Why does identity policy matter? How can we not fall into an identity trap? And what strategy should liberals apply to succeed? Leszek Jażdżewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Yascha Mounk, prof. of global relations at Johns Hopkins University, founder of the magazine "Persuassion" and host of the podcast "The Good Fight". His latest book is "The Identity Trap: A communicative of Ideas and Power In Our Time" (2023).
Leszek Jażdżewski (LJ): What You, a investigator who wrote a book about being a hebrew increasing up in Germany (Stranger in my Own Country: A judaic household in Modern Germany, 2014), prompted the writing of a book entitled The Identity Trap: A communicative of Ideas and Power in Our Time (2023) – a classical political pamphlet on identity and abuse related to it?
Yascha Mounk (YM): In a way, these 2 things are connected. 1 of the things I wrote about in my memoirs, which were my first book, was that as a hebrew in Germany I sometimes experienced not only anti-Semitism, but besides a somewhat frightening form of philosemitism. I met people who tried to prove to me how much they loved Jews and how regretted they had done in the past. In most cases this attitude was due to sincere intentions, but in fact this approach made it hard for me to be equal in society, frequently built in the process of an invisible war between me and another people.
One of the unusual things about moving from Germany (where I was a typical of the most visible class of victims) to the United States (first to survey and then to my first job, where I was a typical of the most visible class of perpetrators, or white men) was that I was frequently expected to treat others in a way that I myself hated increasing up, how I was treated as a child.
Another characteristic feature is that I am a philosophical liberal, which allows me to admit the apparent ways in which people are discriminated against and frequently experience force due to belonging to circumstantial groups. My imagination of a better society assumes that what kind of descriptive group we were born in is much little crucial to our capabilities or how we treat each another and how we find ourselves in relation to society.
One of the threats to specified liberal values is the right, especially from authoritarian dictators, but besides from any right-wingers. Another threat comes from the left, which rejects specified ideals for a society in which the colour of our skin, sex or sexual orientation will forever be a defining feature. According to this vision, the way we are treated by the state does not depend on our individuality, but on which group we belong. And this is besides a real intellectual error.
LJ: Are we in danger of a crisis of universalism? And if so, why did this happen? Can we do anything about it, or is it very powerfully related to the comparative strength of the United States in relation to the remainder of the planet – and Western civilization in general? Does this affect the way we approach the question of identity?
YM: 1 thing that always makes me feel better and at the same time makes me worried about humanity is to go back to earlier political moments and realize how endangered were the values I care about.
For the past fewer years, I have been discouraged, for example, by the degree to which commitment to freedom of speech has exonerated his absence in many intellectual circles in the United States and another places where people have said that if you say something bad, you should be punished. Meanwhile, they refused to admit same - censorship.
When George Orwell goes to 1 of Penn Club's first meetings in London in the 1840s, just after the end of planet War II, he finds precisely the same. Nobody was talking about restrictions on freedom of speech in the russian Union at the time, due to the fact that it was against political fashion, believe it or not. So erstwhile it comes to universalism, you are right that as an perfect it is very old. However, of course, at most historical moments it is ignored and violated.
For example, the Catholic Church is indeed a manifestation of the Christian faith, which in any respects is universalistic. However, of course, the Catholic Church, where he had power, did not act universally and surely did not recognise specified a thing as freedom of religion. Therefore, looking at the planet today, in any ways I am rather optimistic. We have more societies ruling mostly universalist principles than 200, 150 or even 25 years ago. And I truly think that average citizens of Western democracy are showing a deep, continuous attachment to any form of liberal values that they do not express in theory.
They cannot tell you who the Liberal is and are incapable to explain the subtle aspects of universalist ideals specified as freedom of speech. But they are truly tense erstwhile they see that individual is not treated according to these views and values. They have a strong sense of liberal injustice. And that is simply a good point of anchoring these values.
