The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Yascha Mounk - The Identity Trap - Woke Politics, Trump Supporters, and More

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Yascha Mounk, comes in to discuss his new book, "The Identity Trap," and much more.

The main theme of the identity trap, skepticism of truth. The key way to understand any social situation or any political question is race, gender, and sexual orientation. Robin DiAngelo says that every time a white person interrupts a black person, they're bringing the whole apparatus of white supremacy to bear on. The Bill of Rights, the Civil Rights Movement, those are all just an attempt to pull wool over people's eyes. We have to reject, quote-unquote, the defunct racial equality ideology, end quote, of the civil rights movement.

Now, I think that people, whether on the center-right or the center-left, should have a coherent response to that. And so here's the three responses that I think we need to get. Live from the table, the official podcast of The Comedy Cellar. This week, Yasha Monk, author of the new book, The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time. Okay, today I interviewed my friend Yasha Monk. Yasha is an intellectual hero of mine because in a world of cowardly people and journalists

who say one thing in private and then something totally different in public, Yasha speaks out of only one side of his mouth. To wit, Yasha's new book, The Identity Trap, is a direct attack on identity politics and all its ideological cousins that encourage people to define themselves by their race, gender, sexual orientation, cultural origins, etc. His label for all these strains of thought is the identity synthesis. According to Yasha, quote, Quote, advocates of the identity synthesis reject universal values and neutral rules like free speech and equal opportunity as mere distractions that aim to occlude and perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. I think because I was so immersed in Yashalan preparing for this interview, I could have done a better job of laying the groundwork and questioning him about the basics of the book.

But read the book. It's fantastic. The book covers wokeness and all the cultural war issues that have everybody on edge these days. Yasha equips the reader with arguments to counter the identity synthesis and gives us a guide to fighting for social justice, which we all believe in, without abandoning our basic unifying principles. I cannot recommend this book enough and all of Yasha's work, his writings at the Atlantic, his magazine that he edits, Persuasion, his podcasts, his other books. Check him out, Yasha Monk. Okay, hit it. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm doing one of my rare one-on-one interviews today with Yasha.

By the way, how do you pronounce your name properly, your last name? This has become a... How many years have you known me, Noam? Well, but Coleman just sent an email. You saw that. He's heard people saying it, Mounk, and now it's debatable. I'll tell you something about my name. It is made up by my mom. My mom made up my last name, so there's really no rhyme or reason to it. How did you...

I say Yasha Monk. Monk, okay. Say what I... So, the guest today is Yasha Monk, who is an expert on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism, the author of five books that have been translated into over 10 languages. He's a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, a contributing editor of The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, and a Moynihan Public Scholar at City College. And he has a new book out now called The Identity Trap,

a story of ideas and power in our time. Welcome, Yasha Monk. Here's the book. Look at it in the camera if you're on video. There we are. So a few preliminaries before we get into the meat of it. First of all, how does a young guy from Germany at such a young age break through into the most prestigious circle of experts of American politics. How did that happen?

Gradually and then rapidly, as people say about people going bankrupt, I guess. I mean, you know, I grew up in Germany. I was interested in going to live abroad. I did my undergrad in Cambridge in England. And then I really wanted undergrad in Cambridge in England and I really wanted to come live in New York and I applied for a fellowship from the German government to spend a year at Columbia University and you know one thing or another led to the fact that I never really officially lived in New

York since that time but I've been in the United States on and off since about 2007 and so at this point I've spent've spent a majority of my life in the Anglosphere and nearly half of my life in the United States. So that's one part of the answer. The other part of the answer is that I was in grad school and I was starting to worry about the rise of populism and what it was doing to our political system. And that was at a time when that was an unpopular opinion, when people were saying, you know,

democratic institutions in places like the United States are safe. What year is this? We don't have to worry about them. 2013, 2014. Before Trump. Before Trump, yeah. That's why I like to say i'm a democracy crisis hipster i worried about the crisis of democracy before it was cool and so originally i was interested

in the united states and and what i saw is some worrying signs there but i was also really interested in what was going on and in in europe and latin america and in in in other places with populists from people like ugo chavez and venezuela to red zip erdog Chavez in Venezuela to Recep Erdogan in Turkey to Marine Le Pen in France, right? But as a result, when Trump appeared on the scene and won the Republican nomination, I was sort of one of the people who was equipped to talk about the nature of his candidacy and who he was. And so I ended up being an expert on American democracy in a certain kind of way. Yeah, but you didn't have all the years that American schoolchildren have of learning about American history over, I mean, you had to really do a crash course, I suppose. Like, you know about the revolution, about the Federalist Papers.

