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Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap

September 22, 2023
Notes
Transcript
Our democratic order is facing a two-front war. While the immediate crisis may be from the right, the left is presenting its own threats—which only helps make far-right populism stronger. Political scientist and democracy hipster Yashca Mounk discusses his new book with Charlie Sykes on the weekend pod.

show notes:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712961/the-identity-trap-by-yascha-mounk/

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:07
    Welcome to the weekend boat work cast. I’m Charlie Sykes. Not that we take another break from Trumpism and the shambhala clown car, what’s happening on Congress to talk about. Other issues, that are, you know, marginally less controversial. No.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:20
    Not really. Actually, there is a new book out next week. It is the identity trap by our good friend, Yasalong. And, it’s gonna generate an awful lot of buzz because he goes at the whole question of illiberalism from the left and vocalism from the left, but from a center left perspective. And so, yasha, first of all, welcome to the podcast.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:41
    Thank you so much, Charlie. Okay. We gotta do a little bit of
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:44
    the hype because you some of the best blurbs. I got this book in the mail about a month ago, and I’m driving in the car, and I’m reading some of it to my wife. This is Jonathan Last. Who writes America’s academic cultural and political institutions went insane beginning around twenty fourteen. And I’ve been trying to figure out why ever since, into this new book, the identity trap, Yashabung, explains how a few powerfully bad ideas propelled through institutions by people with good intentions are causing systemic dysfunction and dangerous polarization.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:16
    This is among the most insightful and important books written in the last decade on on American democracy and its current torments because it also shows us a way out of the trap Okay. David French, New York Times columnist, regular on this podcast. In this indispensable book, Yosho Mung proposes an alternative to the ceaseless combat between woke and anti woke extremes, one that takes seriously The enduring malignant legacy of systemic discrimination yet correctly identifies the universal values not group solidarity offer the surest path to justice fairness and during social peace. So great reviews for this book, which is coming out next week. So I wanna give people your background.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:58
    I mean, yash is a political scientist, a professor of practice at international affairs at Johns Hopkins contributing writer to the Atlantic You have been writing about democracy for years. Much of your work has been documenting the threat to democracy from the right So tell me why you decided given the fact that we have right wing authoritarianism on the March everywhere. We have book bans, in one state after another. We have, you know, studies about this counterrevolution led by anti Woke warriors like Christopher Rufo and Rhonda Zena. So why did you choose this moment?
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:38
    As a student of politics to write about left wing identity politics and wokism.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:46
    Yeah. Well, first of all, you know, I like to say that I’m a democracy crisis hipster. I worried about the crisis of democracy before it was cool. I published a paper with a colleague in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen when I was a graduate student arguing that people were coming to have more critical views about democracy that they gave left importance to living in the democracy that were coming to be more open to authoritarian alternatives to democracy. And they linked this to what I was already seeing in Europe.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:14
    All of these rising far right movements in parties, gaining in virtue, gaining in power in places like Hangory, where they’re now firmly in in charge. And so I’ve been thinking and worrying about the threat from the right for a very long time. I wrote two books about the nature of populism and why people like Donald Trump and Narendra Modi and Wesip Adawan. Are very dangerous. And I’ve written countless articles first in slate and then the Atlantic Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:41
    Chronicling everything that’s wrong with Donald Trump. The first thing I wanna say is I continue to believe all of things. I’m really worried about the election next year. I’m very worried about the fact that Donald Trump, according to batting markets, has about a one and three chance of being the next president of the United States. And so I haven’t changed my mind about any of that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:00
    I do think that we now have good writing and scholarship on those topics I first wrote my book about populism, I think it was one of the first books, but really explained that phenomenon. We brought it to people. Now we have hundreds of books about populism. I didn’t think me writing another book on a topic I’ve already written about, lots of other people have also written about is gonna help that much. Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:22
    Right. The zone has been flooded.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:23
    Yeah. And I have to say I I admire the people who are able to, you know, write yet another article about how terrible Donald Trump is. I certainly agree with him. I don’t have the energy to do it over and over again.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:35
    I’ve done enough of those. I’ve done my tour of duty. Right? Yeah. And, I mean, the analogy that I’ve used is and I know you’ve heard this before, It’s the heart attack versus the cancer.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:44
    We’ve been focusing on this heart attack, this crisis of democracy here, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not longer term dysfunctions. There are real threats to the democratic order. You know, and we talk a lot about democracy, by which we mean liberal constitutional democracy. And liberalism is really facing a two front war right now. And, you know, the immediate crisis may be from the right, but as you point out, something’s been happening in our culture.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:12
    This is what I find so interesting about the history of your book. Something that not too long ago was confined to university campuses, certain ideas and mindsets, has now seeped out into the general population and the general culture. And it’s having tremendous impact on the way that we relate to one another, the nature of our politics. And it might actually impact the election next year. So let’s talk about this.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:37
    I read you the blurb from Jonathan Last that American University lost their mind in twenty fourteen. What happened in twenty fourteen, Yasha? What was the moment of insanity? Well, I know
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:48
    that it’s twenty fourteen exactly, but let me say a couple of things here. Right? So the first is that why have I been talking about trump and all of those things? I think that if we want to be the heart attack and the cancer, if we actually want to reclaim a mark in democracy, we need to figure out how to build broad enduring majorities against these kinds of demagogues and against these kind of populist. And I worry about the fact that some of the bad ideas among my friends and colleagues, among the kind of social circles I’m I’m running, and are one of the reasons why we found that to be hard.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:21
    And as long as every election is of existential importance, we’re not going to have safe democratic institutions. And so that’s one of the reasons to care about this stuff. The other reason to care about this new idea is is simply that it really is a new ideology. This is not just a continuation of a civil rights movement. It is not a continuation of what I think is the proudest and most inspiring amount.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:45
    We need to define this for folks. So you’re talking about what do we wanna call it? We wanna call it identity politics. Wokism, what you call identity synthesis. What is this new ideology you’re talking about?
