The Bulwark Podcast - Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

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/

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Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Welcome to the Weekend Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sachs. I thought we'd take another break from Trumpism and the Shambhala clown car, what's happening on Congress to talk about

other issues that are marginally less controversial. No, not really. Actually, there is a new book out next week. It is The Identity Trap by our good friend Yasha Monk. And it's going to generate an awful lot of buzz because he goes at the whole question of illiberalism from the left and wokeism from the left, but from a center left perspective. And so Yasha, first of all, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Charlie. Okay, we got to do a little bit of the hype because you have 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 Haidt, who writes, America's academic, cultural, and political institutions went insane beginning around 2014. And I've been trying to

figure out why ever since. In this new book, The Identity Trap, Yasha Monk explains how a few powerfully bad ideas propelled through institutions by people with good intentions are causing systemic dysfunction and dangerous polarization. This is among the most insightful and important books written in the last decade 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, Yashamung 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 enduring social peace. So great reviews for this book, which is coming out next week. So I want to give people your background. 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 studies about this counter-revolution led by anti-woke

warriors like Christopher Ruffo and Rhonda Sanders. So why did you choose this moment as a student of politics to write about left-wing identity politics and wokeism? Yeah. Well, first of all, 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 2013, 2014, when I was a graduate student, arguing that people were coming to have more critical views about democracy, that they gave less importance to living in a democracy, but coming to be more open to authoritarian alternatives to democracy. And I linked this to what I was already seeing in Europe,

all of these rising far-right movements and parties gaining in virtue, gaining in power in places like Hungary, where they're now firmly 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 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 Recep Erdogan are very dangerous.

And I've written countless articles, first in Slate and then The Atlantic, chronicling everything that's wrong with Donald Trump. The first thing I want to say is I continue to believe all of those things. I'm really worried about the election next year. I'm very worried about the fact that Donald Trump, according to betting markets, has about a one in three chance of being the next president of the United States.

And so I haven't changed my mind about any of that. I do think that we now have good writing and scholarship on those topics. When I first wrote my book about populism, I think it was one of the first books that really explained that phenomenon, really brought it to people. Now we have hundreds of book about populism, I think it was one of the first books that really explained that phenomenon, really 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 going to help that much.

Right. The zone has been flooded. Yeah. And I have to say, I admire the people who are able to, you know, write yet another article about how terrible Donald Trump is. I certainly agree with them. I don't have the energy to do it over and over again. 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. 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. We talk a lot about democracy, by which we mean liberal constitutional democracy, and liberalism is really facing a two-front war right now. The immediate crisis may be from the right, but as you point out, something's been happening in our culture. 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, in 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. I read you the blurb from Jonathan Haidt that

American universities lost their mind in 2014. What happened in 2014, Yasha? What was the moment of insanity? Well, I don't know that it's 2014 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 beat the heart attack and the cancer, if we actually want to reclaim American democracy, we need to figure out how to build broad, enduring majorities against these kinds of demagogues and against these kind of populists. 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 running in, are one of the reasons why we found that to be hard.

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 these new ideas is simply that it really is a new ideology. This is not just a continuation of the civil rights movement. It is not a continuation of what I think is the proudest and most inspiring American... We need to define this for folks. So you're talking about, what do we want to call it? We want to call it identity politics, wokeism, what you call identity. But let me start there. What did people like Frederick Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln, like Martin Luther King Jr., what did Barack Obama

believe? Broadly speaking, they made some version of a following argument. They said, we have lovely ideas and values in the constitution, but that's not enough to make sure that our country is just. When Frederick Douglass was invited to speak to his compatriots on the 4th of July, he said, you're being hypocritical. You're talking about these lovely ideas of all men being born equal 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. He said, we should live up to them. He asked his compatriots, who he called hypocrites, 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, that the promissory note made out by the founding documents of the United States to African Americans has proven to be fraudulent. 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'm looking at goes well beyond a recognition that, of course, Americans who come from all over the world

are always going to take some pride in their origin and their culture. It goes beyond the recognition that there's forms of interest group politics that are perfectly natural, that people in some ways are going to fight for the interests of their group. It is trying to put our particular intersection of identities at the very core of our political and cultural life. It is advocating 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 over there. And by the way, if you're white. This actually happens? This happens in many elite private schools around the country. Schools like Gordon in Rhode Island, schools like Bank Street School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is super influential because it trains a lot of teachers. 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 the white kids, they want them to embrace their European origins, to embrace the whiteness. And the idea is that that's going to turn them into great anti-racist activists who are aware of the white privilege

