Book review: The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk

Our common humanity will be the thing that liberates us, not the narcissism of small differences

‘That spurious anger, so resonant with career, can be trusted not to upset the applecart.’ - George Dennison on Leroi Jones.

It is not unusual for highly intelligent people to become possessed by foolish ideas. In recent years many progressives have fallen under the spell of what the journalist and political scientist Yascha Mounk calls the ‘identity synthesis’, a merging of postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory.

In his new book The Identity Trap, Mounk skilfully tells the story of how the identity synthesis - sometimes referred to simply as ‘woke’ by its detractors - has ensnared large swathes of the west’s cultural elite. He traces its origins back to post-war France and the failures of Marxism and other ‘grand narratives’ to bring about European revolution, and to disillusionment with the Soviet Union where socialism looked nothing like the bountiful utopia that was promised.

Communism was the God that failed, and the lesson intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard took from its failure was [Mounk writes] ‘to distrust any ideology that offered a sweeping account of what makes the world tick and how to improve it’. Thus postmodernism was born, and ideas that purported to speak for universal truth or values, or which believed in human progress, were treated as inherently suspect.

From there, the influential postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak built on postmodernism to criticise claims invoking scientific objectivity or universal principles. Yet insofar as it was politically useful, Spivak encouraged activists to organise on the basis of group identities. “I think we have to choose again strategically,” Spivak suggested, “not universal discourse but essentialist discourse. . . . I must say I am an essentialist from time to time.”

As Mounk writes, ‘these few cryptic remarks quickly took on a life of their own’. Influenced by Spivak, postcolonial theory - and later the identity synthesis - became synonymous with claims to speak on behalf of entire groups of people (black, brown, women, the disabled). As Mounk writes, the apparent contradiction in Spivak’s theory ‘is in evidence today when activists preface their remarks by acknowledging that race (or gender or ability status) “is a social construct,” before going on to make surprisingly essentialising claims about what “Black and brown people” (or women or the disabled) believe.’

In contrast to universalism, the identity synthesis posits that different ethnic groups can never fully understand each other. It encourages people (whites as well as historically marginalised people) to define themselves in terms of their ethnicity and to view themselves ‘as members of mutually irreconcilable groups’. This ‘progressive separatism’ is made complete with the addition of critical race theory, the central tenets of which are: law is subjective; words are actions; law is political; racism is permanent; and only white people can be racist.

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While it ditched the universalism of Marxism, the identity synthesis retained the communist urge to censor and persecute heretics. In the former Soviet Union you could lose your job for criticising the doctrines of the Party. Today in the west a person can be fired for causing ‘offence’ or for flouting the ever-changing in-group consensus of the activist class. Social media is the means used to whip people into a moral fervour, resulting in an amplified version of what John Stuart Mill described as ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’. A critic at The Toronto Star got a small business shut down during the pandemic for the crime of serving an ‘inauthentic’ version of a popular Vietnamese soup; publishers have cancelled the release of novels because a handful of online reviewers deemed them ‘insensitive’; venues have shut down shows by comedians because their employees claimed that they might express ‘dangerous’ views; the popular TEDx platform recently attempted to suppress a video by a black speaker because he argued in favour of ‘colour blindness’.

The identity trap has corporate rather than state power on its side, allowing progressives to sidestep concerns about free expression, even if they wind up sounding like libertarians in the process. Object to cancel culture and you will be told that a private company can do as it pleases. Instead of reining in the power of corporate America the identity synthesis entrenches it.

For certain right-wing pundits, claiming to have been ‘cancelled’ is the surest way of getting their face in the newspaper or on television. This has lead some progressives to justify cancel culture as ‘consequence culture’, a way of holding the powerful to account for unpopular views. But as Mounk argues, the fact that some complaints about cancel culture are insincere or vexatious does not make the underlying phenomenon any less real. Most cancellations are directed at those who don’t have newspaper editors or TV producers on speed dial: Mounk points out that more than three out of five Americans now say they abstain from expressing their political views for fear of suffering significant adverse consequences.

Others fall silent because of the tawdry insinuations they are inevitably subjected to for rallying behind free expression. ‘At the end of the day,’ wrote Ellen K. Pao, a former CEO of Reddit and a committed leftist, ‘the free-speechers really just want to be able to use racist slurs.’

This unfortunately is the level at which most online discourse now takes place. I’ve never met a liberal ‘free-speecher’ who didn’t accept that there will be some who use their free speech to make unpleasant or bigoted statements. But their opponents would do well to recognise [as Mounk writes] that ‘a society that gets into the habit of censoring unpopular viewpoints would be just as likely to suppress their own points of view’. Pao and others who sneer at free speech should stop writing rhetorical cheques that their intellects can’t honour.

The influence of the 1960s German-American ‘new-left’ philosopher Herbert Marcuse lies behind some of the contemporary progressive attacks on free expression. His theory that ‘true’ tolerance requires intolerance toward offensive views holds ‘tremendous cultural sway,’ writes Mounk. Marcuse argued [in the words of Mounk] that a ‘subversive majority’ ought to gain power, by violent means if necessary, before withdrawing ‘toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc’.

Marcuse’s authoritarian prattle is today part of the ideological ballast that holds together the work of fashionable antiracist scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi. ‘I don’t consider racist ideas to be a form of free speech,’ writes Kendi, ‘I consider it to be a form of unfree speech.’ Such linguistic sophistry amounts to a ‘dismissive view of free speech that has become astoundingly influential over the course of a decade,’ writes Mounk.

