring to chai wallahs in the streets of India who sell cups of tea, she talked about the identity wallahs at American universities. you know, Said, emphasized that victimhood is not something to be reveled in, but the point is not to entrench victimhood, but to overcome it, to make sure that people are less, defined by, by, by the status as victims. and Foucault, who, you know, passed away of, of, of HIV in the, of AIDS in the 1980s, didn't quite live long enough, sadly, to be able to, you know, really position himself, with regard to some of the later developments of the identity synthesis. But, but, but, but, but in my mind, he would have been, quite clearly an opponent of them, both because these movements now are so based on simplistic notions of identity, both because they themselves have become a grand narrative where, you know, some of those lovely students and smart students we have see themselves as foot soldiers in a grand march towards progress that Foucault would immediately have recognized as a grand narrative. and because I think some of our social customs resemble, one of his most famous fears, which is that of a panopticon.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Yascha Mounk: Because today on social media, his fear in the panopticon was that,

John Tomasi: Foucault's fear.

Yascha Mounk: Foucault's fear that sort of, you know, in, in, in, in a prison that's designed by, by, by, by Jeremy Bentham, as he imagined it, there would be a, a prison guard in the middle who is able to look into the cells for prisoners, but no prisoners at any time knows what they're being observed. And so, you know, that means that sometimes they'll be punished for infractions of the rules, but most of the time they're going to self-discipline, they're going to self-govern and anticipatory obedience because they never know when they might be observed. And I think that some of the forms of, fear about what you can say and how you might be treated if you're seen as violating some not clearly defined line that we have today, in part because of social media and part because of people who've been, fired or vilified for tweets they've liked and things like that. I think are actually a very effective modern day form of a panopticon. And, I, I imagine that Foucault would have, would have, would have, would have believed that and recognized that for, I know it's always a, hazardous business to, you know, to, to, to impute views to people who've, who've passed away.

John Tomasi: We've been focusing on the lure, what it is, the thing that within the trap that draws people and the lure, as you describe it as something like this, perhaps a new ideology of a sort called you, that you call the identity synthesis among its characteristics of the way it pops up. You say that it, it involves a rejection of the existence, a rejection of the idea that there's objective truth. it involves a deep pessimism about the possibility of overcoming racism or other forms of, bigotry, you might say. it involves a preference for public policies that explicitly and permanently perhaps distinguish people on the basis of their identity groups, a rejection of the civil rights paradigm. It also involves the idea that groups are fundamentally unable to communicate with each other, that where our, our essence is, is, is a kind of identitarianism along an ugly word. Did you coin that word, by the way? Is that your, where's that from?

Yascha Mounk: No, I, I, I think some people have used that.

John Tomasi: It's really, that's a really ugly word.

Yascha Mounk: It's not, but it's, but it's, yeah, it's not what it is, but it's not, you know, it's hard to pronounce. It's, it's not gonna, it's not gonna make it as a term in broad, in broad currency, but I think it does actually get to the heart of it.

John Tomasi: So about what's gonna make it as a term, that's right. Let's move now to this other part of your book. So this complicated theory with these really obscure roots that we've been talking about and these different pieces that I just sort of listed a few of them, perhaps shockingly, it leaps from the universities into our society and goes mainstream. At one point, you talk about the short, taking a short march through institutions. Tell us something about, tell us something about how the identity thesis escaped campus and how it seems to have conquered or at least entered the mainstream.

Yascha Mounk: So far, we've basically talked about the first part of the book, which is where these ideas actually come from. The second part of the book asked, well, how do they become influential? Because in 2010, these ideas certainly had, you know, gained a real foothold in law schools, in parts of law schools. They were quite dominant in certain kind of departments and disciplines, certainly in things like African-American studies, Asian-American studies, gender studies, media studies, but also to some extent in comparative literature and perhaps English departments and so on, right?

John Tomasi: So we're still on campus.

