Podcast: Are identity politics a trap? A conversation with author and political scientist Yascha Mounk
Listen: Political scientist and author Yascha Mounk joins Ian Bremmer on the GZERO World Podcast to discuss his latest book, “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.” Mounk delves into the complicated dynamics of identity politics and challenges the conventional wisdom from the progressive left that focusing on identity and what makes us different from each other leads to a more equitable society. By highlighting our differences rather than shared values, Mounk argues, well-meaning liberals are exacerbating societal division and hindering progress toward greater equality. While acknowledging that our society is deeply imperfect and genuine injustices remain, Mounk unpacks the implications of identity politics and questions whether the current focus on identity truly serves the cause of inclusivity or social harmony.
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TRANSCRIPT: Are identity politics a trap? A conversation with author and political scientist Yascha Mounk
YaschaMounk:
I think the important thing is not to build a culture in which we are forced to double down on narrow identities, in which we cease to build the broader identities, like ones as Americans, but allow us to sustain solidarity with people who are very different from us.
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about identity, politics, and how those two things come together to create the complicated contentious idea of yes, yes, yes, identity politics. From race to gender to profession to nationality to astrological science, Scorpio right here, that's right, there are a million ways we define who we are. Not more than a million, not less than a million. A million. And people feel strongly about them, but at what point does a focus on what makes us different hurt more than it helps? When does a healthy appreciation for culture and heritage stifle discourse and deny mutual understanding? I'm going to unpack that tension today with my guest, Yascha Mounk . He's a political scientist, as am I. It's my favorite identity, in fact, whose new book The Identity Trap explores the consequences and the limitations of so-called and I quote, "wokeness." Let's get to it.
Speaker 3:
The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our lead sponsor, Prologis. Prologis helps businesses across the globe scale their supply chains with an expansive portfolio of logistics real estate, and the only end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today. Learn more at prologis.com.
This GZERO podcast is brought to you by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment, presenting ISS. When war breaks out on Earth between the US and Russia, astronauts aboard the International Space Station fight each other for control. This sci-fi thriller is only in theaters, January 19th.
Ian Bremmer:
Yascha Mounk. Welcome back to GZERO World.
Yascha Mounk:
Thank you so much.
Ian Bremmer:
So you have a new book out, but I'm going to ask you first about the talk we had last time, which was democracy and decline. And I mean since then we've had some fairly significant good news, coming, for example, just out of Poland, and certainly the European Union seems pretty stable, but we've also seen some coups in Africa, the United States is deteriorating. How would you rate state of democracy around the world today compared to when you and I last sat down and chatted about it?
Yascha Mounk:
So I think we have to get used to democracy being in a long-term crisis. And events today or tomorrow are not changing the overall assessment in a dramatic way. So I like to say I'm a democracy crisis hipster. I started worrying about the crisis of democracy before it was cool. At the time colleagues in political science said this is silly. Democracy in places like France or the United States is completely safe.
Since then, they've overtaken me on the worry meter and gone from there's no reason to worry to we're doomed. I continue to be concerned about the state of many democracies around the world. I do think we will see some democratic systems that were once thought to be safe, erode and collapse as they did in Hungary. But clearly we are also seeing that democratic countries can be quite resilient in the face of a populist who took over, as was the case in Brazil, as was the case in the United States, at least in 2020, for we will see what happens in 2024 and 2028.
Ian Bremmer:
We'll see what happens, yeah.
Yascha Mounk:
And now very, very good news in Poland where democracy was under serious assault but the Democratic Opposition Coalition has managed to win the elections and it looks like they'll be able to take government in a free and fair transfer of power.
Ian Bremmer:
Indeed. Now one major piece of resilience as I see it is the European Union. The fact that you have this strong supranational thing that actually exerts a lot of sovereignty. So you can get a major populist in Italy, which by the way is one of the more powerful countries in Europe, and yet the implications on domestic governance are very constrained because of the EU. Do you see it that way or not really?