Had the disciples of Marcuse paid greater attention to the rotten material fruits of their guru’s grandiloquent theorising, they might not still be drawing on his doctrines. In an 1969 essay Marcuse cited the ‘Chinese and Cuban Revolutions’ as ‘shining examples’ of repressive tolerance. (They were shining examples of something I suppose.) By this time the murderous Chinese cultural revolution was in full swing and Fidel Castro had already choked off democratic life in Cuba, placing homosexuals, religious believers and other ‘deviants’ - often simply men with long hair and blue jeans - in concentration camps.

The strongest reasons to hold onto free speech have to do with the bad things that happen in its absence. Repressing free speech ‘undermine[s] the ability of a society to course correct,’ argues Mounk. In countries without a culture of free expression, subordinates tell their superiors what they want to hear, facilitating a culture of cover-ups, inefficiency and corruption. This transmission of false information leads to erroneous decision-making, which is why Marcuse’s ‘democratic educational dictatorships of free men’ in Cuba, China and elsewhere have suffered from so many economic catastrophes over the years.

There may not be as many credulous exponents of cultural revolution around today as during Marcuse’s time, but contemporary race hucksters have taken to holding their own Maoist-style struggle sessions. It is at these events that self-appointed ‘anti-racist consultants’ guilt trip white liberals into parting with their money. Operating in service of the ‘pay me’ principle, they draw in both the gullible and those keen to vault themselves beyond the mental parameters of the suburbs and cleanse their consciences with bouts of self-flagellation. These self-punishment spectacles stand in for any meaningful form of sacrifice: the relations of power remain much the same as before. What they do do, however, is reveal the identity synthesis for what it really is: a form of elite brokerage that involves [in Mounk’s words] ‘the public recitation of fashionable slogans over the achievement of real change’.

Though it makes no claims on their money, the identity synthesis does allow elite progressives to simper endlessly about themselves: my identity, my struggle, my truth - me, me, me. This weepy solipsism is presented to the uninitiated as radical and subversive.

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The old left certainly got things wrong. Mounk is a liberal with no illusions about the shortcomings of the Marxist left. The focus on group identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation is partly motivated by disappointment and anger at persistent injustices. The historical tendency of the left to airily wave away racism and sexism as things that will neatly resolve themselves with the overthrow of capitalism - and usher in a colour blind society - has undoubtedly given the identity synthesis added appeal.

But the universalist leftism of Mounk’s grandparents - who were sent to prison in the Europe of the 1930s for their communist beliefs - remains an inspiration. ‘Ever since the French Revolution, the left has touted “equality” as one of its core values,’ writes Mounk. Yet large sections of the left have gone sour on universalism in recent times, claiming that all progress is an illusion. ‘Over the past decade, many politicians, activists, and writers have instead begun to emphasise what they call “equity”’, a series of ‘race-sensitive’ policies that in practice wind up disenfranchising poor whites and Asian Americans.

Moreover, there is an obvious difference between colour blindness as an aspiration and as a descriptive statement of reality. To claim that the United States or Britain are colour blind societies would be to gaslight victims of racism. On the other hand, to aspire to a colour blind society is no more than to affirm Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘dream’ that people should be judged ‘not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’.

Proponents of woke ideology reject this universalism (they blame it for the failure to translate legal victories into sweeping changes on the ground). Instead they encourage people - white and black - to embrace race. According to Kendi, “The language of colour blindness - like the language of ‘not racist’ - is a mask to hide racism”’. Robin DiAngelo, the influential author and diversity consultant whose course was used to train employees of Coca Cola, believes that all white people are racist and if you disagree that simply proves how racist you are.

Or perhaps it simply demonstrates how politically short-sighted DiAngelo is. DiAngelo ‘consistently emphasises the importance of whites developing a stronger identification with the colour of their skin,’ writes Mounk. I have no doubts that this will end badly.

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In his presidential victory speech in 2008, Barack Obama spoke of ‘universal values’ and his goal of ‘a country that’s not divided by race’. Yet a little over a decade later, ideas that were once confined to the ivory tower have gushed out into the mainstream. The dramatic shift in progressive thought that has occurred since 2010 was fittingly called ‘the Great Awokening’ by the journalist and founder of Vox Matthew Yglesias. Universities and colleges today churn out a glut of young staffers who are ‘deeply steeped in the identity synthesis’ and highly suspicious of universal values such as those espoused by Obama. ‘Anyone who compares a copy of The New York Times or The Guardian in 2010 with a copy of those same newspapers in 2020 would be struck by the difference in their tone and content,’ writes Mounk.

This generational cohort’s ‘short march through the institutions’ is ‘transforming the reigning norms and ideals of mainstream society, from neighbourhood schools all the way to government offices’. In college campuses and in the workplace, the separate but equal philosophy of the Jim Crow era is being reestablished in the name of antiracism. Marginalised groups are cosseted like children by white activists and depicted as constantly assailed in their everyday lives by ‘microaggressions’ which threaten their psychological safety. This culture of safetyism has in some cases resulted in the creation of race-segregated college dormitories.

Moreover, the idea that ‘it is literally impossible to be racist to a white person’ - as the Vice journalist Manisha Krishnan has written - is allowing older hatreds to flourish. When Tamika Mallory, one of the founders of the Women’s March, was criticised for calling the proudly antisemitic Louis Farrakhan ‘the greatest of all time,’ she told The New York Times that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy”.

Mounk has produced a dense and intellectually rich book that offers a valuable defence of universalism. He argues convincingly that the identity synthesis is making it harder to realise the traditional aspirations of the left, and that the retreat into walled-off identities and ethnicity-based essentialism is a profound mistake. Much of this intellectual trend draws on the pseudo-scientific renderings of defunct theorists. ‘The evidence from hundreds of studies all over the world is overwhelming,’ writes Mounk; ‘when people who hold prejudices about outsiders come into contact with them under the right circumstances, they develop a much more positive view of them.’

I agree. Our common humanity will be the thing that liberates us, not the narcissism of small differences.