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:55
    So first of all, I suggest that we call it the identity synthesis just because that’s a neutral term. I don’t really care what we call them. I don’t like WOCism because it’s too polemical and I don’t like, identity politics because it’s too vague and too broad. But let me start there. What did people like Frederick Douglas, like Abraham Lincoln, like Martin Luther King Junior?
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:14
    What did Barack Obama? Belief. Mhmm. Broadly speaking, they made some version of the following argument. They said we have lovely ideas and values in your constitution, but that’s not enough.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:25
    To make sure that our country is just. When Frederick Douglas was invited to speak to his compatriots on the fourth of July, he said you’re being hypocritical. You’re talking about these lovely ideas of all man being unequal, while there’s slavery in the United States. But he did not say we should therefore rip up those values. He did not say therefore These ideas are useless.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:44
    He said we should live up to them. He asked his compatriots who he called Hippocrats. By what right are you excluding people like me from the enjoyment of those principles. That is what Martin Luther King said in the civil rights movement. But for promissory note, made out by the founding documents of the United States to African Americans has proven to be fraudulent.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:07
    But he doesn’t want us to rip up the promissory note. He wants the Bank of Justice to honor it, to cash that check. The tradition that I am looking at Those well beyond, a recognition that of course Americans who come from all over the world are always going to take some pride in the origin and, culture. It goes beyond the recognition, but there’s forms of interest group politics that are perfectly natural, that poor people in some ways are gonna fight for the interests of group. It is trying to put our particular intersection of identities at very core of our political and cultural life.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:48
    It is advocating our norms like teachers coming into third and second and first grade classrooms, telling children, if you’re black, you go over there. If you’re Latino, you go over there, if you’re Asian, you go and they’re there. And by the way, if you’re white this actually happens. This happens in many of these private schools around the country. Schools like Gordon, in redundant schools like bank street school on the Apple West side of Manhattan, which is super influential because it trains a lot of teachers.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:19
    And there is a logic for that. These organizations say that the goal of a good education is to get children to think of themselves as racial beings. And so in the case of a white kids, they want them to embrace their European origins, to embrace the white And the idea is that that’s gonna turn them into great anti racist activists who are aware of the white privilege and are gonna become great allies. If it succeeds in that, that would be great. I think everything I’ve learned about history and and social psychology is the opposite.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:49
    But if you tell people the most important thing about you is that you’re white, then you’re gonna fight for the interest of whites or those of others, and that is precisely the kind of politics that we need to oppose. So coming back to know, for political tradition of a civil rights movement, a political tradition of somebody like Fred Douglas. You know, the thinkers that I talk about in this book, if you send the origin of the identity synthesis. They explicitly reject that. People like Derek Bell, the founder of critical race theory, who’s an interesting sophisticated legal thinker.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:23
    I enjoyed reading his work. Mhmm. He started out as a lawyer for the NAACP helping to desegregate hundreds of schools and businesses and other institutions in the American South. But he comes to finkle that work as a mistake. He says explicitly that he comes to agree with segregationist senators who say that actually the kind of work that because lawyers were doing was imposing the ideology of integration rather than truly fighting for the interest of a client.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:55
    And he says we have to move beyond the, I quote, defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement. Kimberly Crenshaw, another key figure in that tradition, says that the philosophy of Barack Obama is fundamentally at odds with key tenets of critical race for you. So what I wanna do in this book is not a polemical book. It’s not a book that shouts about how terrible these ideas are. It’s taking this ideology seriously as something that stands in contrast with those ideas.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:25
    And I think we need to understand what those ideas are and whether they have merit or not.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:29
    Getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here because this is where I think it becomes complex in this extremely polarized, tribalized debate that we’re having right now because the right people like Krista Barufo decided they were going to seize on critical race theory over the last year and that they were going to make that the cudgel with which to push back on the civil rights movement. So now you come out with a book that says, okay. I come from a completely different perspective, a completely different point of view on all of this, but I also want to critique critical race theory. Are you afraid that because the right has decided the critical race theory is bad that your audience on the left will basically say, look, we’re not up for nuance. If they’re against it, we need to go into a defensive crouch.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:14
    I mean, I don’t know. Let’s ask the listeners Secret Podcast. Are you afraid of neurons? Do you wanna believe the opposite of whatever Chris Rufo says? And if he says something, but he happen to agree with tomorrow, then you have to disagree with that and do he outsource your own political judgment to what he says.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:31
    I think that is what’s happened in this debate a little bit. Right? There’s crazy people on the right. Who say that wanting to teach kids about the history of slavery or wanting to acknowledge the obvious truth that, are still forms of very troubling racism in the United States today, that’s all critical race theory. And therefore people on the left have started to think, well, all that critical race theory is is wanting to think critically about the role of race in society.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:56
    Now I went back to the origin of these ideas to actually read these thinkers. I’m trained originally as an intellectual historian. And I I have to tell you, I think Derek Bell would be offended if you told him all he is is somebody who agrees with Barack Obama and Martin New a king. No. His whole life’s work was to say that perhaps Brown versus border medication was a mistake.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:15
    I think he would say, hey. You you completely misunderstood who I am. Right? So I think we can have that nuance. We can understand how these ideas are different.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:25
    And that’s important because I think that there is a tradition that is the historical tradition of the American left, and that’s a tradition that a great majority of Americans can get on board with, which you know, rejects both of these ideas, but certainly wants to teach about American history and its injustices. That certainly is a way of a discrimination that persists. But that doesn’t say, for example, that we should rip up a constitution. And if our politics has become so simplistic that those are the only two stances available, then then I guess I’ll stop thinking about politics.
