Why do identity politics matter? How not to fall into the identity trap? And what strategy should liberals employ to be successful? 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!
Leszek Jażdżewski (LJ): What made a scholar who wrote a coming-of-age book about a Central European Jew growing up in Germany (Stranger in my Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, 2014), to write a book titled The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (2023) – a classical political pamphlet about identity and its abuses?
Yascha Mounk (YM): 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 not only anti-Semitism, but also a slightly creepy form of philosemitism. I experienced people trying to prove to me how much they love the Jews and how sorry they were for what Germans had done in the past. In most cases, this sentiment came from the best of intentions, but it actually made it harder for me to feel like a genuine equal in society, often erected in invisible war 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. Another throughline is that I am a philosophical liberal, which allows me to recognize the obvious ways in which people have been discriminated and often experienced violence on the basis of belonging in particular group categories. My vision for a better society is one in which the happenstance of which kind of descriptive group we are born into matters a lot less for our opportunities, for how we treat each other, for how we relate in society.
One threat to that kind of liberal value is from the right, particularly from authoritarian dictators, but also from certain right-wing populace. Another threat comes from a left that rejects those kind of ideals in favor of a society in which the color of our skin, our gender or sexual orientation will forever be the defining characteristic. According to this vision, the way we are treated by the state is based not on our individuality, but on which group we belong to. And that, too, is a genuine intellectual mistake.
LJ: Are we facing a crisis of universalism? And if so, why did it happen? Is there anything we can do about it, or is it very strongly related to the relative power of the United States versus the rest of the world – and the Western civilization in general? Does it have an impact on the way in which we address the issues of identity?
YM: One of the things that always both cheer me up and worry me about humanity is to go back to earlier political moments and realize how embattled the values that I care about were at the time as well.
I have been disheartened, for example, for the last few years by the extent to which a commitment to free speech has been 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. Meanwhile, they were unwilling to recognize the ways in which they were self-censoring.
When George Orwell goes to one of the first meetings of the Penn Club in London in the 1940s, just after the end of World War II, 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 the time, believe it or not. So, when it comes to universalism, you are right that as an ideal, it is very old. However, of course, it has at most historical junctures being ignored and breached.
For instance, the Catholic Church is indeed a Christian faith, universalist in certain respects. But of course, the Catholic Church, where it had power, did not act in universal ways and certainly did not recognize anything like freedom of religion. Therefore, when we look at the world today, in some ways, I am quite optimistic. We have more societies governing themselves in largely universalist ways than we did 200, 150, or 25 years ago. And I do think that ordinary citizens of Western democracies have quite a deep ongoing commitment to some form of liberal values, which they do not express in theory.
They cannot tell you what a liberal is, and they cannot 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 is a good anchoring point for those values.
At the same time, in part because of the success of universalism, a renewed assault against it comes from an Afro-nationalist particularism on the right. However, it very strongly comes from a new ideology on the left that I call the ‘identity synthesis’, which is often called being ‘woke’. This ‘wokeness’ 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 Jean-Luc Lyotard, which has then been adapted for much more political purposes by post-colonial scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Its contemporary expression may be now observed in American law schools in the work of critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.
LJ: Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about emancipation, which, at least the late 1960s, was a driving force for individual rights, including abolitionist, feminist, and civil rights movements. When and why did identity politics make the wrong turn?
YM: This has to do precisely with rejection of universalism. I do not criticize 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 would be experienced on the basis of being members of an identity group. The same was true of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, with Martin Luther King. Now, what they did was to demand inclusion in existing universalist rules and norms.
Frederick Douglass once said, “You are celebrating the 4th of July talking about how all men are created equal. Well, if you are 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 the Bank of Justice issued a check to African Americans, but it would not honor it, would not cash it. And he did not say ‘Rip up that check!’. He said, “It is time for the Bank of Justice to honor that check!”. This, 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, who are friends of mine, like Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, argued for the first time for gay marriage thus for a seemingly crazy idea that two men, two women, should be allowed to marry each other. And the first opponent of this stance was people from within their own movement, their own community, who said, ‘We do not want to get married! That is a bourgeois heterosexual institution, and we want to burn those institutions down!”.