Yascha Mounk: We're still on campus. And, you know, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in the early 2010s, writes an article celebrating the 30th anniversary of critical race theory, you know, harking back to that course they taught at Harvard Law School. And she says, look, we've gained a lot of influence on campus, and that's wonderful. But sadly, we're just very far away from having any mainstream influence. And Barack Obama is not our guy at all, and, you know, our ideas are just not really going to have an influence in mainstream institutions. And 10 years later, we do. 10 years later, much less sophisticated thinkers and theorists, inspired clearly by the critical, by the identity synthesis and the sort of popularized form of it, which takes shape in the intervening decade. At the top of the New York Times bestseller list, people like Robin DiAngelo.

John Tomasi: It's just remarkable.

Yascha Mounk: It's just remarkable. They, you know, are on all the late night television shows and they're invited to every corporate gathering to speak to the employees of these S&P 500 companies. So it's something really remarkable that happens in that decade.

John Tomasi: And as scholars, we know that. We've been watching these ideas bubbling up before we were scholars. In fact, postmodernism was beginning and growing. And this is the long movement we've been hearing about, those of us who live on campuses. And it's been pretty amazing and shocking to see this doctrine, which was still marginalized and under attack in some quarters on universities intellectually, suddenly take that leap into the mainstream. You talk about social media playing an important role in that. Can you tell us about that?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So one of the key ways in which social media plays that role is that it just encourages an emphasis on identity in ways that people had not predicted when, you know, the internet is invented. And we go, amazing, this is going to reduce the cost of communication. People are going to communicate with people who are really far away from them, who are very different from them. But in fact, it turns out that when the costs of communication are very low, instead of communicating with a person who's in the, you know, in your physical proximity, who might share some similarities or some differences, you're going to go and seek out some of the people online who are most similar to you.

John Tomasi: That was the big twist, right? People were thinking, this is going to be a democratizing, universalizing, universalizing, you might say, medium. But it turned out not to be that way.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. I mean, that's why, you know, the world is not, in fact, flat. But, you know, I had to think of this recently because somebody called this new amazing thing. Google has these new earbuds, which apparently can do sort of live translation when you listen, when you talk to people. And somebody called it a Babelfish in reference to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But, of course, Douglas Adams went on to say something like, I'm going to somewhat butcher the quote, you know, the poor Babelfish in allowing distant civilizations to communicate with each other was responsible for more wars and terror than any other invention in human history. I mean, there's a kind of, you know, Adams, who's always a good, wry, smart thinker in his fiction, sort of predicted that twist in a way. But what happens in part here is that actually, so we end up organizing around identity categories in social media often. And we also end up inventing new identity categories. So, you know, one of the basic things about identity is that I need a certain number of people to share it in order to have it, right? And identity is something social. And so it requires a few different people to embrace it in order for us to be able to say, hey, this is our new identity group. And, you know, for teenagers who are most involved in and obsessed with sort of self-categorization and so on, right? As they're trying to find out the world. Who am I?

John Tomasi: Right. Am I an Exeter student? Am I Asian American?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah, which is a hell, I mean, normally a healthy part of human development.

John Tomasi: Of course. Before it is like, you have a kid of your parents and that's it. And after that, you have to find your own autonomous identity.