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:59
    Okay. So, again, the terminology is brought. So, whether we call it Wocus or identity synthesis, We understand the attraction because there are these serious injustices, which have been perpetrated against minority groups. And, you know, with the rise of these new attitudes, you have know, members of these groups feel more seen, more respected, more empowered, but your book argues, this is a trap that will lead to real injustice and inefficiencies and make it far harder to build a truly tolerant society and ultimately empower the far right. Okay.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:32
    So there are a lot of people saying, well, look, wokeness merely means that I’m not asleep, that I am paying attention to these injustices. And you’re not coming along saying this is a trap. So how does this lead to real injustices and inefficiencies? Talk to me about that. And I we’re not talking about just a few elite schools or a few elite universities.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:52
    We’re talking about in society in general. Correct? Yeah. Absolutely. So let me give you
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:56
    a couple of examples of practices policies that we’ve adopted recently? Yes. And then I wanna talk about some concepts as well. You know, I spoke when I was doing research for this book, to a woman called Kyla Posey. Kyla is a African American educator, lives in the suburbs of Atlanta.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:14
    And she asked the principal of her school. She has two elementary school kits, whether, she could suggest a teacher for for her children. And the principal city has, of course, just tell me what teacher you would like for. And she sent in the name and the principal kept deferring and kept punting on this. And kept saying, well, what about Visava teacher?
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:31
    And eventually, she grew frustrated. She said, look, But why won’t you let me have the teacher? I prefer what’s going on here. And the principal said, well, you know, the class you you asked for, that’s not the black class. And now that sounds like just a straight up story of racial discrimination until you find out that the principle of the school was also a black woman, a black woman who’s imbibed a lot of the progressive pedagogy that’s rooted in some of the ideas I described in the book rooted in ideas like gayatri Spiva’s concept of strategic essentialism.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:02
    She believes that to have the right kind of self identity, to have a healthy development, Bulwark kids need to be in classrooms predominantly with other black kids. And even though their own mother preferred a different class, which also had some black kids, but not predominantly blackheads, that’s not a choice that the mother should be able to make for them. You know, when I spoke to Carla Posey, she told me, look, I I watched the inauguration of Kamala harris with my daughters. And they said, perhaps one day I’ll be vice president. Help perhaps one day I’ll be president.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:31
    And she said, when my kids grow up, I don’t know if they’ll be vice president or president, but they’re gonna go places, you know, they’re smart kids and may need to be able to be comfortable with anybody, they may not be able to walk into any room with confidence. And the idea that they should only be around kids from one group growing up. I really don’t believe that. I found it very moving. Let me give you another example from public policy just to show that this isn’t just about education, please.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:58
    During the pandemic, we had those wonderful life saving vaccines that finally were being rolled out. But at the beginning, of course, there was limited quantities available. Right? So we had to have a system to figure out who would get them first. So I set through a meeting of the ACIP, the key advisory committee to the CDC that was tasked with deciding who should get those vaccines first.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:20
    Now every other country pretty much prioritized elderly people because all of the statistics showed that that was by far and away the biggest driver of mortality. In fact, elderly vaccinated Americans are at higher risk than younger non vaccinated. Americans, age is just the main driver of what happens. Right. That, this committee said, even for it to be easier to roll out the system that way, that’s not what we should do because elderly Americans happen to be disproportionately white.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:52
    And so on ethical grounds because of equity, we should prioritize essential workers as well. Even for the CDC’s own models suggested that that would lead to thousands more Americans dying. Now how did this actually play out? I am a professor in at Johns Hopkins in the state of Maryland, I counted as an essential worker, even though I was not at risk sitting at home, not allowed to teach kids in person. Mhmm.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:17
    Right? So everybody was eligible with those very, very few spots. So who got those spots? Well, the people who could refresh websites all day long could drive hours out of the way to the one pharmacy that had a slot, people who are actually relatively privileged. Now I believe in this policy in India and didn’t just kill more Americans.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:32
    It probably killed more non white Americans because if you give two twenty five year old Black Uber driver a vaccine rather than one eighty year old Black retiree, more black people are going to die. And so these ideas aren’t just abstract. We’re not just at the margins. They now help to shape key ways of how we run public policy.
