On Mounk's Identity Trap

At Liberal Currents I have published a review of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap. I would say it’s the latest antiwoke book to hit the shelves but these things are published at such a rapid clip that it’s impossible even to keep up. This is the core of my review,

Mounk treats society as essentially static. Social justice activism perturbs liberal society from its natural tendency to gradually bend along an arc of progress. Identity politics disrupts the trend toward justice by introducing illiberal practices into American society and provokes a rightwing reaction. This is what Mounk means by describing identity politics as the yin to the yang of right-wing authoritarianism. Right-wing authoritarians need the identity left to justify their own antiliberal ambitions. If the left would just abjure identity politics it would deprive fascism of oxygen. 

This is an illusion. The authoritarian right only appears dormant when the dominance of traditional hierarchies—men over women; whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom; queers, sex workers, and other deviants in the closet; and trans people non-existent—is secure, when the unfreedom of disfavored groups enjoys broad support across party lines. This was the case when Jim Crow enjoyed significant support in both the Republican and Democratic parties. When some progress is made toward equality, rightwing resentment activates and racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism turn very impolitely overt. Under such circumstances any activism for freedom for the marginalized are relentlessly recast by reactionary narratives as aggressive, as overreactions, as illiberal.

There were a lot of possible directions to take my revew. I’ll comment on a few things that didn’t make it into the essay, in a rather scattered fashion because these are the leftovers.

Nonzerosumness

Like other antiwoke liberals, Mounk talks about the “zero-sum” world view inherent in identity politics. I argue in the essay that the explicit purpose of identity politics as originally propounded by the Combahee River Collective and carried forward by, among identity movements, the Movement for Black Lives, is to cultivate solidarity across difference. The idea is to recognize difference and learn how not to let division grow in the face of the dominant group.

I wanted to include the analysis by Heather McGhee that focuses on how zero-sum politics actually work. In The Sum of Us, McGhee details numerous examples of how the right uses racist narratives and dog whistles to poison solidarity. Public investments and policies that would benefit everyone (positive-sum) are foregone when political actors on the right successfully create the perception that disfavored minorities (especially Blacks) will reap benefits. McGhee’s evocative workhorse example is the number of public pools that were drained and closed in response to desegregation.

Liberal identity politics sees solidarity as the means to a positive sum society, where all people of all genders, creeds, and ethnicities prosper.

Utopianism

Another accusation from Mounk and the antiwokesters is that critical race theory (CRT) and social justice movements generally are utopian because they are disgruntled about the imperfection of liberal society. They fail to appreciate the progress on racial and gender equality and other social justice issues. And they immaturely demand perfection out of the crooked timber of human, all too human, institutions. Moreover CRT and similar identity ideological edifices have a simplistic view of race (that it determines everything).

This is all backward. Mounk’s liberalism acknowledges that race is a social construct, but seeks racial justice not by directly addressing the material inequalities of structural racism but by abolishing racism by color-blindness. Color-blind liberalism seeks the abolition of a social construct that has evolved over four centuries and shaped norms, institutions, and hierarchies throughout its history. We will abolish race by pursuing scrupulously color-blind policies, emphasizing the racial progress we’ve already achieved, and pushing back hard against any identity-based claims of grievance.

How is this not utopian? It is simply (color) blind faith in the arc of history bending toward justice. Faith without works. CRT actually studies how this social construct—older the nation itself (1776) and much older than America’s multi-racial democracy (1963)—manifests in social, economic, and political life, its patterns and dynamics and clever adaptations. Racial justice activists seek not a utopia where race—a social construction which now intertwines with ethnicity, language, art, music, and culture—no longer exists but a real world built out of ours where race does not dominate an individual’s life prospects or a community’s flourishing.

Free speech

I didn’t touch on the issue of free speech in my review, which Mounk of course pits against his “identity synthesis,” but the topic is important to the relationship of identity politics to liberalism. Mounk believes we should not just have a narrow concept of free speech where the government is forbidden from censoring private expression but instead we should foster a “culture of free speech.” Mounk writes,

The first argument points out just how many societies have jailed, tortured, or murdered people—from Socrates to Galileo—for expressing what later generations came to embrace as the truth. Should we really be so arrogant as to think that we are the first generation to get things absolutely right? Clearly, the answer is no. If great moral and scientific advances have, in the past, so often been delayed because an obstinate majority shut down free expression, limits on free speech would pose the same risk today.