Yascha Mounk: You know, in the analog world, there's a real limit to the kind of identity groups you could become a part of. Because you need a minimum number of people. And the only feasible group is the people who are around you in a high school or something like that. Or perhaps some church community that you go to on Sundays. And so you end up with the jocks and the theater kids and the, you know, whatever in the kind of American context, right? Now you have the introduction of something like Tumblr, which is, I think, actually the most important social media platform for understanding the changes over the last 10 years. And the one that has been nearly completely forgotten. And where you are able to label yourself and then find people with similar kinds of labels and to share very easily memes and jokes and ideas. And so that's a place where you get this real proliferation of new identity categories. You suddenly have people who consider themselves demisexual, for example, or who coin new forms of gender identity. You coin all of these new forms of self-identification. And it's a platform used mostly by teenagers and people in the early 20s. And that becomes a very vibrant world of self-exploration and of invention of new identity groups. And then it needs some kind of overarching ideology to hold together these different identitarian tribes, to hold together these different people defining themselves in these different ways. And that's where you start to have a kind of implicit popularized form of the identity synthesis of we can't understand each other. We have to refer to each other. The question is who is most oppressed. We use discourse analysis to continually call out people who are problematic and so on and so forth. And then you start having that being translated into the written form at first through things like thought catalog or website where everybody could basically be published and which hosted all kinds of content. But one important corner of that content was the first written form of a popularized version of the identity synthesis. You then started having websites, this is where I came across it, like everydayfeminism.com. I remember sitting as a graduate student in the computer room of my department, somehow coming across this website and really thinking, wow, these ideas that I knew sort of from the seminar room and that I'd encountered in some courses and so on, had now been memefied in a sort of listical form that was popular at the time, that I was sort of inspired by BuzzFeed. You know, five things you can say to your yoga teacher who thinks that cultural appropriation is fun, right? Or like, you know, you think you're a breast man, here's why that's problematic.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Yascha Mounk: You know, seven things you can do, you know, against white supremacy and so on. So these ideas that were seen so abstract and so abstruse are now proving to be highly actionable in the world. If you're a young person wanting to stand out, wanting to identify with a group, wanting to do something, wanting to change something for the better, let's say, here's action you can do. You can call out your yoga teacher, for example, or whoever it might be. Yeah, and it harkens back to some of the themes we talked about, right? Like the politicized form of discourse analysis, right? A good way to be popular activist is to, you know, tell your yoga teacher that they're culturally appropriating and so on. But it is really also the sort of foundation of sort of, yes, this popularized version of these ideas that are suddenly able to be digested into a form that a 15-year-old can understand and can base their own political commitments around. And those ideas then very quickly enter the mainstream, in part because there's a technological shift where most content starts to be consumed through social media rather than by going on the website of a publication. And that means that the average article doesn't have to have as broad an audience. It's fine for a publication to have 10 niche articles, each of which travels within a particular kind of identity network on social media, rather than having one article or five articles that are appealing to most of their readers. And then under tremendous economic pressure, mainstream newspapers and cable news channels and so on see some of those very viral articles embracing this popularized version of the identity synthesis from a first-person perspective often. And they hire those writers who are able to get those clicks into those newspapers. And so very quickly, an idea that starts in a way on Tumblr and in these really quite obscure places comes by 2020 to dominate the op-ed coverage of some places like the New York Times, at least for a while.

John Tomasi: You describe in a very rich section of your book how mainstream news outlets become increasingly reliant on social media because of the possibility of virality. You talk about the role of college graduates now having walked off, learned these ideas on campuses and entering the workforce, carrying with them, thinking about discourse, discourse rationalized as a way to change the world and their local worlds. You talk about the role of Donald Trump and the effect of all that. And so this, and you described the short marks through institutions, again, that lovely phrase. I wonder if we could talk a bit about how push, how one might push back or why one might push back. And so you're interested in the idea of contrasting the identity trap with, and the identity synthesis with something, a version of universalism. Can you tell us something about moving now towards thinking about responding and about how to analyze it itself? You list three logical underpinnings of the identity thesis. I'll just kind of read them out to you as I wrote them down. To understand the world, we must look through the prism of a group identities. Another is that universal values are masks for power. I'm changing your language into my own language though. And that to build a just world, we must treat citizens differently, in different ways, permanently perhaps. So those are, that's my interpretation of sort of three main theses that you describe as sort of the logical foundations of the identity synthesis. Is that roughly right, those three?

Yascha Mounk: Yes, yeah, yeah.

John Tomasi: Those sound familiar? So what's to be done? What do you think about this lore, given how attractive it is, given that it leads people in and gives them no way out to actually proceed to make the world a better place in fact? What do you make of it?

