The Trap of Identity Politics - with Yascha Mounk

Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Yascha Mounk, a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, the Founder of Persuasion, and the host of “The Good Fight” podcast. His latest book is “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power In Our Time”. Tune in for their talk!

Yascha Mounk will be a guest of the forthcoming edition of Freedom Games, a festival of ideas held annually in Łódź, Poland. This year’s edition will be held on October 18-20 in EC1 Łódź. The European Liberal Forum is the Co-Organizer of the festival.

This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.

Play on SoundCloud or on Apple Podcast. See the transcript below.

Transcript – The Trap of Identity Politics – with Yascha Mounk

Welcome to the Liberal Europe Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me on.

I wanted to ask you, firstly, what made a scholar who wrote ‘Stranger in My Own Country’ a coming-of-age book about a Central-European Jew growing up in Germany, to write the book, ‘The Identity Trap’, a political pamphlet – in the best classical meaning of this term – about identity and its abuses?

Well, in a way, the two are related. One of the things that I wrote about in my memoir, which was my first book, was that as a Jew in Germany, I sometimes experienced antisemitism, but I often experienced a slightly creepy form of philosemitism. I experienced people trying to prove to me how much they loved the Jews and how sorry they were for what Germans had done in the past. And that came from the best of intentions in most cases, but it actually made it harder for me to feel like a genuine equal in society. It often erected an invisible wall between me and other people. One of the strange things about moving from Germany, where I was a representative of the most salient victim class, to the United States for grad school and then my first job, where I was the representative of the most visible perpetrator class, which is that of white men, was that I was then often expected to treat others in the ways that I had hated being treated as a child growing up.

And the other line through this is that I am a philosophical liberal, which is to say that I recognise the obvious ways in which people have been discriminated against and often experienced violence on the basis of belonging to particular group categories. But my vision for a better society is one in which the happenstance of which kind of ascriptive group we’re born into, matters a lot less for our opportunities, for how we treat each other, for how we relate in society.

And I think one threat to that kind of liberal value is from the right, particularly from dictators, but also from certain right-wing populists. But another threat is from a left that rejects, or parts of a left that reject those kinds of ideals in favour of a society in which the colour of our skin, our gender, and our sexual orientation will forever be the defining characteristic of us, in which the way we’re treated by the state is based not on our individuality, but on which group we belong to. And that, too, I think, is a genuine intellectual mistake.

I think, at least since Christianity, universalism was very much a basis of Western civilization and, to some extent, perhaps imposed on the rest of the world. Do you think that there is a crisis of universalism, and why did it come to being? And is there something we can do about it? Or is it very strongly related to the relative power of the USA versus the rest of the world and Western civilization and Western countries in general? Do you think that it has an impact on the way that we address the issues of identity, or is it a sort of enemy within? So, it was dismantled by the philosophical postmodernism in the Western world, and it didn’t necessarily have to be weakening vis a vis the rest of the world.

Well, I think one of the things that always both cheer me up and worry me about humanity is to go back to earlier political moments and realise how embattled the values that I care about were at the time as well. I’ve been disheartened, for example, for the last years, by the extent to which a commitment to free speech has been, you know, striking by its absence in many intellectual circles in the United States and other places in which people were saying that perhaps if you say the wrong kind of thing, you should be punished. And they weren’t willing to recognise the ways in which they were self-censoring. Of course, you read George Orwell, and he goes to one of the first meetings of a Penn club in London in the forties, just after the end of World War two. And he finds exactly the same, nobody will talk at that time about restrictions on free speech in the Soviet Union, because that was against the political fashion of a time, believe it or not. So when it comes to universalism, you’re right that as an ideal, it is very old, but of course, it has, at most historical junctures, been ignored and breached.

The Catholic churches, indeed, and the Christian faith, universalists in certain respects, but of course, the Catholic Church, where it had power, did not act in universal ways and certainly did not recognise anything like freedom of religion. So I think when we come to today, in some ways, I’m quite optimistic. I mean, we have more societies governing themselves in largely universalist ways than we did 200, 150, or probably 25 years ago. And I do think that ordinary citizens of Western democracies have quite a deep-going commitment to some form of liberal value, which they don’t express in theory.