Yascha Mounk:
I'm a little bit more skeptical. So I think Giorgia Meloni in Italy has turned out to be relatively moderate. I think that is as much her choice as it is pressure from the European Union. We've also seen the EU be quite helpful to would be authoritarian populists. In the case of Hungary, I think there was two mechanisms that really helped Viktor Orban. The first is a lot of funding from EU, that they continue to send to Budapest and Orban often uses to pay off his cronies and consolidate his power. And secondly, of course, the fact that a lot of young Hungarians who may have stayed to fight against Orban, to fight for the democratic institutions, understandably took the temptation to use their right to travel freely and work in other parts of the European Union and said, "I'm going to go off to other parts of Europe and have a good life there." So I think it's a double-edged sword.
Ian Bremmer:
So let's move to what you've been talking about over the last few months, your new book The Identity Trap. And of course anyone in the United States has been hearing far too much about the culture wars. Explain to me a little bit what you mean when you call identity a trap.
Yascha Mounk:
Yeah. Look, we all have identities and that's a great thing. We're recording this in the middle of New York City. One of the things that I love about this place is that there's people from all over the world. But many of those people have strong connections to the cultures, the languages, the cuisines of the places that they're from. And there's always been forms of identity politics. I think people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were in some sense engaged in identity politics.
What I worry about is the novel ideology about race and gender and sexual orientation, sometimes called woke though I try to avoid that term, that has gained tremendous power over our mainstream institutions. And that is different in a number of ways. Number one, it really tries to encourage people to double down on their identities in new ways. A lot of elite private schools in the city we're recording this in, now think that the mission of a progressive education is to get children to think of themselves as racial beings. And they come into classrooms, sometimes in the third grade, the second grade, the first grade, and split kids up by race in order to make them double down on their identities in that kind of way. That I think is a mistake.
And the second key thing here is that the form of demands that are made have changed significantly from what they used to. Rather than asking for true inclusion in shared institutions, rather than, as Frederick Douglass did in his famous speech about the 4th of July, is saying, "By what virtue are you excluding me from the values you're celebrating today? From the idea that all men are created equal?" They often reject that universalist heritage and want to make how we treat each other and how the state treat all of us explicitly depend on the kind of identity groups of which we're a part. Derek Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory, for example, argued that we should reject I quote, "the defunct racial equality ideology of the Civil Rights movement." That I think is a big mistake.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I guess a bunch of ways we can go with this. One is, I wonder, I understand that you do not want universities to become crucibles for snowflakes who are incapable of handling and dealing with diversity, incapable of dealing with a true multiplicity of ideas that actually deserve full airing, irrespective of whether they're politically correct. On the other hand, there continue to be very real structural inequalities, for example, on issues like race and availability of economic well-being, and affirmative action, for example, facilitated that transition. So what do you think, because clearly on the other side of the spectrum you have people saying, "We're not going to support any affirmative action anymore, because this issue has been resolved and now we're just going to treat everyone on the basis of merit." I mean, where do you come down on that?
Yascha Mounk:
Well, I think this is a much broader conversation than affirmative action. I'm happy to get back to affirmative action, but I think it's important to put that in context. One of the things that the United States did over a course of the COVID pandemic was when we finally got these life-saving vaccines, whose inventors just rightly got the Nobel Prize, we had to figure out who to distribute them first because they were scarce.
Ian Bremmer:
Right.
Yascha Mounk:
Most countries around the world started distributing them first to the elderly because they were most at risk of serious adverse consequences. The key advisory committee to the Centers of Disease Control in the United States, ACIP, rejected that possibility because it said that elderly Americans were disproportionately white. And therefore it suggested prioritizing essential workers.
What ended up happening is that everybody was eligible, but there was no spots. So who got those spots? People who were counted as essential workers, who were finance workers in New York, movie producers in LA. I was counted as an essential worker as a college professor in the state of Maryland. So this had really bad consequences.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah.
Yascha Mounk:
And it had bad consequences for non-white Americans, by the way, because if you end up giving two shots of a vaccine to 25 year old Latino Uber drivers rather than to one 80 year old Latino retiree, more Latinos are likely to die. What we needed to go and prioritize, as we always do in triage, medical treatments to the people who are actually most at risk rather than resorting to these simplistic racial categories that actually cloak what's really going on.
Ian Bremmer:
Again, I continue to get you-
Yascha Mounk:
Now when it comes to affirmative action-
Ian Bremmer:
But I'm trying to put the term affirmative action in a broader sense.