and are going to become great allies. If it succeeds in that, that would be great. I think everything I've learned about history and social psychology is the opposite. That if you tell people the most important thing about you is that you're white, then you're going to fight for the interests of whites or those of others. And that is precisely the kind of politics that we need to oppose. So coming back to the political tradition of a civil rights movement,

the political tradition of somebody like Frederick Douglass, the thinkers that I talk about in this book, who stand at 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. I enjoyed reading his work. 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 think of 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 these lawyers were doing was imposing the ideology of integration rather than truly fighting for the interests of their client. 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 theory. So what I want to 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. And I think we need to understand what those ideas are and whether they have merit or not. We're 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 Christopher Ruffo, 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 that 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. I mean, I don't know. Let's ask the listeners of this podcast. Are you afraid of nuance? Do you want to believe the opposite of whatever Chris Rufo says? And if he says something that he happened to agree with tomorrow, then you have to disagree with that. And you actually outsource your own political judgment to what he says. 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 there 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. No, I went back to the origin of these ideas to actually read these things because I'm trained originally as an intellectual historian. And I have to tell you, I think Derrick Bell would be offended if you told him, all he is, is somebody who agrees with Barack Obama and Martin Luther King. No, his whole life's work was to say that perhaps Brown versus Board of Education was a mistake.

I think he would say, hey, you completely misunderstood who I am, right? So I think we can have that nuance. We can understand how these ideas are different. 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 rejects both of these ideas. That certainly wants to teach about American history and its injustices. That certainly is aware of the discrimination that persists. But it doesn't say, for example, that we should rip up the constitution. And if our politics has become so simplistic that those are the only two

stances available, then I guess I'll stop thinking about politics. Better pro, our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca. Okay, so again, the terminology is fraught. So whether we call it wokeness or identity synthesis, we understand the attraction because there are these serious injustices

which have been perpetrated against minority groups. And with the rise of these new attitudes, you have members of these groups feel more seen, more respected, more empowered. But your book argues this is a trap that will lead to real injustices and inefficiencies and make it far harder to build a truly tolerant society and ultimately empower the far right. Okay, so there are a lot of people saying, well, look, wokeness merely means that I'm not asleep, that I'm paying attention to these injustices. And you're now coming along saying this is a trap. So how does this lead to real injustices and inefficiencies? Talk to me about that. And we're not talking about just a few elite schools

or a few elite universities. We're talking about in society in general, correct? Yeah, absolutely. So let me give you a couple of examples of practices or policies that we've adopted recently. And then I want to 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 an African-American educator, lives in the suburbs of Atlanta. And she asked the principal of her school, she has two elementary school kids, whether she could suggest a teacher for her children. And the principal said, yes, of course, just tell me what teacher you would like

for them. And she sent in the name and the principal kept deferring and kept punting on this and kept saying, well, what about this other teacher? And eventually she grew frustrated and she said, look, 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 asked for, that's not the black class. And that sounds like just a straight up story of racial discrimination until you find out that the principal 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 describe in the book, rooted in ideas like Gayatri Spivak's concept of strategic essentialism.

She believes that to have the right kind of self-identity, to have a healthy development, black 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 black kids,

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 watched the inauguration of Kamala Harris with my daughters. And they said, perhaps one day I'll be vice president. Hell, perhaps one day I'll be president. And she said, when my kids grow up, I don't know if they'll be vice president or president, but they're going to go places.

You know, they're smart kids. And they need to be able to be comfortable with anybody. They need to 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 that very moving. Let me give you another example from public policy, just to show that this isn't just about education. Please. 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 sat through a meeting of the ACIP, the key advisory committee to the CDC that was tasked with deciding who should get those vaccines first. 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. But this committee said, even though it would be easier to roll out the system that way, that's not what we should do because elderly Americans happen to be disproportionately white.

And so on ethical grounds, because of equity, we should prioritize essential workers as well. Even though 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 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. So everybody was eligible, but there's very, very few spots. So who got those spots? Well, the people who could refresh websites all day long, who could drive

hours out of the way to the one pharmacy that had a slot, people who are actually relatively privileged. And I believe that this policy in the end didn't just kill more Americans, it probably killed more non-white Americans. Because if you give two 25-year-old black Uber drivers a vaccine, rather than one 80-year-old black retiree, more black people are going to die. And so these ideas aren't just abstract. They're not just at the margins. They now help to shape key ways of how we run public policy. Well, let's go through.