They can’t tell you what a liberal is, and they can’t explain to you the fine points of universalist ideals like freedom of speech. But they do actually grow quite upset when they see that somebody is not being treated in accordance with those views and values. They feel a strong sense of liberal injustice, and that, I think, is a good anchoring point for those values. At the same time, I do think that there’s, in part because of the success of universalism, a renewed assault against it. That renewed assault comes from ethno-nationalist particularism on variety. Still, it very strongly comes from a new ideology on the left that I call the identity synthesis, which is often called woke wokeness.

That I do think has roots not, as some right-wing commentators say, in cultural Marxism, but rather in postmodern thought, in the philosophies of people like Michel Foucault and John Lyotard. That has then been adapted for much more political purposes by postcolonial scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, and which came to something like its contemporary expression in American law schools in the work of critical race theorists like Kimberly Crenshaw and Derek Bell.

Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about emancipation, which, at least I think, until the late 1960s, was a force for individual rights, not to mention abolitionist, feminist, and civic rights movements. When and why did identity politics make the wrong turn?

Yeah, so I do think that that has precisely to do with the rejection of universalism. So, you know, I don’t criticise all forms of identity politics because it seems to me that some of the movements I most admire could be described, if you want to, as a form of identity politics. In the United States, for example, the fight against slavery in the 19th century was certainly rallying members of a particular identity group against injustices that they experienced on the basis of being members of that identity group.

The same was true of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as you evoke Martin Luther King now; what they did was demand inclusion in existing universalist rules and norms. Frederick Douglass said, you’re celebrating before July, talking about how all men are created equal. Well, if you’re serious about those values, how can you continue to live with slavery? How can you enslave people who look like me? Martin Luther King said that, you know, the Bank of Justice issued a cheque to African Americans, but it won’t honour it, it won’t cash it. And he didn’t say, rip up that cheque. He said it’s time for the Bank of Justice to honour that cheque. That, I think, has been the most successful emancipatory movement.

And the same, by the way, is true for gay rights. There was a big debate within the gay rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s, where some of the people who I know and who are friends of mine, like Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, argued for the first time for gay marriage for the seemingly crazy idea that two men, two women, should be allowed to marry each other. And the first opponent of this was people from within their own movement, their own community, who said, we don’t want to get married. That’s a bourgeois heterosexual institution. We want to burn those institutions down.

But the great improvements for the rights of sexual minorities that we’ve had came from resisting those groups, from saying no. What we’re asking for is not a social revolution. It is not to destroy the institutions of society or to take down universalism. It is to actually be included in the universalist institutions and practises that so far have unfairly and unjustly discriminated against us and excluded us.

So, you tell a very interesting story about how wokeism, or how you call it, identity synthesis, came into being and how your critique differs from that made on the right. And can you describe the way in which you differentiate between identity politics that you consider acceptable and the one which you think is a bridge of individual rights, liberalism and free speech?

Yeah, so I would say that there are two main differences. One is a difference in intellectual history. As I briefly mentioned earlier, the most common frame for this on the right is to say that we should really understand what I call identity synthesis, wokeness, as a form of cultural Marxism. So, you take Marxism, you remove social class, and you put in categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation instead.

Now, a Polish audience will, at least above a certain age, much against perhaps its choosing, have some familiarity with Marxism. And when you are familiar with Marxism, I think you’ll see relatively quickly that Vegas doesn’t quite make intellectual sense. Taking class out of Marxism is a little bit like taking the ball out of football. There’s not enough left after you do that. In fact, when you look at the thinkers who are cited by scholars and activists in this tradition, they’re not Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They’re not even particularly Antonio Gramsci or the Frankfurt school. They really come from these different traditions of postmodernism and post-colonialism. So, the way that I set it up, intellectual history is rooted in a few major themes that are cobbled together by theorists, some of whom would actually reject today’s ideology, like Michel Foucault.

So, Foucault provides to it the scepticism about universal truth and the emphasis on discourses and the way we’re speaking as the real locus of political power. Edward Said adds to it the use of discourse critique as a kind of political tool, that the natural way to do politics is not just to fight for particular laws or regulations, but to, if you’re a feminist, critique or celebrate the Barbie movie.

Gayatri Spivak takes from postmodernism the scepticism it has about identity groups, originally saying that to think that there’s something in common to all women or to all workers and so on, and is an oversimplification that is essentializing those groups. But, she says, for political purposes, in order for somebody to speak for the most vulnerable in the world, who can’t speak for themselves, we have to strategically pretend that this essentialist notion of a group is actually true. We have to engage in what she calls strategic essentialism. That’s what you see at play when you go to activist circles today and they say race is a social construct, but we have to refer to black and brown people. You know, we have to, as now happens in many American private schools, split kids in a school up into different racial groups for them to learn the right racial self-identity, to lean into their racial self-identity that is rooted for. She may have criticised it in Spivak’s understanding of strategic essentialism.