However, the great improvements for the rights of sexual minorities that we have had come from resisting those groups, from saying ‘no’. What we are asking for is not a social revolution – it is not to destroy the institutions of society, to take down universalism. It is to actually be included in the universalist institutions and practices that, so far, have unfairly, unjustly discriminated against us and excluded us.
LJ: How does your critique of identity politics differ from the one made on the right? How do you differentiate between identity politics that you consider acceptable and the one which you think is a breach of individual rights, liberalism, and free speech.
YM: There are two main differences. One is a difference in intellectual history. As I have already mentioned, the most common frame for this matter on the right is to say that we should really understand the so-called ‘identity synthesis’, or ‘wokeness’ as a form of cultural Marxism. So, you take Marxism, you take out social class and you put in categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation instead.
If you are familiar with Marxism, you will see relatively quickly that that just does not quite make intellectual sense. Taking class out of Marxism is a little bit like taking the ball out of football. There is not enough left after you do that. And, in fact, when you look at the thinkers that are cited by scholars and activists in this tradition, they are not Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – they are not even Antonio Gramsci or the Frankfurt School. They really come from these different traditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism. So, the way that I set it up, the intellectual history is rooted in a few major themes that are cobbled together from theorists – some of whom would actually reject today’s ideology (like Michel Foucault).
Foucault provides to it the skepticism about universal truth and the emphasis on discourses and the way we are speaking as the real locus of political power. Edward Said adds to it the use of discourse critique as a kind of political tool, stating that the natural way to do politics is not just to fight for particular laws or regulations, but to, if you are a feminist, critique or celebrate the Barbie movie.
Gayatri Spivak takes from postmodernism the skepticism it has about identity groups originally, saying that to think that there is something common to all women or to all workers etc. is an oversimplification that is essentializing those groups. However, she says, for political purposes, in order for somebody to speak for the most vulnerable in the world who cannot speak for themselves, we have to strategically pretend that this essentialist notion of a group is actually true.
Therefore, we have to engage in strategic essentialism. This is what you see at play when you go to activist circles today and they say, ‘racist social construct’, but we have to defer to black and brown people. We have to, as now happens in many modern private schools, split kids in a school up into different racial groups in order for them to learn the right racial self identity to lead into the racial self-identity that is rooted.
And then you get to the critical race theorists, who both claim that society is incapable of making any progress, that any progress is just a form of delusion. That America today is as racist and as sexist as it was 200, 100, or 50 years ago – that those forms of discrimination may be more hidden, may be a little more concealed, but they are still as pronounced as they were in the past.
Therefore, if we take those five themes together, they explains the main convictions of woke scholars, 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 the right wing is about what the remedy for all of this is supposed to be. Let me give you an example of somebody who is a very interesting thinker, who I like and respect, namely Eric Kaufmann. In a book called Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2018), he recognizes the existence of what he calls ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’. According to this concept, the fact that minority groups are currently encouraged to take very strong pride in the markers of group identity, particularly ethnic or cultural ones, is asymmetrical.
It is wonderful to celebrate being a member of an ethnic minority group or coming from a particular cultural background, but also sexual, gender, and other kinds of groups. But, of course, the dominant group that continues to be the biggest in many societies, consists of people who are white. Therefore, people who are part of a native majority are not really allowed to celebrate in the same kind of group.
Kaufmann is right in pointing this out as a fact about contemporary societies. Now, Eric, who by the way is not white, has the solution, but 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 is just the model of society now. This is certainly one way to dissolve that tension, but it is the wrong way. That is a way in which we are going to end up with ever more zero-sum conflicts, which will mean that we are not going to be able to build societies, but we will actually remain stable and tolerant once they have become very diverse – which most democracies, at this point in time, are.
A better solution is for them to try to have certain forms of pride in the cultural heritage – of maintenance of the religious, the culinary, the cultural traditions. All of that is perfectly fine. But they 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 for the citizens of the European Union or fellow human beings. And that tempers our commitment to sub-national communities and identities.