You know all the stuff that we don't even know. And you must have taken that in a very short time. Like, you must have really done a deep dive. I suppose. My training really wasn't intellectual history because my fourth of us were in the wrong place at the wrong time for about five generations.

I ended up studying history because I had a sense of how history impacts people's lives in a very concrete way. But I arrived in England, I did my undergrad at Cambridge. Now, you're referring there to the fact that you're Jewish, and you're from Germany, and your family history is a series of close calls and maybe actually deaths at the hands of people who hated Jews, correct? Yes, yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, my grandparents were born in shtetls in what today is Ukraine,

what then would have been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their parents perished in the Holocaust. A lot of their siblings perished in the Holocaust. My grandparents were convinced communists and wanted to go, you know, make a more just, a more fair, a more thriving society and went to prison for the communist convictions in the 1930s. But then, and then after the war, helped to build up a regime in Poland. But lo and behold, the regime turned on them.

And in 1968, they and my parents were thrown out of a country in which my parents at least had... Can I use that to jump off into a different direction? Because I'm afraid I'll forget to come back to it. It's interesting because I wondered about this. You know, it was typical of people my age to have grandparents who lived through the Depression. And they saw everything that happened through that lens. And consequently, they would overreact to all sorts of things because the next

oppression was right around the corner. Do you ever wonder, do you ever worry in your own scholarship that in some way that's happening to you? That because some of this history is so visceral to you at the hands of populism

that maybe you're you overreact to the threat in some way? Do you worry about that? I know that you have a good nose for people going wrong, so when you say that to me, I start to worry about it. No, no, I don't know the answer to that. But it's definitely a human dynamic, that you're worrying about something, you can over the answer to that. But it's definitely a human dynamic, you know, that something is worrying – you're worrying about something. You can overreact to it.

I think – And the opposite – to be fair to you, the opposite is true too, that people underreact and we have a big problem with that. People who for seven generations have lived in pleasant suburbs and who can't imagine that something might change. That's right. That something might be unstable, right? Yeah. That's right. It might be unstable, right? I mean, I feel like my track record on this is pretty good in the sense that I was one of the first people to warn about this danger to our democratic institutions. And I know that we probably have slightly divergent views on what the nature of that threat is and how severe it is. But I feel like, you know, let me take you back to when I was in grad school and I took this class on the part of politics.

And what people told us is, hey, you know, a lot of democracy is unstable. If you're poor, if you haven't had a democracy for a long time, it might collapse. This happens all the time. If you have a rich dictatorship, it might persist for a really long time. But if you are a poor, if you are an affluent country, but has had democratic institutions for a long time, you really can take that for granted. I mean, these countries have consolidated democratic regimes, democracy is the only game in town. Unless aliens land on Earth or we all starve to death,

you really don't have to worry about their democratic institutions, right? And I caught bullshit on that because I thought that all of the sort of signs, all of the concomitants of a stable democracy didn't seem to be present anymore because a lot of people were deeply unhappy with the democratic system because they said they were open to authoritarian

alternatives to it because pretty extremist parties were rising in the polls in a lot of different countries because people at the time were really disengaging from politics and not turning out to vote, leaving political parties. And I thought all of that was reason to worry.

Now, I didn't think there was a reason to say, oh, my God, the sky is going to fall tomorrow. It was where, you know, if the sort of likelihood that people in my field would have given to democracy dying was 1%, I thought it was more like 25%. And I think the weird thing that's happened since 2016 is that a lot of people in the field would now give a chance of 50% or 75% or something percent to democracy dying. They think we're basically screwed, and everything is terrible, and it's done already. And I feel like I've held relatively steady.

