On September 12, 2009, a motley crowd of conservative and libertarian protestors gathered in Washington D.C., spurred by the tortuous battles on healthcare reform and, more insidiously, the ascendency of Barack Obama to the Oval Office. They massed before the Capitol but did not breach it, as would happen in the insurrection 11 years later. They carried anti-government banners and posters portraying Obama as an African witch doctor. They were “real” Americans, some costumed as the Founders, shouting down their perceived enemies. With an estimated 75,000 citizens, this was just one in a series of Tea Party demonstrations across the nation, catalyzing discontent and rage throughout the body politic. Historians now interpret the Tea Party as a racist rejection of our first Black President, and a precursor to the MAGA movement.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The emergence of an online, confrontational Left during the 2010s might well have been a response to the Tea Party, but Yascha Mounk bypasses that notion in his cogent, polemical, flawed new book The Identity Trap. In fact, Mounk cites the Tea Party only once, in a throwaway sentence about a liberal grassroots organization. In his view, “wokeness” has mutated, virus-like, from college campuses into mainstream media, infecting millions of professors and students, pundits and politicians, and birthing a cottage industry of DEI consultants. The Identity Trap, then, is a manifesto of sorts, but ultimately Mounk falls into an identity trap of his own making.
He kicks off his thesis with a head of steam. He eschews the term “identity politics” for “identity synthesis,” a broader category loosely associated with the slangy “wokeness.” “As social psychologists have demonstrated again and again, drawing lines between different groups seems to come naturally to our species,” he writes. “We are capable of great courage and altruism when called upon to assist members of our own group, but also of terrifying disregard and cruelty when confronted with people whom we think of as members of another group. Any decent ideology must have an account of how to attenuate the ill effects of such conflicts. One key problem with the identity synthesis is that it fails to do so.”
Much of The Identity Trap is a critique of Mounk’s turf: the academy and legacy publications like The New York Times. (An American citizen since 2017, he’s currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of International Affairs in Washington.) He targets figures such as Imbram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates. His ire burns bright beneath a cool and measured surface. A champion of pluralism, he considers the current vogue for identity synthesis a rebuke of the Civil Rights era, underscoring how theorists like Derrick Bell insisted on the pervasive menace of structural racism and the fierce need for Black people to disengage from white spaces — segregation by another name. Mounk seems affronted by the notion that, contra their best efforts and intentions, humans will never bridge chasms of race, class, and gender. For him this is a failure of empathy and imagination. His most passionate chapters flesh out a countervailing philosophy, sustaining a few clear lines of inquiry. Where Bell lamented stasis, Mounk celebrates progress.
But does he truly grasp the convoluted morality and broken promises of the country he now claims as his own? His career may lie on this side of the Atlantic, but his intellectual sensibility is anchored amid the other. His internationalism enriches our debates, but doesn’t acknowledge the varied tributaries of the American Experiment. “Despite the real variation within and between academic departments, this [identity] synthesis is characterized by a widespread adherence to seven fundamental propositions: a deep skepticism about objective truth inspired by Michel Foucault; the use of a form of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends inspired by Edward Said; an embrace of categories of identity inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; a proud pessimism about the state of Western societies as well as a preference for public policies that explicitly make how someone is treated depend on the group to which they belong, both inspired by Derrick Bell; and an embrace of an intersectional logic for political activism as well as a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of members of different identity groups to understand each other, both associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw.”
This list tilts toward émigré intellectuals, and no surprise: Mounk came to the U.S. from Germany as a Harvard graduate student. He largely neglects prominent Black American thinkers — W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, bell hooks — who forged a brilliant corpus of work despite the forces arrayed against them. (Mounk refers to Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling White Fragility and grifter extraordinaire, more frequently than he does to Frederick Douglass.) There are exactly zero mentions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” a pillar of American individualism, or the Combahee River Collective, formed by Black feminists in 1977. Wokeness is as American as Mom and apple pie; to suggest it’s foundationally European is to misread our history.
Mounk’s overview of the rise of social-media platforms is concise and thoughtful; he skillfully plots a throughline from the “curated” ur-site, Tumblr, as young voters began to cluster on-line, building communities that ebbed and flowed but grew in intensity and reach. “What began on Tumblr did not stay on Tumblr,” he observes. “As social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and (later) TikTok became more important as places for young people to construct their identities and express their politics, many of the memes and themes that were taking shape on Tumblr also adapted to these different environments. Nor was the influence of Tumblr ideology restricted to social media. Soon, the popularized form of the identity synthesis also came to shape the content of a growing number of upstart publications—and even that of legacy newspapers and magazines.” It was “a short march” through the institutions that have buttressed the postwar world order.
The book interrogates the jargon so prevalent in elite universities and now professional spaces, “microagressions” and so forth. Mounk also fervently preaches equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. His elaborate prescriptions — they go on and on — sound sensible, if occasionally platitudinous, his tone that of a patient if patronizing tutor. He summarizes his chapters with “key takeaways,” perhaps a poke at TED talks and corporate slideshows, but the effect is distractingly schoolmarmish: “We must aspire to surpass the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by the religion of our ancestors or the color of our skin. We should keep striving for a society in which categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation matter a lot less than they do now because what each of us can accomplish — and how we all treat each other — no longer depends on the groups into which we were born.”
Mounk is correct to highlight the illiberalism of echo chambers and groupthink, the bizarre ways ideologies have captured our culture, but it turns out that he’s a creature of his own sensory bubble, or Umwelt, to borrow a noun popularized by science journalist Ed Yong. (Aren’t we all?) The homework Mounk assigns us feels like an imposition, a need to gain the rhetorical upper hand. He notes, “When I notice that I feel nervous about arguing for a position that is unpopular among many of my friends and colleagues (as I have in parts of this book), I remind myself that I am proud of the views I hold. I have thought about them long and hard. They are rooted in a noble tradition that has done a tremendous amount of good for the world. And though I recognize that I am, like everyone else, likely to be wrong about some important things, the views I hold are — virtually by definition — the ones that seem most likely to prove right. This makes it a little easier to speak from a position of calm confidence.” Is this hubris or wisdom?
Mounk is allowed to speak his piece — hence this book–but would he grant the same leeway to Coates or Sarah Schulman, who think and write within a vastly different moral matrix? As it winds down, The Identity Trap thrashes in the snares of its certitude, inadvertently putting its finger on the paradox of our imperiled democracy: is all freedom of expression, even the most heinous, permissible? And if not, why not?
[Published by Penguin Press on September 26, 2023, 416 pages, $32.00 US hardcover]