And then you get to the critical race theorists, who both claim that we haven’t made any progress, that society is incapable of making any progress, and that any progress is just a form of delusion. But America today is as racist and as sexist as it was 200, 100, or 50 years ago. But those forms of discrimination may be more hidden, maybe a little more concealed, but as pronounced as they were in the past. So, we take those five themes together, and I think that just explains the main convictions of woke scholars and activists and everyday people much better than rereading Marx and Engels and somehow substituting race every time they say, class.

The other disagreement I have with these parts of a right is about what the remedy for all of this is supposed to be. Let me take you an example of somebody who’s a very interesting thinker, who I like and respect, Eric Kaufmann. He recognises in a book called Whiteshift the existence of what he calls asymmetrical multiculturalism, perhaps I forget what the noun is, but the point is that it’s currently asymmetrical, that minority groups are encouraged to take a very strong pride in the markers of group identity, particularly ethnic ones or cultural ones. So it’s wonderful to celebrate being a member of an ethnic minority group coming from a particular cultural background, but also sexual and other kinds of gender and other kinds of groups. Right?

But of course, the dominant group and the group that continues to be biggest in many societies, people who are white, people who are part of a native majority, really are not allowed to celebrate in the same kind of way. So, I think he’s right in pointing this out as a fact about contemporary societies. Now, Eric, who, by the way, is not white, has the solution that, therefore, whites must be encouraged to have a form of pride for themselves, that they too should lean into a form of ethnically based pride because that’s just the model of society.

Now, there’s one way to resolve attention, but I think it’s the wrong way. I think that is a way in which we’re going to end up with ever more zero-sum conflict in which we’re not going to be able to build societies but actually remain stable and tolerant once they have become very diverse, which most democracies at this point are. I think the better solution is for them to try. Of course, they can have certain forms of pride in the cultural heritage, certain forms of maintenance of religious, the culinary, the cultural traditions, all of that is perfectly fine, but we also need to develop a common identity. We need to say that whatever sub-national identities we have, we also share a broader, inclusive identity as people who are fellow citizens of the same country, perhaps to some extent fellow citizens of the European Union or fellow human beings.

And that tempers our commitment to subnational communities and identities. The most important thing about me is not that my ancestors are from country x and say it comes from country y, but I have this much melanin in my skin. You have that much melanin in your skin, but rather that we share a set of political ideals, that we’re citizens of the same country, but we stand in solidarity with each other across that kind of boundaries.

And that, I would say, is my main difference. To somebody like Eric Kaufmann, for example, I think it’s a fascinating dilemma because it seems very much that the crisis of this civic liberalism is also, well, it’s not sort of self-made, but it’s also very political because it makes sense for, well, not just politicians, but for intellectuals to create this, create distinctions and divide people.

Well, this is politics: divide people or use the divisions that exist and get some ideology behind it. Do you think that since we sort of…it seems that both polarisation and the fact that this division, this ethnic nationalism, seems to be working at least for majority groups, do you think it is sort of possible to get the genie back to the bottle, and we sort of come back to the different phase of liberal democracy. It’s a sort of connection to your book about democracy, about the crisis of democracy. Do you think that it is not sort of a different stage of the development of democracy? Maybe it’s not a liberal democracy anymore. Maybe it’s a sort of mass democracy with a different role for elites, and it will be impossible to come back to these universal values that everyone sort of acknowledges.

Yeah, I think that goes back to the point I made a little while ago, which is that we never had democracies where everything was stable and wonderful. Perhaps we did for a few decades in a few countries. But, you know, I’m currently reading Tony Judt’s ‘Postwar’, which is magisterial history of Europe, west and east and central from 1945 until the 1990s.

And, of course, challenges to the liberal universalist order existed in virtually every country in Europe throughout that period. Obviously, in the countries that were subjugated by the Soviet Union, where something like liberal universalism was stamped out with tanks and by the force of weapons, but also in many Western European countries, where there were very strong communist parties, where in some places there was fascist rule, like in Spain and Portugal, where those ongoing critiques of liberal universalism from the right.