Yascha Mounk:
Right.
Ian Bremmer:
Which is what you are trying to do is assess the people that are most in need. For any policy, for any resource, you want to assess who are the people most in need. Now, of course, globally, we completely fail at that because the people that are most in need are not Americans and yet overwhelmingly the resources go to the wealthy country. So we're already failing at this globally. But in the United States, for any policy, what you are saying, and I completely agree, is that you want to focus on the people that are most in need. And for vaccines, the Americans completely failed. And I'm asking, wouldn't you want to apply that kind of sensibility to all of your policies?
Yascha Mounk:
Sure, but the problem is that race is a very, very bad metric for that in virtually all circumstances. So let's take the example of child poverty. We had a very good child poverty policy for a year or so after the Inflation Reduction Act, which helped all children in America who were in need to have dinner on their plate. And that's morally right, because every child in America should know that they're going to be able to get dinner irrespective of their race. It's also politically much more winning because it's much easier to sustain a policy that is directed at all children in need. There's much broader support for it. And finally, it actually helps to move us towards "equity" because a policy that is directed at if African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately likely to have children who are in need, a universal policy that helps all children who are in need is actually disproportionately going to help African-Americans and Latinos.
And so again, I think using race as this simplistic metric is a mistake. That was true in the case of affirmative action as well. I think the strongest rationale for affirmative action is as a form of reparations for the terrible unjust treatment that African-Americans have received in this country for many centuries, which continues to set back the educational opportunities and so on. 50% of the students who are Black at Ivy League universities, wonderful students, many of whom I've taught, are the children of engineers and doctors and so on, recent immigrants from countries like Nigeria or Kenya. The fact that they are Black here is a very bad metric for whether they are actually in need of that kind of historical redress. And some African-American activist groups, like a group called American Descendants of Slavery recognize this and say, "Hang on a second, you're claiming you're doing something for us, but you're not. This is the wrong metric."
Ian Bremmer:
And Asian-Americans are similarly being hit on the other side of this.
Yascha Mounk:
Yeah. And one thing that's very clear is that you can be a defender of affirmative action and still recognize that Asian-Americans have quite clearly been discriminated against places like Harvard Universities. Asian-Americans at this point in this country have the same extracurricular achievements as other ethnic groups. They're as likely to be in sports teams. As likely to be high school presidents. They get the same score from alumni interviews for places like Harvard University and yet admissions officers who review their files, who haven't met those students, who see information that places them on par with all the other applicants say that Asian American applicants to Harvard happen to have personalities, but are vastly less attractive, vastly less appealing, vastly worse, than those of other races. I think that should trouble us.
Ian Bremmer:
Absolutely. So another thing that I find interesting and also hard to square is we have these debates about people and young people in particular not wanting to have society define what box they're in. They want to be able to identify themselves. Most people do. I mean, I'd rather be considered a Scorpio and left-handed than I would an American who has political views by dint of where I'm born. I would enjoy that more. That's not the way it works. Now, on the one hand, I have to say, as someone who is a little older, I don't quite get all of the pronouns. It's hard for me to address someone as they. I don't have pronouns in my email signature. But I also get that young people don't like the idea that historic determination of identity by fixed gender identity is who you are. How do you deal with that? Because it feels legitimate to me that young people want to rebel against what they sense as society telling them, "This is how you need to be."
Yascha Mounk:
Well, let's say two things. The first is that everybody should be free to be who they are, to act as they wish, to present as the gender role that they prefer. And we need to have a society in which we respect everybody equally, irrespective of a race we're from, irrespective of a national origin, irrespective of their biological sex, irrespective of a gender role they chose.
Ian Bremmer:
Sure. But we don't do that.
Yascha Mounk:
Well, yes, and we need to keep fighting to do that more closely. But that is different from saying that we should create a society where how we treat each other is deeply shaped all of the time by the group of which we're from. I'll give you an example. Robin DiAngelo, the white diversity trainer who wrote bestselling books, she says that every time a white person interrupts a black person, they're bringing the entire apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them. That makes me think that she doesn't have any Black friends because part of being friends, we're friends, I hope? Even after this conversation.
Ian Bremmer:
Ish, ish.