Of course, I think some kind of culture of free expression and open dialogue is important. Not all who communicate seek truth or even to persuade. Some seek to derail, filibuster, and monopolize our attention. But Mounk doesn’t even mention, let alone resolve, the problem bad faith poses for any culture of free speech. The reason we in 2023 are still talking about racial differences in intelligence or creationism (this issues has died down but I prophecy its resurrection) is not because there is an earnest debate about the science. Nor is impatience with such topics a result of “arrogance” risking the moral and scientific advances that race science and intelligent design might usher in. No, we are compelled to suffer race scientists like Charles Murray and his tireless popular defenders like Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan because they steadfastly resist evidence.

We will always be confronted with race science and other bogus ideas (like climate change denial or Trump’s claims to have won the 2020 election) because powerful actors stand to gain from their persistence. Importantly, this doesn’t mean that the person on the bus or your uncle at the holiday dinner doesn’t sincerely believe these ideas. It is simply that these ideas are pushed from above for political rather than earnest, truth-seeking reasons. And the “culture of free speech” and “the left is against free speech” narratives abet the persistence of these baleful ideas. Liberals should not have to resign themselves to playing dumb about these ideas for the sake of a culture of free speech, especially when many such ideas have the explicit purpose of disrespecting—or terrorizing—whole groups of people. A liberal culture has to be prepared to actively resist misinformation, bad faith propaganda, and hateful or threatening rhetoric. Without banning books or websites, this may indeed include “deplatforming” persons and ideas by discouraging publishers and venues from hosting those persons and ideas. Protest and boycott can be tools of speech.

The debate over free speech often comes in the form of questioning whether some terrible person should be allowed to speak on a university campus, or whether some hateful group should be allowed to demonstrate. But we rarely question how we came to the dilemma of suffering a neo-Nazi to speak or protesting an event and generating yet another tiresome cancel culture headline. And we rarely question whose and what speech we fail to hear because we are so busy with big-mouthed and big-pocketed bigots.

This doesn’t mean that we should censor people with the power of the state or that we should give up speaking to people we disagree with. Part of a genuine culture of free speech includes listening to reasonable people with different perspectives. Who counts as reasonable? Reasonable people will disagree about who counts as reasonable! Here we are abandoned to the undying necessity of prudent judgment, a virtue that must sustain free speech and liberalism more broadly.

Deference politics

Good judgment also plays a major role in my final addendum. It is amusing that Mounk insinuates Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is an ally in his struggle against identity politics. Indeed Táíwò explicitly refers to himself as in the identity politics camp in his excellent book, Elite Capture. Still, Mounk is onto something to note there is a tension between some dubious practices of identity politics and liberal values, and that it is related to the “deference epistemology” Táíwò criticizes in his book.

Deference epistemology refers to the oft-heard calls to “listen to women” (or people of color, etc) or “center the marginalized” without thinking too hard about which women or marginalized people we mean by this and whom we might be leaving out. Obviously, women, people of color, and marginalized groups are not monoliths. As fears mount over reports of increasing Black support for Trump in recent polls, we liberals may find ourselves with a problem of just which voices we’re supposed to be centering. Likewise women are not exactly strangers to far right movements.

Far right and reactionary minorities are easy to find and easy to manufacture. This is indeed a tried-and-true feature of rightwing politics: the enthusiastic showcasing of Black intellectuals who minimize white supremacy and women who create whole public intellectual careers out of being antifeminists. The right can, if not exactly center, then gesture to their own members of marginalized communities with a smirk.

Then what is to be done? We again retreat to good epistemic practices. Judgment, honesty, earnestness, and open-mindedness. In our epistemic environments we find experts we trust, scientists respected by the profession in their fields, writers who have proven themselves. We apply our own expertise when it’s relevant and see how someone we’re listening to measures up in an area we know pretty well. One rule of thumb I have is to be suspicious of thinkers who make the privileged and the powerful too comfortable, but this isn’t foolproof. I certainly approached Mounk’s book—after having already read a number of articles by him—expecting to dislike it, largely because he was encouraging readers to disvalue thinkers and ideas I had already come to value after some major intellectual trekking. We grow and learn, and we adapt our listening and reading habits accordingly. There are no shortcuts. We do the best we can.