Yascha Mounk: So first of all, let me just acknowledge that we're jumping over one big part of the book, which is great because you don't want to give everything away. To really understand what's in the book, you have to go and buy the identity trap. And by the way, I know that many of the people listening to this have campus groups and so on. I always love to speak to campus groups, so feel free to come and, you know, invite me to speak to your campus group and so on. But I must go buy and read the damn book, the identity trap. But I have a whole part of the book where I look at the main ways in which these ideas then come to be applied to different parts of our cultural and political life. So I have chapters on why we should insist on the ability to understand each other across different lines of identity, on why we should reject the idea that anything that might be called cultural appropriation is inherently problematic, while for some things that we call cultural appropriation were in fact bad. The wrong-making feature was never the kind of mutual influence that have always been aspects of human culture and which are positive. While we need a robust defense, as everybody at Heterodox Academy is a lot aware of, not just the laws of free speech, but a culture of free speech, I think I have a novel account of why it's so important to argue for free speech, not just on the basis of the good things that follow from free speech, but on the basis of the bad things that follow from not having free speech. I critique forms of progressive separatism in education and emphasize the importance of having more institutions that actually bring people together. And I criticize many of the forms of race-sensitive and identity-sensitive public policy, which have really become standard repertoires of our politics, even in really important questions like how to roll out scarce COVID vaccines. So I'm not going to talk about any of that in your comments, but I want to answer your question, John. So, yeah, so I think that you can sort of boil down some of the key elements of the identity synthesis into three postulates, into a kind of rational reconstruction of three main ideas. And unsurprisingly, I think that those three ideas, each in their own way, are direct attacks on philosophical liberalism in certain ways on the basic principles of liberal democracy more broadly. So you listed them very well and reformed them very well. Perhaps I'll just spend a moment long on each of them.

John Tomasi: Please, please do.

Yascha Mounk: So I think it's important to understand. So the first is that...

John Tomasi: And can I just say, as I understand what you're going to do, is you're interested in finding out what's the insight in each of these theses, each of these three theses, and then how does universalism correct for it or make it...

Yascha Mounk: Yes, how can a more universalist ideology...

John Tomasi: Accommodate and learn from...

Yascha Mounk: ...express some of the kernels of truth in these ideas without throwing the baby out of the bathwater while sticking to a humanist idea of how to organize society.

John Tomasi: So tell us about that.