At the same time, partially due to the success of universalism, the re-attack on this approach is expected by right-wing afro-nationalism. However, to a large degree this comes from a fresh left-wing ideology, which I call "the synthesis of identity", frequently called "being wokeIt’s okay. ” This ‘culture woke” has roots (not as any right-wing commentators claim) in cultural Marxism, but alternatively in postmodern thought in doctrine of characters specified as Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Lyotard, which was subsequently adapted to much more political ends by postcolonial scholars specified as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Its contemporary expression can now be seen in American law schools in the work of critical theorists dealing with race issues specified as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.
LJ: Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about emancipation, which at least in the late 1960s was a driving force for individual rights, including abolitionist, feminist and civilian rights movements. erstwhile and why did identity policy take the incorrect direction?
YM: This involves rejecting universalism. I do not criticise all forms of identity policy due to the fact that I think that any of the movements I admire most can, if anyone wants, be defined as forms of identity policy.
For example, in the United States, the fight against slavery in the 19th century surely united members of a circumstantial identity group against injustices experienced due to belonging to a circumstantial identity group. The same was actual of the civilian Rights Movement in the 1960s with Martin Luther King at the head. At that time, these movements were requested to be integrated into existing universalist principles and standards.
Frederick Douglass erstwhile said: “You are celebrating July 4 and you are talking about how all humans were created equal. Well, if you take these values seriously, how can you proceed to live in a planet where slavery exists? How can you enslave people who look like me?” Martin Luther King talked about how the Bank of Justice issued checks to African Americans, but he did not honor and execute them. And then he didn't say, "Cut those checks!" He said, “It is time for the Bank of Justice to honour these checks!” I think it was the most effective emancipation movement. By the way, the same thing applies to gay rights.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the gay rights movement had a major debate in which people I know who are my friends, specified as Jonathan Rauch or Andrew Sullivan, first advocated gay marriages, and so the seemingly insane thought that 2 men or 2 women should be allowed to marry. And the first opponent of this position were people from their own movement, their own community, who said, “We do not want to marry!” It is simply a bourgeois heterosexual institution and we want to overthrow specified institutions!’.
However, the large improvement in the rights of sexual minorities that we have achieved is due to opposition to these groups, by saying no. What we are asking for is not a social revolution – not the demolition of social institutions, the overthrow of universalism. Rather, it is about being included in universalistic institutions and practices that have so far unfairly discriminated against us and excluded us.
LJ: How is your criticism of identity policy different from the right-wing one? How do you separate the identity policy you consider acceptable from the 1 you consider to be a violation of the rights of an individual, liberalism and freedom of speech?
YM: There are 2 main differences. 1 is the difference in intellectual history. As I have already mentioned, the most commonly utilized word utilized by the right is the message that we truly should realize the alleged "synthesis of identity" or "being woke“ as a form of cultural Marxism. So you take Marxism, you remove social class, and alternatively you place categories of race, gender, or sexual orientation in its place.
If we know the principles of Marxism, we can rapidly realize that this does not make any sense in the intellectual aspect. Taking a class category out of Marxism explanation is kind of like removing a ball from football. There's not much left. And in fact, if we look at the thinkers quoted by the researchers and activists of this tradition, they are not Karl Marx and Frederick Engels – it is not even Antonio Gramsci or Frankfurt School. In fact, they come from different traditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism. So, as I presented it, intellectual past is rooted in respective major themes gathered together by theorists – any of which would actually reject today's ideology (like Michel Foucault).
Foucault adds skepticism to this approach to universal fact and emphasis on discourse and the way we talk as a actual sphere of political power. Edward Said adds to this the usage of discourse criticism as a kind of political tool, stating that the natural way to practice politics is not only to fight for certain laws and regulations, but besides if you are a feminist, criticizing or celebrating the movie Barbie.
Gayatri Spivak takes over from postmodernism the first scepticism he had towards identity groups, saying that reasoning that there is something in common for all women or all employees, etc., is an excessive simplification that leads to the essence of these groups. However, in her opinion, in order for individual to be able to talk on behalf of the weakest social groups, who cannot talk for themselves, we must strategically pretend that this essentialistic concept of the group is actually true.