Because the Identity Trap, your book, mounts a critique of all of the main debates that are going on. These five main debates that we're now in the process of working through and that you argue are transforming major institutions. And again, they have this intuitive appeal because they do purport to deal with genuine injustices. So I want to go through. I think people have heard the terms, but I want to hear your critique of all of them. So I want to talk about cultural appropriation, standpoint theory, limits on free speech, progressive separatism, and race-sensitive public policy. I think you just 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 and artifacts, what's wrong with that?

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 the United States and in other countries. You know, the magazine Bon Appetit apologized a couple of years ago because it allowed a Gentile writer to write the recipe for hamantaschen, a Jewish dessert. You know, a festival in England in Brighton a couple of months ago told its 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. Now, I get that the apparent plausibility of this concept stems from the fact that there are some genuine injustices that are sometimes being described as a form of cultural appropriation. So in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, there were white musicians who were inspired by or sometimes stole the songs of black musicians who weren't able to have big careers because of discrimination against them. And that was clearly unjust. That was evidently unjust.

The question is whether the concept of cultural appropriation helps us to understand what was unjust about those cases. It helps to point the way to how to remedy that situation. And what I'm 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. And when you can't express it in more straightforward ways, then you shouldn't worry about it. 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, 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 those black musicians. It's that the black musicians were living under Jim Crow. They were not allowed to perform in concert venues. Major record labels would not sign them. 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 all the 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. It's our ability to forge forms of new culture. As the British-Ghanian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah 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, 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 and these outsiders can't in any way be influenced by our ideas and we are going to lock ourselves off against the influence of those people. That's ethno-nationalists on the right. So I have a question about your example about Bon Appetit magazine. So does everybody who writes for and works for Bon Appetit, are they all French?

Well, that's why they only write about French food. One point that I think is really important about this is, where does this logic lead? If you said that only a Jewish writer can write a recipe for hamantaschen, then at some point you're going to say, well, a black writer really shouldn't be allowed to write about traditional French cuisine. That's right, only the French. 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. Okay, this has also really become a major issue in literary circles. deeply, deeply disturbing. And it goes against the kind of society we should build. Okay. This has also 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 black characters? And one of our contributors, Richard North Patterson, longtime bestselling author, wrote a book about voter suppression in Georgia. and publishers didn't want to 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. If you can only write from the perspective of people who have exactly your racial, ethnic, sexual identity. By that logic, in a country that's thankfully super diverse, in which our institutions and our social life and hopefully our friendship groups are pretty mixed, are we going to have literature where somehow everybody is from the same group because people aren't allowed to write about each other, right? I mean, this really, to me, hopefully illustrates why I'm not a kind of troglodyte, 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 direction. 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 raised about standpoint theory, 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 harassed. And I'm not black, so I don't

know what it feels like to look at a cop and think, you know, perhaps he might stop me and frisk 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 fellow citizens. I have to ask them, I have to listen to my fellow citizens. I have to ask questions. I have to have an open mind. When they tell me about something, I'm skeptical at first. Say, hang on a second.

Perhaps their view is different. I should really take that seriously. But there's now a lot of people who say, I can't understand you anyway if you're more oppressed than I am. And so I shouldn't even try. And rather than standing in true solidarity with each other, what I should do is just to delegate my political judgment to you, 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 going to work,

and this is the recipe for losing elections. But more importantly, I think it's a really impoverished 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. I can be enraged by the fact that many black Americans are uncomfortable about interactions with the police, don't have a resource of being able to call on the police when they need policemen to help protect them against crime because they're worried about what might happen to them in certain contexts. 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 want to live in, that seems unfair. And so I stand in solidarity with them, not because I say in a patronizing way, you're so different from me, I'm never going to understand you, but sure, whatever you say, I guess must be true. No, 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 want to live in, I'm going to 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. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get a pro. to improve the world. Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. So let's talk about this attitude about free speech, because I think this really goes to the heart of some of the things that we're debating here. This idea that this is complex. I mean, obviously we don't want disinformation. We don't want hate speech. But there is this push now to limit speech to protect vulnerable minority groups from being exposed to hurtful, bigoted speech. Even when it comes to forms of expression that remain legally

permitted, this idea that society should hold what they call the consequence culture that makes people less likely is kind of a polite way of saying the cancel culture that at least we hold you accountable. So, again, there is the good intention here. But why is this wrong? You argue that it's dangerous to underestimate the danger that stems from giving up a culture of free speech. Maybe it just makes us a kinder and gentler, more responsible society. Yeah, let's talk about that.