And yet we managed to get through that turbulent history. So I think perhaps what we’re seeing now is the definitive end of the comparatively calm politics rooted in the rapid economic growth of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in Western European countries that had a relatively limited public sphere and so on. And, you know, unless we have another cataclysm like World War two, perhaps we’ll never quite get back to that.

That doesn’t mean that liberal universalism won’t ultimately win out, that it won’t be able to

respond to and contain its enemies. And I think more broadly, the way to think about the threat of populism, particularly on the right, but also on the left, is not just in ones and zeros, right? So it’s not just Venezuela or it’s not just Turkey, where democracy really did die and may one day come back through popular uprisings and the evident way in which the regime in Venezuela has lost any semblance of support among its population, for example, but in which that really wouldn’t be a democratic renewal.

It would be overthrowing something that has quite clearly become a dictatorship. But in other places, like Poland, populism did not play out that way. You had a very serious threat to free institutions in Poland. Certainly, it would be premature to say that that threat has been eliminated. There are risks and challenges that continue, and it is very hard for new political forces to reestablish democratic norms without themselves having to break them in certain ways, as deep paradoxes and puzzles of how to reestablish democratic institutions in a place where they were challenged.

But certainly, Poland never did become Venezuela or Turkey, for that matter, either. And I just wonder whether the way to understand the populist challenge in places like the United States, Brazil, India and other places around the world is more akin to the Polish case than it is to the Venezuelan case, in which these anti-democratic forces will be able to weaken democratic institutions in significant ways. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily win.

And that, I think, is a slightly more optimistic way of thinking about it. The last question would be, well, with regards not just to your intellectual capabilities, but you run a podcast, you run ‘Persuasion‘ a very influential publication. You are sort of a warrior for liberalism, not just a public scholar. And so I wanted to ask you a sort of practical question. What would be your liberal strategy? What should be the liberal strategy? Because we had this intellectual opposition to communism in the Cold War. Do you think it calls for something like this? And do you see the threat in which the sort of antipopulist politics can turn into the sort of populism and enabling, you know, the normal politics is out of the question because we have to oppose these terrible people who might come to power, Marine Le Pen, Orban and so on. We have this almost millennialism in our politics today. So how do we avoid it? And what’s the liberal strategy?

Yeah, I mean, there are two answers to that, right? I mean, one is that personally, my self-conception as a writer. And as such I think that I owe it to my audience to say what I think is true and interesting. And if those things happen to upset people on my own side, then so be it. And that both comes from my own self-conception of what my role is in the world. I’m lucky enough to be able to live from writing and thinking about ideas and teaching, and I think that’s the one moral obligation that comes with that privilege.

But I think it’s also strategically smart in the long run. I think one of the mistakes that many journalists have made in the last few years is that they understand journalism as part of a defence of democracy, which is fine. We need journalists for democracy to function, but they have allowed that to influence how they frame each story.

You know, each time they report on something, when we report on Joe Biden’s mental acuity, just a few months ago, they would say, “How can I frame this in such a way that I minimise the risks to democracy?”

That means that I minimise the risk that Donald Trump might win power and, therefore, that I minimise the problem that ultimately loses more trust than it wins. It simply doesn’t actually accomplish the purpose that is meant to serve. So yes, my first answer is simply in my personal capacity. I do a new weekly column about big ideas that are trying not always to keep up with the latest news cycle. And when I do that, I try to divorce myself from that activist role. I’m simply stating what I think is interesting and important.

And the second thing is that, yes, I do think that collectively, we need to make the case for liberal values and ideals. Societies have been so infused with them that we start to take them for granted, though we’ve allowed the enemies of liberalism to blame anything they don’t like about our society. There are plenty of things to dislike in liberalism without recognising that many of those things aren’t liberal at all and that, in fact, the great achievements of our societies, in fact, really are due to liberalism.

Liberal societies around the world are among the best, most affluent, most free, and most coveted societies. When you ask people around the world where they want to live, what they name are liberal societies. I do think that it’s very important for us collectively to make the intellectual case for liberalism at a time when it’s sort of oddly still dominant in terms of how our institutions tend to work. But as an ideology, it’s fallen into disuse or perhaps disrepute. So we need to remind people of the great accomplishments of his intellectual tradition.

The Trap of Identity Politics – with Yascha Mounk

Transcript – The Trap of Identity Politics – with Yascha Mounk

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