That is why we request to engage in strategical essentialism. This is what can be seen erstwhile you enter the activist circles present and hear the "racist social construct", but we request to step down for black and brown people. We need, as is happening present in many modern private schools, to divide the children in the school into different racial groups to learn the right racial identity that would lead to the creation of an rooted racial identity.
And then we come to critical race theorists who claim both that society is incapable to make any progress, and that all advancement is simply a form of delusion. That today's America is as racist and sexist as 200, 100 or 50 years ago – that these forms of discrimination are possibly a small more hidden, but they are inactive as clear as they were in the past.
So if we put these 5 subjects together, they explain the main beliefs of scholars, activists and average people who are called woke much better than rereading Marx and Engels and someway replacing the breed each time they say "class".
Another issue I disagree with about this part of the right is what the cure for all this should be. Let me give you an example of individual who is simply a very interesting thinker, who I like and respect, namely Eric Kaufmann. In a book entitled Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2018) It recognises the existence of what it calls "asymmetric multiculturalism". According to this concept, the fact that number groups are presently encouraged to be very arrogant of the tags of group identity, especially cultural or cultural, is asymmetrical.
It is large to celebrate belonging to an cultural number or origin from a circumstantial cultural environment, but besides from circumstantial sex, sex, and another groups. But of course the dominant group, which is inactive the largest in many societies, are white people. Therefore, people belonging to the indigenous majority are not allowed to celebrate in the same group.
Kaufmann is right, pointing out this phenomenon as a fact concerning contemporary societies. Eric, who by the way is not white, has a solution to this, but it is so essential to encourage white people to feel any form of pride, so that they besides tend towards a form of pride based on cultural origin, due to the fact that that is the model of society. It is surely 1 way to relieve this tension, but it is wrong. In this way we will lead to an expanding number of zero-sum conflicts, which will mean that we will not be able to build societies, but in fact we will stay unchangeable and tolerant erstwhile they become very diverse - and this is the majority of democracy today.
A better solution for them is to effort to have certain forms of pride from cultural heritage – to keep religious, culinary, cultural traditions. It's all in the best order. However, they must besides make a common identity. We must point out that regardless of our regional identity, we besides share a wider identity as people who are fellow citizens of the same country, possibly to any degree as citizens of the European Union or as a community of all people. This in turn weakens our commitment to regional communities and identities.
In light of this common identity, the most crucial thing for me is not that my ancestors come from country X, and your ancestors come from country Y, that I have so much melanin in my skin that you have so much melanin in your skin, but alternatively that it leads us to share a collection of political ideals or the fact that we are citizens of the same country where we share solidarity, being above specified limitations.
And in this respect, my position is different from that of Eric Kaufmann.
LJ: Have we returned to another phase of the improvement of liberal democracy? possibly what we are presently seeing is simply a kind of "mass democracy" with a different function of the elite, and consequently it is not possible to return to universal values recognised by all?
YM: We have never faced a democracy where everything would be unchangeable and wonderful. This may have been the case for respective decades in respective countries, but I am presently reading Tony Judt’s book Postwar: A past of Europe From 1945 (2005), which discusses the past of Europe (West, East and Central) from 1945 to the 1990s, and naturally the challenges to the liberal universalistic order existed in this period practically in all country in Europe.
Of course, they existed in countries conquered by the russian Union, where something like liberal universalism was suppressed with tanks and weapons. But they were besides present in many Western European countries, where there were very strong Communist parties, where in any places there were fascist governments (as in Spain and Portugal), where criticism of liberal universalism on the part of the rightist people continued. Yet we have managed to overcome these historical challenges.
So possibly we are now seeing the definitive end of a comparatively calm policy, rooted in the fast economical growth of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in Western European countries, which had a comparatively limited public sphere. And if we don't have another cataclysm like planet War II, we may never get back to it. This does not mean that liberal universalism will yet not prevail, that it will not be able to respond and halt its enemies.