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:53
    Well, let’s go through because the identity trap your book, you know, mounts a critique of all of, like, the main debate that are going on the these five main debates that we’re now in the process of of working through. And that you argue are transforming major in institutions. And, again, they have this intuitive appeal because they do purport to deal with genuine injustice. So I wanna go through I think people have heard the terms, but I wanna hear your critique of all of them. So I wanna talk about cultural appropriation, standpoint theory, limits on free speech, progressive separatism, and race sensitive public policy.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:28
    I think you guys gave an example of that. So these are terms that I think people will encounter, but in your book, you put them in context. So let’s just go through some of them. So This concept of cultural appropriation, the argument that groups should enjoy some form of collective ownership of their cultural products or our artifacts, what’s wrong with that?
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:49
    Yeah. So, first of all, just to explain what we’re talking about, this is a concept that has become very influential in a lot of United States and in other countries. You know, the The magazine Bon appety apologized a couple of years ago because it allowed a gentile writer to write the recipe for Hamantaschen, a Jewish dessert. You know, a a a festival in in England right in a couple of months ago told his attendees that they were not allowed to bring weapons and they were not allowed to wear non western clothes that might be guilty of cultural appropriation. So there’s come to be this very general fear this general pool of suspicion for any ways in which members of different cultural groups might inspire or influence each other.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:31
    Now I get that the apparent possibility of his concept stems from the fact that there are some genuine injustices. But are sometimes being described as a form of cultural appropriation. So in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, for example, there were white musicians who were inspired by or sometimes stole the songs of Bulwark musicians, who weren’t able to have big careers because of discrimination against them. And that was clearly unjust. That was evidently unjust.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:00
    The question is, whether the concept of cultural appropriation helps us to understand what was unjust about those cases. So it helps to point the way to how to remedy wish. And what I am arguing is that when there is something unjust, you can express it in much more straightforward ways. And when you can’t express it in more straightforward ways, then you shouldn’t worry about it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:24
    I mean, this also goes to just the nature of society. I mean, as you write mutual cultural influence is a virtue not a vice of diverse societies, but that’s now being challenged. Right? I mean
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:34
    It is being challenged. Yeah. And so just to go back to that example for one second, you know, what was wrong with that was not that these white musicians were inspired by this Bulwark musician Right. Is that the black musicians were living under Jim Crow that they were not allowed to perform in concert venues that major record labels would not sign them. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:50
    What was the problem? Was the straightforward forms of terrible racial discrimination that they suffered. And what we should put our effort in is fighting those rather than this broad concept of cultural appropriation. And as you’re saying, that’s often more important because it has costs when we put a general pool of suspicion under these forms of mutual influence. What is best about America is how many different influences we have from people all over the world is our ability to forge forms of new culture.
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:24
    As the British Ganae and American philosopher, Kwame, Antonia says, There’s no such thing as a cultural product, but it’s purely coming from one country. And we’ve always made progress when we have cultural change, when we’re able to learn from each other, when we’re able to influence each other, the technology we use, the language we use, the forms of writing we use. All of those have roots in many different cultures. And to say that we should be worried about that kind of thing in the future, to me, that’s very personal. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:54
    Like, part of the reason why I’m on the left. Part of the reason why I love living in a diverse place like America is that we’ve always been the ones who celebrate the ability of people to meet each other to influence each other. The people who worry about cultural purity and the way in which we have to make sure that things don’t change means outsiders can’t in any way be influenced by our ideas, and we are gonna lock ourselves off against the influence of those people. That’s ethno nationalists on the ride.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:20
    So I have a question about your example about Bonapati magazine. So does everybody who writes for and works for a Bonapatiit? Are they all French?
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:29
    Well, that’s why they only write about French food. No. I mean, it’s it’s, you know, one point that I think is really important about this is, you know, where does this logically Right? If you said that only a Jewish writer Yeah. Can write a recipe for Hamant Tarshan.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:41
    Right. But at some point, you’re gonna say, well, a black writer really shouldn’t be allowed to write about traditional French busy.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:46
    Right? That’s right. Only the French.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:47
    Yeah. If a white person can’t write about hip hop, then I guess a black person can’t write about Shakespeare. I mean, this is a logic, but I think this is deeply, deeply, disturbing, and it goes against the kind of society we should build.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:59
    Okay. This has also re really become a major issue in literary circles. The whole question of, you know, should a white writer be able to write a book that is, you know, centers on Bulwark characters, and one of our contributors, Richard, North Patterson, long time best selling author, wrote a book about voter suppression in Georgia, and publishers didn’t wanna publish it because He’s a white male writer, and many of his characters are African American. I mean, and there are other examples of this. I mean, if this becomes the standard, This upends our entire understanding of what literature is about.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:34
    If you can only write from the perspective of people who are have exactly your racial, ethnic, sexual identity. By that logic, in
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:45
    a country that thankfully, super diverse in which our institutions and our social life. And, hopefully, our friendship groups are pretty mixed. We’re gonna have literature where somehow everybody is from the same group because people aren’t allowed to write about each other. Right? I mean, I mean, this really, to me, hopefully illustrates why I’m not a kind of troglodyte.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:06
    Right? And my concern about these ideas is not that they go too far, they’re a little too radical, but they go in the right No. They go in the wrong direction. I want to live in a society where we can influence each other. It speaks to the other point you you raised about standpoint theory.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:21