In light of this common identity, the most important thing about me is not that my ancestors come from country X and your ancestors come from country Y, that 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 or that we are citizens of the same country, where we start in solidarity with each other across those kinds of boundaries. And that, I would say, is how I differ from somebody like Eric Kaufmann, for example.
LJ: Have we returned to a different stage of development of liberal democracy? Maybe what we are seeing right now is a kind of ‘mass democracy’ with a different role for the elites and it will be impossible to come back to the universal values that everyone acknowledges?
YM: This goes back to the point I made a little while ago, which is that we never had democracies where everything was stale and wonderful. Perhaps we did for a few decades in a few countries, but I am currently reading Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), which is a magisterial history of Europe (West, East, and Central) from 1945 until the 1990s. And, of course, challenges to the liberal universalist order existed in virtually each and every country in Europe throughout that period.
Obviously, they existed 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 they were also present in many Western European countries, with very strong communist parties, where in some places there was a fascist rule (like in Spain and Portugal), where there were ongoing critiques of liberal universalism from the right. And yet, we managed to get through that trouble in history.
Therefore, perhaps what we are 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 unless we have another cataclysm like the World War II, perhaps we will never quite get back to that. This does not mean that liberal universalism will not ultimately win out, that it will not be able to respond to and contain its enemies.
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 is not just Venezuela or Turkey where democracy really did die. It 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 would not be a democratic renewal. It would be overthrowing something that has quite clearly become a dictatorship.
However, in other places – like Poland – populism did not play out that way, even though you had a very serious threat to free institutions in Poland. Certainly, it would be premature to say that this threat has been eliminated. There are still risks and challenges that continue and it is very difficult 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.
Poland certainly never did become Venezuela or Turkey for that matter either. And I wonder whether the way to understand the populist challenge in places like the United States and many other countries (like 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. This, however, does not mean that they will necessarily win. And that is a slightly more optimistic way of thinking about it.
LJ: Apart from being a scholar, you are in a way a ‘warrior’ fighting for liberal values. What should the liberal strategy be like? Do you see any threats in which the anti-populist politics can turn into populism? If so, how do we avoid it?
YM: There are two answers to that. One is that, personally, my self-conception is as a writer. Therefore, 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. This comes from my own self-conception of what my role is in the world, and I am lucky enough to be able to live from writing and thinking about ideas and teaching. This is the one moral obligation that comes with that privilege.
It also happens to be strategically smart in the long run. One of the mistakes that many journalists have made in the last years is that they understand journalism as part of the defense of democracy, which is fine. We need journalists for democracy to function. But they have allowed that to influence how we frame each story. Each time they report on something – for example, when they reported on Joe Biden’s mental acuity a few months ago – they would ask themselves, ‘How can I frame this in such a way that I minimize the risks to democracy?’. This means that I minimize the risk that Donald Trump might win power, and therefore, that I minimize the problem. And this approach ultimately loses more trust when it wins, as it simply does not actually accomplish the purpose that is meant to serve.
Therefore, my first answer is simply in my personal capacity. I do a new weekly column about big ideas that are trying not always to be in keeping with the latest news cycle (See: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/). And when I do that, I try to divorce myself from that activist role. I am simply stating what I think is interesting and important.
Regarding your question, 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 started taking them for granted, though we have allowed the enemies of liberalism to blame anything they do not like about our society. And there is plenty of things to dislike about liberalism, without recognizing that many of those things are not liberal at all.
In fact, the great achievements of our societies really are due to liberalism. Liberal societies around the world are among the best, most affluent, most free, most coveted societies. When you ask people around the globe where they want to live, what they name are liberal societies. This is why it is very important for us collectively to make the intellectual case for liberalism at a time when it is sort of oddly still dominant in terms of how our institutions tend to work.
Nonetheless, as an ideology, liberalism has fallen into disuse, or perhaps disrepute. And thus, we need to be reminding people of what the great accomplishments of this intellectual tradition are.
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.