Yascha Mounk: Yeah, so the first claim that the identity synthesis makes is to say that really the fundamental way to understand the world is to look at it through the prism of gender, race, sexual orientation, through the prism of these forms of ascriptive identity. You know, and that is, by the way, to something you were saying earlier, one of the appeals of it, but it tells you I can go into any social situation and understand what's going on by looking at it through the prism of this particular vocabulary that I've learned. And I can tell anybody who looks at it differently, you're an idiot, you don't know the vocabulary, you don't know how to think about this, you have inferior insight. And that's similar to sort of a Marxist awakening that many people had 100 years ago. So actually, this situation is over a social class, right? So in that sense, I think there is a strategic similarity. But, you know, there's, you know, Robin DiAngelo, one of the really influential people in popularizing this ideology in a more, less sophisticated way, claims at one point that, has claimed at one point that whenever a white person interrupts a black person, they're bringing the whole apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them. And that, I think, to me, is precisely the example of seeing the whole world through these identity prisms, right? Saying that it can't be the case that these people are lifelong friends, can't be the case perhaps by lovers, can't be the case that the business partners and that they interrupt each other and that's part of how they deal in the social world, because there's many friends and business partners and lovers interrupt each other all the time as part of a normal human conversation. No, it has to be interpreted through this lens. Which makes me think, by the way, that Robin DiAngelo does not have any non-white friends because that's what she'd be more aware of. But the second argument, the second claim that you rightly listed, is that these kind of universal values and mutual laws or rules, they're not just compatible with the persistence of injustice. It's not just true, obviously, that the beautiful ideas of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence were not, in fact, realized in America while slavery was on the books, while Jim Crow was on the books. It's that they actively help to pull the wool over people's eyes, that they actively perpetuate that kind of form of discrimination and justice. And therefore, the third claim is, if you want to make any progress, it can't be by living up to those kind of values or rules. It's got to be by rejecting them, rejecting the defunct racial equality, ideology of the civil rights movement, and really making how we treat each other and how the straight treats all of us much more explicitly dependent on the group to which we belong. Not just in exceptional circumstances, perhaps in university admissions, I'm starting to go really across the board in how we conceptualize the fundamental institutions of our society. In a permanent and ongoing way. Yes. Is that the idea? Yes. And so, you know, I think that universalists or humanists or liberals, or, you know, choose your particular term, have a very convincing set of responses to this, which can take on board the kernel of insight in this tradition, some of which is new, some of which predates the tradition in important ways. Because after all, there's many liberal historians, for example, who have written about the horrors of slavery or the hypocrisy of sort of American reality as compared to its supposed ideals for a very long time outside of a framework of something like CRT. But there's very convincing responses that are able to capture those insights in the right way, in a serious way, without throwing the baby out of the bathwater. And here's three of them. The first is that we should not, as Jonathan Haidt once put it, be methodologically monomaniacal. We need to be able to see the world through different kinds of lenses. And one of those, of course, is understanding and taking seriously the influence that race and gender and sexual orientation have in structuring our societies and structuring many of the injustices in our societies. But it is also paying attention to social class. It is also paying attention to religion. It is also paying attention to ideology. It is also paying attention to how people act as individuals. It is also paying attention to national categories. It is paying attention to a much, much, much broader set of ways of understanding the world. And each situation has to guide us towards what the right way to understand this rather than us coming in with a preconceived filter saying identity is more important than anything else. The second point is that, yes, every society in the world has been deeply unjust in important ways, and that includes the societies that have made grand claims for the values they supposedly uphold. But in fact, liberal democracies are quite remarkable for how much progress they have made on that. Today, the societies in the world that are most tolerant, that give the highest social standing to minority groups, that are most peaceable, that are most affluent, that allow the members the highest level of human development and flourishing, are virtually all liberal democracies. And unsurprisingly, they are also the societies that people want to immigrate to. And in American history in particular, I think it's simply wrong to say that there's a permanence of racism which makes the America of 2023 as racist as America was in 1950 or 1850. In fact, I find it offensive, not offensive to us, the lovely people living today, but offensive to the people who had to suffer through much worse, much more extreme forms of injustice in their own day. And more than that, these universal ideals have always been part of what has allowed us to make that progress. Frederick Douglass did not reject free speech. He called free speech the dread of tyrants. That's right. In his speech about the 4th of July, he did not reject the Constitution. He said that, I have deeply mixed feelings because how can you talk about these values while people are still enslaved, but what you should do is to live up to the Constitution. The same is true of Martin Luther King, who pointed out the check issued to African Americans by the Bank of Justice was fraudulent, but insisted that the Bank of Justice cash that check rather than ripping it up. And, of course, it's true of Barack Obama later on. And so I think that we need to double down, first of all, in recognizing that these universal values can inspire progress. And therefore, thirdly, the remedy is to live up to those universal values and to those neutral rules, to actually create a society in which what your opportunities are and how you're treated comes to be less rather than more dependent on the kind of identity group to which you belong.

John Tomasi: I'm John Tomasi. You're listening to Heterodox Out Loud. We're talking with Yascha Mounk about his book, The Identity Trap. I have two more questions for you, and I'm going to move away from the book now, having talked about it at some length. I'm just curious about how you see my first question about the Supreme Court case recently in June on affirmative action. So it seems – so this idea that ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, it seems a direct rejection of key themes of the identity synthesis. Namely, it rejects the idea that the state should treat citizens differently or unequally. What impact, if any, do you see this decision having on the identity thesis? Is it a blow against it? Is it a harbinger of the future in some way? What do you think – what's the significance and meaning of that case in the context of your work in thinking about this?

Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So let me share a few points. The first is that I'm generally skeptical about discussing moral questions through a very sort of jurisprudential framework, as we often do in the United States. I don't think that it's helpful to think about the justice or the injustice of a death penalty by thinking about whether something consists of cruel and unusual punishment. That sounds like CRT. It sounds like critical legal studies, for example. No, I don't think so. I just think that the moral questions that are at stake are sort of not fully captured by those particular legal debates. As a matter of constitutional law, it's helpful to have a set of constitutional standards and so on. But when you think about it as a moral or political philosopher, I think that there's many moral considerations that aren't adequately captured by whether or not the death penalty consists cruel and unusual punishments. The best arguments for it and the best argument against it go beyond that. And so in general, I'm skeptical of trying to answer these kind of questions through constitutional discourse. I think in this particular case... The question now about university admissions. For example, right? Yes. But in the particular case of university admissions, I actually think that the jurisprudential framework, which both progressives and conservatives in the court have come up with, is the right framework, is the right set of questions to ask. And that is broadly speaking that the 14th Amendment to the United States, as well as some other parts of the Constitution, says that, you know, there should be a very strong presumption against treating people on the basis of their belonging and racial and certain other kinds of groups. That whenever possible, we should avoid that. Secondly, that in certain contexts, there can be a compelling state interest, which justifies deviations from that rule. But thirdly, that when there is such a compelling state interest, it has to be very narrow. You know, you have to first look to remedies for the non-race-based. And if you cannot find those, they have to be narrowly tailored. And then there needs to be strict scrutiny as to whether those principles have been applied. That basic framework is one that's shared by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is ruled mostly in favor of affirmative action, and Antonin Scalia, who has ruled mostly against affirmative action. I think that's basically the right framework. So we can look at the situation we had previously and say, does it actually sort of live up to that framework? And I think you can reasonably end up on different kinds of sides of that debate. I will say one thing, which is that to me, the most intuitively appealing element of affirmative action is to say that given the deep injustices of American history, it would be an injustice to have college campuses with very few black students in particular, with very few descendants of enslaved people in particular. But that most straightforward remedy in terms of reparations have been ruled out by the Supreme Court for a long time. And I think the sort of much looser understanding of diversity which universities have embraced as a result has led us into many absurdities. For example, the fact that these days about 50% of black students at many Ivy League universities, at many of the top universities, are in fact, the descendants of recent immigrants from often upper middle and upper class Nigerian and Kenyan and so on families who are wonderful students. But, you know, you have to have a very simplistic idea of identity to think that the deep injustices of American history are somehow being remedied by admitting these kids of much more recent immigrants who have a very different kind of history and social standing. And so I do worry about the way in which affirmative action was practiced because I think it doesn't actually respond to the deepest moral intuitions behind the justified practice. And then I have concerns about what's going to happen now after this ruling, in part because the sort of sentence in the ruling that universities immediately seized upon was to say, well, of course, nothing stops universities from looking at the way in which people's experience, including the race, has shaped who they are today. And I think that this is going to encourage universities to give less importance to standardized tests, which are often good ways of discovering talented students who don't go to good schools, who don't come from rich backgrounds, who are generally disadvantaged, and even more emphasis on the kinds of essay questions, which are very easily gameable by people who can have tutors to pay for them, who already have been to, whose parents have been to top universities, who have a lot of cultural and cultural capital. And it's going to encourage students even more strongly to define themselves by the race, to say the most fundamental experiences I've had are on the basis of race. And finally, I know this is a long answer, I have fears about how this plays out in terms of the standing of universities in American society. Trust in higher education has plummeted over the last decades from a clear majority of Americans having trust in institutions of higher learning to a minority of Americans having such trust. And I think what we will see is many colleges and universities trying to maneuver the way around the Supreme Court ruling in ways that's going to lead to very embarrassing things emerging in discovery, in fact, finding enterprises when people sue these universities. And I think all of us who have some part of our professional identity should be aware of the extent to which these universities are only possible because of the tax-exempt treatment of our endowments and because of various forms of public funding, which we take for granted, but which are dependent on some amount of broad social acceptability, which we have been undermining in the last decades for a variety of reasons.

John Tomasi: Yes. Thank you. And that's that we've been talking for almost an hour and a half, but I just have to do one more because you're directly on my last last questions. So I just want to we can push our chairs back for a minute. You and I just look at universities more generally. Here we are in the Center for Academic Pluralism in New York City, the home of Heterodox Academy. We work on universities. We're a membership organization of professors all around the world to care about open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement. I wonder what this conversation and this this phenomenon of the identity synthesis and the identity trap tells us about universities. So we have a court on your story. We see that this identity synthesis first emerges on college campuses and theories. It then importantly spreads into the mainstream via college graduates who've taken taken who've fallen into the trap, perhaps. So I just sort of wonder, is there something about college campuses that forever makes them sources of worrying social and intellectual changes? What do you and this is the part of the skepticism, I think, that you're that you've been expressing. I mean, your book came out of the university. So here we are as university professors talking about these things, looking for remedies from the inside. But what do you what do you think about that idea? I think a lot of people have that universities are always going to be sources of bad ideas, let's call them.

