German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk joins associate editor Rachel Lu to discuss his book The Identity Trap.

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.

Rachel Lu:

Hello, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us. I am Rachel Lu, an associate editor at Law & Liberty, and my guest today is Yascha Mounk. Yascha is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations. He’s also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and he has a new book that we’re going to be discussing today, the Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Yascha, thanks so much for being with us today.

Yascha Mounk:

Thank you. I look forward to our conversation.

Rachel Lu:

Great. So, in this book, you talk about a phenomenon that I think will seem familiar to all our listeners, but they may be used to calling it something else. They may think of it as identity politics or maybe wokeism. You have your own term. I think it’s your own term that you coined. You call it the identity synthesis. So maybe you could start by telling us: why do you see this as the preferred term? What is being synthesized here?

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah, so first of all, look, I don’t think that a lot depends and turns on exactly what we call it, but at the moment, in the conversation about this big ideology that has arisen seemingly out of nowhere and come to have this tremendous influence on American society and culture and politics, we don’t really have a way to refer to it that is politically neutral. So the way in which this conversation is polarized is with various terms like wokeness, which originally actually were put forward by people who believed in that ideology, who defended that ideology but have now become a kind of cudgel where the moment you say that, a lot of the audience stops listening, and you’re in danger of sounding like an old man who’s shouting at the cloud.

So, just for purposes of his book, for the purpose of his conversation, I think we should have a politically neutral term like liberalism or conservatism or all kinds of other terms so both people who embrace those ideas and people who criticize those ideas are happy to say, “Yes, that is the label for this set of ideas. I might like it, but you might not like it. We can have a conversation about it.” So that was sort of a first impetus behind saying, let’s just coin a new term.

I think it’s called the identity synthesis. I think that term makes sense for two reasons. First of all, this new ideology we’re talking about is fundamentally about forms of group identity like race, gender, and sexual orientation. It sees the world through the prism of those identities. It thinks that we should act much more strongly on the basis of those identities. It thinks that that is the key concept through which to think about and engage with the world or what identity should be in there. And synthesis really goes to my argument about where those ideas come from, that it is not, as some people have claimed, a form of cultural Marxism where you take the Marxist tradition and you take out class and you stuff in these identity categories and you get where we are.

It’s actually a strange synthesis of ideas in postmodernism, post-structuralism, and then critical race theory. But if you understand those three traditions and the main concepts within them, you really start to see the main themes of what I’m calling the identity synthesis or, if you prefer, of identity politics or wokeness that have become so influential in recent years.

Rachel Lu:

Right, so you go through that intellectual history in the first section of the book, and I thought that was pretty interesting. You seem to see it basically as a synthesis of four different components that you talk about, right? You start with Foucault, and then you talk about people like Edward Said, and then you start talking about critical race theory, and then finally a section on intersectionality.

I was just going to say, incidentally, do you ever feel this sinking sense of possible futility when you start an argument with a plan to engage Foucault? There’s always this feeling like, okay, there’s been a signal from the beginning, “I don’t agree to the standards of rational discourse.” So then you’re wondering, “Where is this conversation going to end up?” But I think you do a really good job of bringing all of those pieces together. Can you say just a little bit about why those things came together so well? Why was it so natural for those things to fuse into one synthesis?

Yascha Mounk:

Yeah, I don’t know that it’s natural. I was originally trained as an intellectual historian. That’s what I did for a lot of my undergrad and part of my PhD. And when you look at past political moments in which people think these 10 different beliefs naturally go together, there’s something that makes that combination of ideas compelling at that time, that helps to explain why people believed that particular set of things. But there’s also always quite a lot of contingency in why it is for various political imperatives and various kinds of political developments that that set of ideas came together.

So I do think that these have now fused in this really impactful way, surprisingly impactful way in the mainstream of our society, but I don’t know that it was inevitable. And in an interesting way, some of these thinkers that I talk about and portray actually end up being quite critical of what becomes of their ideas. So, one of the sections I have at the end of part one of the book is Careful What You Wish For. And again, it’s not atypical in intellectual history. A lot of the people who make a set of ideas happen and who are at the root of them in certain ways end up turning around and saying, “Hang on a second. That’s not what I was hoping for.”

But to give you a little bit of a sense of what these ideas are, yes, I mean, Michel Foucault starts with a broad rejection of what he calls grant narratives, of the structuring accounts of how society works and what is true in the world. And he rejects, as one part of that, philosophical liberalism, the basic tradition underlying our political system of liberal democracies, or if you prefer, of democratic republics. But he also rejects Marxism, which he thinks of as another grand narrative, and that’s not an idle rejection. It’s one that cost him politically and intellectually in his time because the most famous intellectuals are Jean-Paul Sartre, who are contemporaries of his in Paris and were very much influenced and embracing of a Marxist tradition.

And Foucault goes on to make a few points but get the train in motion. One of them is ironically to be quite skeptical of identity categories. Foucault is, in our contemporary terms, gay. He thinks that the idea of a homosexual, the idea of that label, is overly simplifying and he thought we should be very skeptical about it. And the other is his emphasis on political discourses. He doesn’t think of political power as simply traveling from the top down but rather as being exercised in everyday conversations and the way we talk about things and the kind of concepts we use. I mean, this podcast is an exercise of power in Foucauldian terms.

And that gives you the building blocks of a radical rejection of a lot of contemporary institutions, a lot of assumptions we have about the world, but it’s also curiously apolitical, right? It leads Foucault to think, “But there really can’t be any particular improvements of the world because there will always be this kind of power discourses, and that’s sort of inevitable.” And so then, a lot of his story consists of how the subsequent traditions respond to and adapt Foucault to their own purposes. So first, Edwards Said says, “Yes, Foucault is right about discourses.” That is how the West has orientalized a lot of the East; that is how it has justified colonial oppression, but the point is to change that. So, I actually want to introduce a politicized form of discourse critique where that really becomes a form of political battle. And we see the effect today of that.

For a lot of people in academia but also in a public sphere, what it is to do political battle today is to praise or critique the Barbie movie. What it is to be a feminist is to argue over our cultural interpretations of things and the categories we use in order to talk about the world. That is a contemporary echo of that politicized form of discourse analysis. In another step within the reverse colonial tradition, Gayatri Spivak, a theorist who was born in Kolkata in Bengal in the east of India but teaches at Columbia University, says, “Look, I’m deeply influenced by this postmodern rejection of stable identity categories.“ She agrees that the essentialist account of what makes a woman or what makes somebody black, what makes somebody Latino, these are all to be viewed with tremendous skepticism. But she says the really oppressed can’t speak for themselves. Somebody has to speak for them and to speak for them, we need those kinds of identity categories. And so she sort of suggests the slightly puzzling term of strategic essentialism.

And what that is is to say, look, on a philosophical level, these essentialist accounts of identity are wrong, but for strategic purposes, we should act as though were true. And again, you can see the echo of that in contemporary social justice activism. Something you’ll hear very often there is race is, of course, a s