    Right? Yes. There’s this whole set of ideas that if I stand at one intersection of identities, and you stand at a different intersection of identities, then we really can’t understand each other. Now again, there’s a kernel of truth to this. The kernel of truth is that I’m not a woman, so I don’t know what it feels like to fear that if I go on the subway, perhaps I’ll be sexually homeless.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:42
    And I’m not Bulwark. So I don’t know what it feels like to look at a cop and think, you know, perhaps you might stop me and freak me and then treat me violently or beat me up or do something terrible to me. I don’t have that fear to the same extent. And so To understand those experiences and what to do about them, I have to listen to my Right. Fellow citizens.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:00
    I have to ask questions. I have to have an open mind. When they tell me about something I’m skeptical at first, just say, hang on a second. Perhaps their view is different. I should really take that seriously.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:09
    So there’s now a lot of people who say, I can’t understand you anyway if you’re more prosperous than I am. And so I shouldn’t even try. And rather than standing in true solidarity, what I should do is just to delegate my political judgment to you, to to let you make the decision and just go along with whatever that is. I think that’s a really impoverished vision of what political solidarity looks like. I think not many people are going to do it, and it’s not gonna work.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:36
    A recipe for losing elections. But more importantly, I think it’s a really important vision of what it means to actually understand and support you. I will never know exactly what those things feel like, but I can understand enough about it to know that it’s unjust and unfair to think that my female friends have to fear taking the subway and I don’t have to think about it. Right. I can be enraged by the fact that many black Americans uncomfortable about interactions with the police don’t have a resource of being able to call on the police when they need the policeman to help protect them against crime because they’re worried about what might happen to them in certain contexts.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:15
    I can be enraged about that because I understand enough of their experience to know that this is deeply unjust. And because according to my own vision of a kind of society I wanna live in, That seems unfair. And so I understand and solidarity with him, not because I say in a patronizing way, you’re so different for me. I’m never gonna understand you, but sure whatever you say, I guess, must be true. No.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:35
    I have listened to you. I understand enough of your experience to know that these things are unjust. And for reasons of my own, for reasons of What I value, what society I wanna live in, I’m gonna stand in solidarity with you. I think that’s a much more inspiring, a much more realistic, and a much more powerful vision of how to do politics, of how to improve the world.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:58
    So let’s look attitude about free speech because I think this really goes to the the heart of some of the things that we’re debating here, this idea that this is complex. I mean, obvious we don’t want, disinformation. We don’t want hate speech. But there there is this push now to limit speech to protect vulnerable minority groups from being exposed to hurtful, vacated speech, even when it comes to forms of expression that remain legally permitted, This idea that society should hold the, what they call, the consequence culture that makes people less likely is kind of a polite way of saying to cancel culture that at least we hold you accountable. So again, there is the good intention here, but why is this wrong.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:41
    You you argue that it’s dangerous to underestimate the danger that stems from giving up a culture of free speech. I mean, maybe it just makes us kinder and gentle or more responsible society?
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:52
    Yeah. Let’s talk about that. You know, first, just as an observation, I’m just struck by the fact, and I’m sure Charlie had the same experience that, you know, what I’ve had lunch with people over the last four or five years, sometimes friends and acquaintances who, you know, teachers or or Bulwark in an office somewhere or do whatever people do. Right? And sometimes, United States, senators, or representatives, or CEOs, or famous media commentators.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:21
    And as a just natural thing, well, express some innocuous opinion, and then say, oh, but, of course, I would never say this publicly. Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Have you had that experience?
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:32
    Oh, yeah. The everyone’s had this experience. Mean, I think it’s impossible to be around the university campus or increasingly corporate America without having that conversation pop up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:42
    And I think that that’s really concerning because, of two reasons, a, because people should be able to be the true selves. I think the democratic society people should be able to express what they believe, especially when these ideas might be on sensitive topics or uncomplicated into the topics but come from a good place, come from a genuine desire to to make a better world and and to understand what’s what’s happening. And second, because I think it’s a lot of the reason why we have such deep mistrust and institutions. I think a lot of Americans can smell this. They can tell that what a lot of people in Congress or a lot of CEOs of companies, a lot of presence of universities are saying to each other in private is different from what they say in public.
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:26
    And so they say, so why should I trust you guys? You won’t even tell me straight up what you actually think. Right? So I think this is real consequence for society. But to talk about the broader argument, look, from John Stewart Mill onwards.
  • Speaker 2
    0:30:38
    People have always realized that what we need to have a genuine protection for free speech is not just legal So the state can’t throw you in jail for what you say, but a culture of free speech. We’re not worried about getting fired. You’re not worried about a form of social death just because you express your deeply held beliefs. And, you know, the reasons why people have traditionally said free speech is important, a culture of free speech, animals of free speech are the great things that we get from having free speech. And I agree with many of them.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:10
    If you haven’t read John Stewart mill Mhmm. On liberty, read it. It’s a wonderful text. And he’s right that Free speech is what preserves the ability of truth to live another day. It’s not that it always wins out in the marketplace of ideas that would be naive, but that even if it could continues to be a minority opinion, at least we preserve the ability of that speech.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:29
    He says that even if the opinion we would center is wrong, we need to hear it because that’s what it takes to hold our beliefs as living truths rather than as dead dogmas, but actually then become much more techable nobody remembers how to argue for them, how to defend them. Right. All of that, I think, is right. But what I focus on is the opposite. It’s the terrible things that happen when you don’t have free speech.