Yascha Mounk: Well, I think I think it's true. They're also going to be sorts of good ideas.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: I mean, part of a point of universities is to have a socially protected space in which provocative, radical, sometimes unpopular ideas can emerge. And I think we have to defend universities as such. There's a few problems with that. One is that often within universities today, you can't, in fact, differ even in a moderate way to the radical ideas that have become mainstream within them.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: So we need to do much more to create and preserve a culture of free speech within universities, which ensure not just that there's one counterculture to the mainstream or to the former mainstream at universities, from which you then can't internally descend. But rather than generally places in which faculty members and administrators, importantly, and students of different kinds of political persuasions, of different kinds of convictions, can bring their own whole selves to the discovery of ideas.

John Tomasi: Can bring their own whole selves.

Yascha Mounk: And relatedly to that, you know, part of the problem is not that some bad ideas emerged at universities or some ideas that are worth grappling with, but which I think are ultimately misguided, but that they've been bought and imbibed wholesale by mainstream institutions that should have vetted them, should have stood up to them, perhaps throwing certain positive elements from them, but actually done their own job to live up to their missions and their values, rather than simply in the course of very few years. So look, you know, 19-year-olds are going to have some smart and a lot of stupid ideas. I had some smart and a lot of stupid ideas when I was 19, you know, and so universities are always going to be placed. That's fine. I will say something that gives me more specific pause about American universities and the role they now play in society. You know, I grew up in Germany and I was always deeply envious of the idea of campus universities. And I was very lucky to go to college in England, in Cambridge, and went to do my PhD in the United States. And I've spent a lot of time on campuses and they're wonderful places. But I've come to think that Germany is in some sense advantaged by not having campus universities, because it leads to a situation in which most students live much closer to home when they go to university. I find, you know, live in normal, shared apartments with other people in much more ordinary neighborhoods.

John Tomasi: Right.

Yascha Mounk: In which it's easy for them to stay friends with high school buddies who perhaps are not on the path of social advancement and who are not sort of headed towards the elite realms of their society. And that makes Germany universities less good a lot of the time. But I think in a weird way, it also makes the society more healthy a lot of the time. I worry about the role that universities in the United States have institutionally in, you know, bringing in wonderful, great students, most of whom are generally extremely talented and enterprising, but creaming them off of ordinary environments. As we know, far too many of our students come from elite environments in any case. But even the ones who generally don't are scooped up at the age of 17 or 18 and sent to a, you know, four-year all-in inclusive resort where they're just around people who are going to go on to be elite in all kinds of ways. And then they go often into, you know, three or four cities in the country, particular neighborhoods within them, to particular kinds of professions and professional milieus. And by the time that they genuinely have influence and power in the world, by the time of 35 or 40 or 45, they've spent half of their lives or more than half of their lives really very far removed from ordinary citizens. And I do worry about the broader culture of that influential million that we've built. And that's not about, not just, not predominantly about the ideas that emerge on campus of India as they imbibe, but it is about the economic and the social and the cultural separateness of that milieu, of which you and I are a part, of which the huge majority of listeners to this podcast are going to be a part. So it's not me standing in the outside saying, you terrible elites, it's us looking at ourselves and thinking about the kind of role we play in society today.

John Tomasi: And the residential structure does those two things. On the one hand, as you say, it removes people from the opportunity or the experience of connecting with more diverse others on a regular basis and having their ideas maybe grounded in some wider sense of realities, but it also gives the opportunity or creates the possibility of the university filling in that space too with a, with a dogma of the day.

Yascha Mounk: Yes.

John Tomasi: Which is a twin, a twin danger. Yascha, thank you so much for this conversation. Again, you're all listening to Heterodox Out Loud with John Tomasi. We're talking with, we've been talking with Yascha Mounk about his book, The Identity Trap. Thanks for listening.

Yascha Mounk: Thank you. This is wonderful.