Yascha Mounk:
Is that we interrupt each other.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Yascha Mounk:
That's part of what is to be social equals.
Ian Bremmer:
That's what we do.
Yascha Mounk:
So I think having a society where we have these forms of deference to each other on the base of our identities is not in fact a way to build towards social equality. And the other thing I want to say is that many of the norms and practices that have now been adopted in these institutions actually box people into defining by their identity even when we don't want to. After the new Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, colleges are going to put even more weight on personal statements. And every applicant has to, to get into college, say, "Hey, I'm defined by the adversity I've experienced."
Ian Bremmer:
This is who I am.
Yascha Mounk:
Whether not that's true.
Ian Bremmer:
So what I'm trying to get at, I get this, and I think sensible people generally agree with what you are presently saying. I worry that in society today we're sort of lionizing and spending too much attention focusing on people whose actual, the things they are saying are largely performative, they are meant to drive eyeballs, they are algorithmically expanded, but normal people don't actually believe or accept that.
Yascha Mounk:
Look, I agree and I disagree. I agree that most Americans strongly disagree with these ideas. According to the best research on this by more uncommon, the sort of tribe of what they call progressive activists, about 8% of US population, they happen to be predominantly white, predominantly highly educated, and predominantly rich. At the same time, they have outsized influence over our institutions. Most elite private schools in this country now engage in those kinds of affinity groups. And I'm not talking about 16 year olds choosing to spend time with people who have similar origins. I'm talking about teachers coming into the classroom and splitting up the kids into different kinds of groups. The CDC was deeply influenced by this ideology of equity, even though its own models suggested that this would lead to about 0.5 to 6.5% more deaths in the COVID pandemic. And it is also a political trap.
Ian Bremmer:
But is that really the experience of a majority of college students around the country? If you go to the University of Michigan where you've got, I mean the temple is football. You've got 110,000 people out there every weekend. That's what they're all turning out for. Middle of the country. I mean, America's a diverse place. Universities, I mean, I get that you have a few of these Ivy League schools that are driving this, but is this really the experience of most American university students? Is it really?
Yascha Mounk:
Well, I'll tell you two things. The first is that the students I teach are very open to thinking seriously about these topics. And to changing their mind. But everything they've been taught at this point in their education is that they should define themselves by the particular intersection of identities at which they stand. They should be skeptical of free speech or they should put under general pool of suspicion all forms of what's come to be called cultural appropriation. That there's a deep way in which we're not going to be able to understand each other if we stand at different intersections of identity. So that is a deep, pervasive part of the university culture.
But the other thing I want to say is I was struck when I started to research this book how little good writing there had been on this. In the book, I sourced the intellectual origins of these ideas and there isn't an academic who has actually written about this, other than me. I try to make a reasonable case against these ideas. One which recognizes that we have genuine injustices in the United States today, that some form of identity will always play a part of our politics, but that also champions the political tradition in which I think people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King stood. One that's saying the goal is not to rip up the values of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but rather to live up to it.
And by the way, people who claim we haven't been able to make any progress on racism, any progress on homophobia, any progress on these forms of prejudices are wrong. Our society is deeply imperfect. We have to fight to do better. But we can do better on the basis of these principles, and that's how, from the gay rights movement to the fight to abolish slavery, we've been able to make the greatest political progress in the past. And so I think we need somebody, a book like The Identity Trap, to make this argument in a reasonable yet forceful way. I think the important thing is not to build a culture in which we are forced to double down on narrow identities, in which we think that we can't communicate with each other if we have different identities, in which we cease to build the broader identities, like ones as Americans, but allow us to sustain solidarity with people who are very different from us.
Ian Bremmer:
Yascha Mounk. Great to see you again on GZERO World.
Yascha Mounk:
Great to see you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter. It's called GZERO Daily.
Speaker 3:
The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our lead sponsor, Prologis. Prologis helps businesses across the globe scale their supply chains with an expansive portfolio of logistics real estate, and the only end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today. Learn more at Prologis.com.
This GZERO podcast is brought to you by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment, presenting ISS. When war breaks out on Earth between the US and Russia, astronauts aboard the International Space Station fight each other for control. This sci-fi thriller is only in theaters, January 19th.
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