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:55
    And there’s all kinds, but the most important one of them is simply But by definition, the people who would decide what you can and can’t say are not gonna be the marginalized, but not the weakest in society. But actually the powerful, you know, who is going to be on an imaginary, you know, federal census bureau, or who is gonna be a member of whatever Silicon Valley calls it, the, you know, speech facilitation committee at Facebook or Twitter.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:23
    Yes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:23
    Is it gonna be the weakest in society? Is it gonna be the most marginalized or is it gonna be people who are powerful and privileged and highly educated and very affluent? People who actually already have a lot of social power. Fred Douglas wrote at a time when people said terrible things in in newspapers defending slavery. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:45
    And he was well aware of that. But he nevertheless defended free speech because he knew he was also the weapon that abolition is needed when we were very unpopular to press the case. He quoted the dread of tyrants. And I think the smart parts of left have always recognized that your speech is a key defence for the week. And the idea we have today that somehow, miraculously, the senses are always gonna be on our side.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:09
    They always gonna agree with us is deeply naive. Look at what’s happening in Florida. What is looks for? Look, but dissent is another Republican governors are doing. And the same is true when it’s not governors making those decisions, but companies.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:21
    Do you really think that if we get in the habit of Mastercard being able to revoke your credit card for what you say, and American Airlines telling you you can’t take the flights if you dislike what you say. It’s always gonna help the left rather than the right? What do you think would have meant after nine eleven? What do you think that’s would have meant in other moments in American history? So we need free speech because it is the key protection of the powerless.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:45
    Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:45
    And I think you have to have the imagination to think that whatever power is out there to suppress free speech might be in the hands of the other side. You know, I was on a panel the other day, we’re talking about the use of federal power to stop certain kinds of information from being disseminated. And I said, well, be careful what you wish for. Because imagine how that power would be wielded by Trump two point o in January, February of twenty twenty five. So be careful about your enthusiasm for this kind of federal two other points, though.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:14
    One of the things that that that I that you see on the the attacks on free speech particularly on university campuses, is this notion that speech is harm. And the rhetoric that If you allow the speaker to speak, if you allow these ideas to be expressed or this book to be read, you are causing harm to someone. And it’s interesting you hear that on the left on the university campuses that will minorities will be harmed. They have to have a safe space where they don’t have to hear these ideas, but It’s interesting watching the way the right has appropriated the same argument to justify banning books in schools, which is Well, we’re not banning books because we hate free speech. We are protecting children from harm.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:58
    So isn’t this kind of central to this new thing? This this assumption of the fragility of the audience, fragility of students of employees of corporations, citizens, young people, therefore must be protected against being hurt by the latest book about willy wonka or whatever it is that they’re obsessed about these days.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:18
    Yeah. I think that’s right. And it’s I mean, it’s one of a sort of strange Things that has happened that the writer started to emulate some of those arguments, often in cynical ways for political purposes, but I think it shows us how easily those arguments can migrate become effective tools for people with whose positions we deeply disagree. And so we should ask whether true or not. And there is a difference between physical violence and speech which is upsetting.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:46
    Well, it’s a crucial distinction, Yeah. It is. And by the way, I’m not saying that you should engage in every form of speech, and every form of speech is wonderful. I would love for all kinds of terrible things that are written every day on Twitter and and said on TikTok and so on to never find an audience to never be spread. The question is, Do I trust any institution to reliably make the determination of what is actually harmful in that way of what is upsetting, what is stupid, of what is disgusting or not?
  • Speaker 2
    0:36:16
    Do I trust somebody else, some committee of people to make that decision on my behalf, and particularly at the moment, in which very dangerous political forces have a lot of power in this country I just think it’s very naive to to trust that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:32
    I wanna pick up on another point you made. And and this is something that I remember writing about in the nineteen nineties when, when the speech codes were spreading on university campuses and the first wave of this idea that we need to restrict what you’re able to say. And I remember thinking at the time, one of the real dangers was this doesn’t stop the quote, unquote, bad ideas. It just drives them underground. It makes them more transgressive.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:57
    And one of the things we’re seeing now is kind of like bursting out where all the pressure, you know, don’t say this, that on the right, They have now sort of embraced the idea that we are seeing what you think. They don’t want us to say this. And so there is kind of this explosion of truth talk, which is often pretty vile. You go into what used to be on the far reaches, the fever swamps. So things like the most racist things.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:23
    And there’s a certain, you know, like, look how brave I am. And that’s kind of a a little bit of a thrill. You can see among some of these young right wingers. That they’re saying things that are banned on campus. That’s kind of the shtick of a Tucker Carlson.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:37
    Right? I know I’m not supposed to be able to say this, and then he’ll use some form of disinformation or the replacement theory. But this is also the problem that if you have too much of a speech regime out there, people then think that, okay, here’s a class of people. Here are the people who are just bullshitting. And then suddenly, here are the truth tellers.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:57
    Here’s the honest. And guys like Donald Trump exploit that, don’t they? That I’m saying what nobody else has the guts to say.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:04
    Yeah. I think that’s a cool part of it. There’s a really interesting way in which, you know, they used to be left wing student movements and protesters and a conservative establishment. And in a certain kind of way, there was a healthy, equilibrium. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:19
    You you you had young people fight for really important things, like most sexual freedoms and so on. And when you had an establishment that said, well, we sort of try and oppose that and perhaps some of the good ideas are gonna win out and some of the bad ideas will not. But they sort of realized that there’s some aspects of our institutions in our norms that we need to defend today, we have this really weird situation where the people who are running the institution, the people who effectively are the establishment are sort of in denial about that because they don’t see themselves as descendants of the establishment of a nineteen sixty. They see themselves as descendants of a student movements of a nineteen sixties. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:56
    And that’s sympathetic. I mean, I feel myself closer to the students over nineteen sixties when we administrators over nineteen sixties as well, but it sets up a very weird dynamic. Where everybody thinks that they’re a rebel, even when they have actually the establishment. And I think that it helps to explain why the case for free speech has moved in some ways from the left to the right. Because when you’re in power, it’s always tempting to censor.