First, just as an observation, I'm just struck by the fact, and I'm sure, Charlie, you've had the same experience, that when I've had lunch with people over the last four or five years, sometimes friends and acquaintances who are teachers or work in an office somewhere or do whatever people do. And sometimes United States senators or representatives or CEOs

or famous media commentators. And as a just natural thing, they'll express some innocuous opinion and then say, oh, but of course I would never say this publicly. Oh, yeah. Have you had that experience? Oh, yeah. Everyone's had this experience. I mean, I think it's impossible to be around a university campus

or increasingly corporate America without having that conversation pop up. And I think that that's really concerning because of two reasons. A, because people should be able to be their true selves. I think in a democratic society, people should be able to express what they believe, especially when these ideas might be on sensitive topics or on complicated, intricate topics that come from a good place,

come from a genuine desire to make a better world and to understand what's happening. And second, because I think it's a lot of a reason why we have such deep mistrust in 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 or a lot of presidents of universities are saying to each other in private is different from what they say in public. 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 a real consequence for society.

But to talk about the broader argument, look, from John Stuart Mill onwards, people have always realized that what we need to have a genuine protection for free speech is not just legal restrictions, where 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 the reasons why people have traditionally said free speech is important, a culture of free speech and the laws of free speech, are the great things that we get from having free speech. And I agree with many of them. If you haven't read John Stuart Mill 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 continues to be minority opinion, at least we preserve the ability of that speech. 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

attackable because nobody remembers how to argue for them, how to defend them. 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. And there's all kinds, but the most important one of them is simply that by definition, the people who would decide what you can and can't say aren't going to be the marginalized, but not the weakest in society. They're actually the powerful. Who is going to be on an imaginary federal census bureau? Or who is going to be a member of whatever Silicon Valley calls it, the speech facilitation committee at Facebook or Twitter?

Is it going to be the weakest in society? Is it going to be the most marginalized? Or is it going to be people who are powerful and privileged and highly educated and very affluent? People who actually already have a lot of social power. Frederick Douglass wrote at a time when people said terrible things in newspapers defending slavery, right? And he was well aware of that. But he nevertheless defended free speech because he knew it's also the weapon that abolitionists needed when they were very unpopular to press the case he called it the dread of tyrants and i think the smart parts of left have always recognized that free speech is a key defense for the weak and the idea we have today that somehow

miraculously the senses are always going to be on our side they're always going to agree with us is deeply naive look at what's happening in florida what it looks well look what dissenters and other republican governors are doing and the same is true when it's not governors making those decisions but companies 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 they dislike what you say, that's always going to help the left rather than the right. What do you think that would have meant after 9-11? What do you think that would have meant in other moments in American history? So we need free speech because it is the key protection of the powerless. Yeah, 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 2.0 in January, February of 2025. So be careful about your enthusiasm for this kind of federal. Two other points, though. One of the things that you see in the attacks on free speech, particularly on university campuses, is this notion that speech is harm and the rhetoric that if you allow this 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, well, 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. So isn't this kind of central to this new thing, 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. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's one of the sort of strange things that has happened that the right has 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 and become effective tools for people with whose positions we deeply

disagree. And so we should ask whether they're true or not. And there is a difference between physical violence and speech, which is upsetting. 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 when every form of speech is wonderful. I would love for all kinds of terrible things that are written every day on Twitter 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? Do I trust somebody else, some committee of people to make that decision on my behalf? And particularly at a moment in which

very dangerous political forces have a lot of power in this country. I just think it's very naive to trust that. I want to pick up on another point you made. And this is something that I remember writing about in the 1990s 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. And one of the things we're seeing now is kind of like bursting out with all the pressure, you know, don't say this, that on the right,

they have now sort of embraced the idea that we are saying 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 of the fever swamp. So things like the most racist things. And there's a certain, you know, like, look how brave I am. And there's kind of 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. Right. I know I'm not supposed to be able to say this. And then he'll spew 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, 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. Yeah, I think that's a cool part of it. There's a really interesting way in which, you know, there 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? You had young people fight for really important things, like more sexual freedoms and so on.

And then you had an establishment that said, well, we're sort of going to try and oppose that and perhaps some of the good ideas are going to win out and some of the bad ideas will not. But they sort of realized that there's some aspects of our institutions and 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 the 1960s. They see themselves as descendants of a student movement

of the 1960s, right? And that's sympathetic. I mean, I feel myself closer to the students of the 1960s than the administrators of the 1960s as well, but it sets up a very weird dynamic where everybody thinks that they're a rebel, even when they're actually the establishment. And I think 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.