More generally, the way of reasoning about the threat of populism – especially on the right, but besides on the left – is not based solely on the zero-one sum, is it? So not only in Venezuela or Turkey, democracy truly died. It may 1 day return as a consequence of the folk uprisings and the apparent way in which the Venezuelan government lost, for example, any appearance of support among the population, but in fact it would not be a democratic renewal. Rather, it would be to overthrow something that clearly became a dictatorship.
However, in another places – e.g. in Poland – populism did not work this way, even though there was a very serious threat to free institutions in Poland. surely it would be premature to say that this threat has been completely eliminated. There are inactive certain risks and challenges, and it is very hard for fresh political forces to re-establish democratic standards without having to break them in a certain way, which is manifested by deep paradoxes and unknowns about how democratic institutions can be re-established in areas where they have been challenged.
Poland has surely never become a second Venezuela or Turkey. I wonder if the way of knowing the populist challenge in places specified as the United States and in many another countries (such as Brazil, India and another places in the world) is more akin to Poland than Venezuela, where these anti-democratic forces will be able to importantly weaken democratic institutions. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will win. And this is simply a somewhat more optimistic way of seeing this phenomenon.
LJ: Apart from being a scholar, in a sense you are besides a “warrior” fighting for liberal values. What should be the liberal strategy now? Do you see the danger of anti-Popular politics becoming populism itself? If so, how can we avoid it?
YM: There are 2 answers to that question. First of all, I personally see myself as a writer. Therefore, I have a work to my recipients to say what I consider real and interesting. And if they make people on my side nervous, so be it. This is due to my own thought of my function in the planet and I am fortunate to be able to live by writing, reasoning about ideas and teaching. This is simply a moral work that involves this privilege.
In the long run, this is besides strategically reasonable. 1 of the mistakes many journalists have made in fresh years is that they see journalism as part of the defence of democracy, which is besides fine. For democracy to function, we request journalists. But at the same time, the same journalists allowed it to influence the way we relate all story. all time the media reported something – for example, a fewer months ago, Joe Biden's head was questioned – the question was, "How can I put it in specified a way as to minimise the hazard to democracy?" This means that I minimize Donald Trump's hazard of gaining power, and therefore, I minimize the problem itself. And specified an approach yet leads to a failure of confidence, due to the fact that it simply does not accomplish the goal it is intended to serve.
Therefore, my first answer simply concerns my individual role. I am writing a fresh weekly column on large ideas that are not always consistent with the latest news cycle (see: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/). And erstwhile I do, I effort to separate myself from the activist role. I'm just describing what I find interesting and important.
As far as your question is concerned, yes, I truly think that together we must advocate liberal values and ideals. The societies were so steeped in them that we began to consider them obvious, though we allowed the enemies of liberalism to blame liberalism for everything they did not like in our society. And there are quite a few things that you can't like about liberalism without realizing that many of these things aren't actually liberal.
In fact, we owe the large achievements of our societies to liberalism. Liberal societies worldwide are among the best, richest, freest and most desirable societies. erstwhile you ask people all over the planet where they want to live, they name liberal societies. That is why it is very crucial that we together present intellectual arguments for liberalism in times in which it inactive dominates in any sense the way our institutions operate.
However, as an ideology, liberalism came out of use, and possibly even gained bad fame. We must so remind people of the large achievements of this intellectual tradition.
Yascha Mounk will be the guest of the upcoming edition Freedom Games, an thought festival held all year in Łódź. This year's edition will take place on 18-20 October at EC1 Łódź. The co-organiser of the festival is the European Liberal Forum.
This podcast was produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movieno Liberal Social and the Liberté Foundation!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are liable for the content of the podcast nor for any way of utilizing it.
Podcast is besides available on platforms Sound, Apple Podcast, Stitcher and Spotify
Dr. Olga Łabendowicz translated from English
Read English at 4liberty.eu