  • Speaker 2
    0:39:20
    And when you feel an opposition, when it’s always tempting to be in a favor of free speech. And even though dangerous, far right, extremists hold a lot of power in country and state houses and and parts of Congress and so on, in a lot of, officially neutral businesses, cultural institutions, and so on, it is the left that feels like the entire power. And therefore, they have this temptation to censor. But that temptation is historically, short sighted.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:51
    So we we talked about cultural appropriation standpoint, theory limits on free speech. I think we talked about progressive separatism, the anecdote that you told about the the woman from Georgia. And then, of course, there’s the race sensitive public policy which seems to me to have the least public popular support when it’s exposed Your thoughts about the end of affirmative action, and the effects that’s going to have on higher education. Of course, this has been coming for some time, but the Supreme Court struck it down. So would you come down on the future of affirmative action in higher education and in the rest of society as well?
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:27
    Right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:40:27
    Right. Well, a few thoughts on this, I mean, one is, but There is actually a lot of these policies that now get adopted quite unfrequently, and and I’m worried about them in those areas much more than when it comes to this topic we all love to discuss. That’s actually not as important as many other things happening in society. It’s just, you know, university admissions policies. So one really striking example of this beyond the COVID case that I talked about is that at first, we had a COVID relief fund for small businesses.
  • Speaker 2
    0:40:54
    Which had to have an order of priority and was gonna run out of money at some point so that order of priority was important. And they said, look, if you lost seventy percent of your revenue at the early stages COVID. Perhaps you were a buyer where people weren’t allowed to go and frequent you. Right? Then you’re gonna be first in line.
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:08
    If you lost fifty percent of revenue when you’re second in line and so on and so forth. Well, then there was a policy change in which, the order of priority started to be determined by the race of the owner of a business. So that if you were a minority owned business, you were first in line. And if you were a white owned business, than you were last in life. Who who decided this?
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:33
    That was the Biden administration. Okay.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:35
    Alright.
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:36
    The one way in which I think the previous policies were better than what Biden did. The way these things work out in practice ends up being really paradoxical a lot of the time. Right? So in this case, if you were a Latino guy married to a white woman or a black woman married to a white guy, coming up from poverty, working your way up, founding a small business being successful. Now suddenly your danger of losing your business because of this pandemic, but nobody could reasonably have expected you to predict.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:08
    Right. And when you’re not going to be able to get that aid, because legally your spouse is a fifty percent owner of your business, and because you made a mistake of marrying a white spouse, you’re gonna go back in line relative to, some sibling or cousin who married a different rate. I mean, you know, the kinds of actual practical determinations you end up having to make when you run policy in this way. I think I really, really damages. Now when it comes to affirmative action, I’ll say a few things.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:36
    You know, one is that there’s more important topics like making sure that community college have much better funding which is where, you know, a lot of minority students actually go. I believe, that given America’s history, there’d be obvious concerns of the number of black students at some of the leading colleges was very low. The justification for doing something about that, I think is much better framed in terms of that specific historic injustice or form of reparations from the much vaguer notion of diversity, which has become sort of one concept that used to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and that therefore has really, I think, the shape in our admissions policy in weird ways. I as somebody who’s an immigrant to this country have to say that I just find the whole system befuddling. I find it absurd that my children would have an advantage getting into Johns Hopkins university because I’m a faculty member at the university.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:29
    Mhmm. I find it absurd that your kids would have an advantage in going to whatever school you and Lamnasov. I find it absurd, but at the moment men, get a boost admissions because women out before men at the high school level, and god forbid the gender ratio at university was fifty forty five rather than fifty fifty. Right? I find it absurd that we give preferential treatment to athletes and that we think we must break the admissions system in such a way that there’s a second violinist for the university orchestra.
  • Speaker 2
    0:44:00
    Right? So I’m really not a burn down the system kind of a guy. But when it comes to this question, I just feel like burned down the whole damn thing. I think it’s such an absurd, baroque way of engineering and manufacturing the sort of future ruling class of a country that we should just burn the whole system down and start from scratch.
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:19
    Okay. So let’s go ahead out of this identity traffic, because this is the important part is okay. Like, what is the answer to this in in part four of your book? You propose a principled alternative, which is really to go back to core principles of liberalism, small l liberalism, the belief in universal values, neutral rules that can formulate powerful critiques of oppression and injustice without falling into this identity trap, but how does that work? I mean, at a moment right now, where illiberalism seems rampant.