And when you feel in opposition, then 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 this country, in state houses and in parts of Congress and so on, in a lot of facially neutral businesses, cultural institutions, and so on, it is the left that feels like they're in far power, and therefore they have this temptation to censor. But that temptation is historically short-sighted. So we talked about cultural appropriation standpoint,

theory of limits on free speech. I think we talked about progressive separatism, the anecdote that you told about 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?

Right, right. Well, a few thoughts on that. One is that there is actually a lot of these policies that now get adopted quite unthinkingly, 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, just 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, which had to have an order of priority and was going to run out of money at some point. So that order of priority was important. And they said, look, if you lost 70% of your revenue at the early stages of COVID, perhaps you were a buyer where people weren't allowed to go and frequent you, right? Then you're going to be first in line. If you lost 50% of revenue, then 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, then you were last in line. Who decided this? That was the Biden administration. Okay. All right. 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 you're in danger of losing your business because of this pandemic, but nobody could reasonably have expected you to predict. And then you're not going to be able to get that aid because legally your spouse is a 50% owner of your business. And because you made the mistake of marrying a white spouse, you're going to go back in line relative to some

sibling or cousin who married a different race. 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 are really, really damaging. Now, when it comes to affirmative action, I'll say a few things. One is that there's more important topics like making sure that community colleges have much better funding, which is where a lot of minority students actually go. I believe that given America's history, there'd be obvious concerns if 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 than 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, misshapen 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. I find it absurd that your kids would have an advantage in going to whatever school you're an alumnus of. I find it absurd that at the moment men get a boost in admissions because women outperform men at the high school level. And God forbid if a gender ratio at the university

was 55-45 rather than 50-50. I find it absurd that we give preferential treatment to athletes and that we think we must rig the admission system in such a way that there's a second violinist for the university orchestra. 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 burn-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. Okay. So let's go to how do we get out of this identity trap? Because this is the important

part is, okay, what is the answer to this? And 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, I'm sorry, people hate that both sides isn't, certainly illiberalism rampant 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? 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? And then the other is, you know, how do we argue back

against bad 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. And thinkers of Michel Foucault and Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak and Derek Bell, we talked a little bit about, and Kimberly Crenshaw. But what I do in the fourth book is to really boil these ideas down to what I see as the three main philosophical claims that they make. And they're the following. The number one, that the key prism 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 DiAngelo, the best-selling diversity consultant who is a white woman as it happens, says that every time a 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 them, shut up. But in other situations, these might be two longtime friends who love arguing about politics and who interrupt each other all of the time. It might be people who are married who do that. It might be people who are engaging in what psychologists call a rapport interruption, where I finish your sentence for you to signal that I've understood what you 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 those universal rules, all of those 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. And that helps to explain why we haven't made any progress. For somebody like Derek Bell, America in 2000 is as racist as it was in 1950 or 1850. For many gay rights organizations today, America is as homophobic today as it was in the 1990s. And then third, finally, therefore,

what you need to do is to make how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us explicitly dependent on the identity groups of which you are a part. In the kind of way that the policies we are a part, in the kind of way that the policies we talked about did, in the kind of way in which pedagogical practices in elementary schools and middle schools and high schools now often do. So I have a response to each of those points. I think there's a way of taking racism very seriously, of taking other forms of discrimination seriously, of acknowledging the injustices in America's history without embracing these three points of view.

So what I would say is number one, but yes, of course, you need to think about race and 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. 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 let the situation teach you how to think about it. So sometimes these categories are going to be helpful. And sometimes, as in the case of D'Angelo saying, every time a white person drops a black person, that's white supremacy. That's going to be helpful. And sometimes, as in the case of D'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 our constitution is never enough to make a society just. And it 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, they recognized that these also gave us the tools to make a more just society. But free speech is the dread 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 all people are born equal. Well, how then can you justify treating me unequally? How can you

justify saying I'm not allowed to get married? I'm not allowed to ride in front of a bus. I'm not allowed to be an American of equal standard. How can you justify that? That argument was actually incredibly powerful in American 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 jobs 30 years ago because they publicly, quote-unquote, admitted that they were gay or lesbian, like Ellen DeGeneres. It's offensive to the many black Americans who were enslaved, who suffered from Jim Crow, who were discriminated against in ways that are much more disgusting than what thankfully most black Americans experience

today. And so finally, what do we do? We don't rev up these principles. We live up to them. We want to create a society and 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 the institutions

and the policies and the social norms that help to overcome them. On that note, the book is The Identity Trap by Yasha Monk. Yasha 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 desperately need. Yasha,

thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and best of luck on the book next week. Thank you. I've loved this conversation. 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 Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.