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:55
    I’m sorry. People hate that both sides of them. Certainly a liberalism ramping on the right But clearly, also on the rise on the left, you’re basically making an appeal to a return to classical philosophical liberalism. How does that happen?
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:10
    Yeah. Well, I think there’s two answers to that question. One is substantively about what ideas should we believe in and defend and champion.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:17
    And
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:17
    then the other is you know, how do we argue back against that ideas? How do we argue for a better vision of a world? So, you know, on the first question, you know, we’ve talked about some of the themes, some of the ways in which these ideas get applied. In the book, I talk a lot about what the origin of these ideas are and the main themes of it. In thinkers of Michelle Fukhon and Edward Saeed and Gayatris Piva and Derek Bell who talked a little bit about and Kimberly Crenshaw.
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:44
    But what I do in the fourth book is to revolve these ideas down to what I see as the free main philosophical claims that they make. And we have a following, the number one, but the key prison to understand the world, the key way in which to think about our social interaction or about political events or about history is through identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Robin Deangelo, the best selling diversity consultant, who is a white woman as it happens, says that every time white man interrupts a black man, they are bringing the entire apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them. And that might be true in certain situations when perhaps a white boss is trying to exploit his workers and telling him shut up, you know, But in other situations, these might be two long time friends who love arguing about politics and who interrupt each other all of the time. It might be people who are married to do that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:41
    It might be people who are engaging in what psychologists call a rapport interruption where I finish your sentence for you to signal, but I’ve understood what you’re saying, and you do the same for me, and it’s a way of affirming each other. So you have to look at the context. Right? The second claim that they make is that you know, the United States constitution, the bill of rights, Brown versus board of education, all of us universal rules, all of us universal values and neutral rules, they were actually designed to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That really fundamentally, what they were trying to do is to perpetuate racial, sexual, and other forms of discrimination.
  • Speaker 2
    0:47:20
    And that helps to explain why we haven’t made any progress. For somebody like Derek Bell, America, and to thousand just as racist as it was in nineteen fifty or eighteen fifty. For many gay rights organizations today, America’s as homophobic today as it was in the nineteen nineties. I mean, third, finally, therefore, what you need to do is to make how we treat each other and how a state treats all of us explicitly dependent on the identity groups of which you are apart in the kind of way with the policies we talked about it and the kind of way in which the pedagogical practices and elementary schools and, middle schools and high schools now often do. So I have a response to each of those points.
  • Speaker 2
    0:48:01
    I think there’s a way of taking racism very seriously of taking other forms of discrimination of acknowledging the injustices in America’s history without embracing these three points of view. So what I would say It’s number one, but yes, of course, you need to think about race, gender, and sexual orientation to understand contemporary America. But that’s not the only things that you need to think about. You need to also think about social class. You need to think about religion.
  • Speaker 2
    0:48:27
    You need to think about people’s individual attributes and opinions and actions. You need to think about all kinds of different things rather than coming to a situation with one preconceived notion of how to understand it You have to look at the situation and then let the situation teach you how to think about it. So sometimes, these categories can be helpful, and sometimes, as in the case of De Angelo saying, every time a white person drops a black person, that’s white supremacy, that’s going to be wrong, that’s actually going to mislead you. Secondly, The fact that we have beautiful words written on a constitution is never enough to make a society just and certainly hasn’t been for much of American history. But when the members of the proudest American political tradition insisted, that those values actually are ones we need to live up to rather than to rip them up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:49:17
    They recognized that these also gave us the tools to make a more just society. But free speech is the threat of tyrants because it allows the most marginalized to speak up for themselves because the moral appeal to say, you say you care about these values. You say you think, or people are born equal. Well, how then can you justify treating me how can you justify saying, I’m not allowed to get married. I’m not allowed to ride at the front of a bus.
  • Speaker 2
    0:49:43
    I’m not allowed to be in a mountain of equal standing. How can you justify fiber. That argument was actually incredibly powerful in the map and history in helping us make progress. And by the way, I think it’s offensive to say that we haven’t made progress on those counts. Not offensive to us, wonderful Americans living today, but offensive to the people who were fired from the job thirty years ago because they publicly couldn’t admit it that they were gay or lesbian like elm degenerates.
  • Speaker 2
    0:50:10
    It’s offensive to the many Bulwark Americans who went slave, who suffered from Jim Crow, who were discriminated against in ways that are much, more disgusting than what thankfully most Bulwark Americans experience today. And so finally, what do we do? We don’t rub up these principles. We live up to We want to create a society in how we treat it and how we treat each other becomes less dependent on the group into which we’re born. Not because we ignore injustices or pretend they don’t exist, but because we create institutions in the policies, and the social norms that help to overcome them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:45
    On that note, the book is the identity trap by Yasha Monkiyasha is a political scientist who’s been writing about democracy for decades. Now this is an immensely important book, and I hope that it gets the hearing and starts the debate that I think we so desk perately need, Yasha. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and best of luck on the book next week.
  • Speaker 2
    0:51:06
    Thank you. I’ve I’ve left this conversation.
  • Speaker 1
    0:51:08
    And thank you all for joining the Bulwark podcast this weekend. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back next week, and we’ll do this all over again. The Bullbrook contest is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.
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