I am concerned about American democratic institutions. Well, let me ask you, because you know what? I always wonder about this. They say existential threat to democracy and all these things. And I want to take it seriously. I don't want to be stupid about it. Does it mean a dictator takes over, that the military then falls in behind a strongman

and America is held in place at the point of a gun? Is that what it means that democracy might die in America? Because I have, maybe it's my own failure of imagination, I have trouble picturing that. Well, so first of all, I don't think it's very helpful to think of democracies in ones and zeros, right? It's not just one country is completely a democracy and it's democratic in every single respect, just one country is completely a democracy and it's democratic

in every single respect. And another country is, you know, totalitarianism. And, you know, you're in the world of 1984. And if you say one word against the dictator, some secret microphone is going to, you know, pick it up and send you to jail, right? There's a lot of political systems around the world, which political scientists know by different kinds of names, whether it's a competitive authoritarian regime, or my friend Roberto Fo and I have named this kind of term of dirty democracy, where there is some amount of real competition, there's some amount of viability that the opposition has, but it's a really skewed playing field, and the people who are in power enjoy tremendous unfair advantages over the opposition has, but it's a really skewed playing field, and the people who are in power enjoy tremendous unfair advantages

over the opposition. Now, to come to the United States, let me put it this way, right? The one thing that most Americans can agree on right now, perhaps except for you, is that our democracy is in danger, which is to say, you know,

if you are on Donald Trump's side of a political aisle, then you believe that the democracy has been stolen, right? When you believe that actually the most important element of our democracy, which is that elections settle who gets to rule by a set of rules which we have to follow, has been broken because actually Donald Trump is the legitimate victor of the 2020 election, and yet he has been hounded out of office. And if you disbelieve that story, as I do, then you think that the sitting president was not willing to go home

on the basis of a spurious theory about the election being stolen and inflicted some amount of violence, or incited some amount of violence and certainly sowed the belief in a lot of the election, in the electorate that the election was stolen when it actually was not. So it's sort of, either way you look at it, American democracy,

and the most fundamental aspect of American democracy is in trouble, which is that we use elections to figure out who should get to rule. Now, falling short of that standard doesn't mean that we have totalitarian dictatorship, right? It doesn't mean that the next election might not be determined in some important ways by the votes that people cast at the ballot box. But how can we not think of that as a significant threat to our democratic institutions? Well, I mean, okay, so to me, so long as in every four year period, there's an opportunity for the voters to speak and return the pendulum to where we'd want it to be, I would say democracy is healthy,

or at least if that's what, it's a far cry from an existential threat to our democracy. Yes, the Trump voters. But no, there's conditions around that, right? I mean, you have pro-forma elections in China. You have pro-forma elections in Zimbabwe. You have pro-forma elections in Turkey, right have pro-former elections in Zimbabwe. You have pro-former elections in Turkey, right? To be meaningful, there have to be such that the opposition actually has a fair chance of winning

and that we think if the opposition gets more votes, according to the longstanding rules of the game, right, in the United States it's a majority in the electoral college rather than a majority in the popular vote, then they're actually going to rule. And, you know, there's stark cases where that's clearly the case or clearly not the case, and then there's hard cases in the middle that, but I think that's something worth to be concerned about. He's saying that the criterion for elections is just, the criterion for democracy is just that there's elections every four years, then a vast number of countries in the world are democracies. No, we have to have fair elections.

Look, for instance, you could say that the idea to pack the Supreme Court that the Democrats wanted was, you know, people are going to roll their eyes, but in a certain way, that was a real threat to democracy because they could collapse two branches of government into one for who knows how long that would last. I agree.

But that's a great example of a way in which I think there would have been a threat to our democratic institutions. I was horrified by the fact that a vocal minority of the Democratic Party was advocating for that. Thankfully, it didn't go anywhere. But again, you know, it's not, you could say, well, they've done that. That's not a break of democracy.

Our Constitution allows for this. The Constitution doesn't say there's nine judges, right? They would have followed the normal Senate procedure for passing those judges at a certain kind of level of analysis, that's not a threat to democracy at all. That's just the system working. And yet, I think if you have a fair analysis, you would say, no, a very important norm of our political system is that you don't abuse your control over the Senate in such a way that you just pack the court. That goes against some

of our deeply held norms. Now, if that had happened, it wouldn't mean that there's a dictator, right? It wouldn't mean that, you know, Hunter Biden would become the king of America for 50 years, right? But it would have been a real threat to our democratic institutions. Not an existential threat, but it would be a real threat. And you know,

these guys are always disillusioned, these presidents, when the justices they appoint actually don't just line up behind them in every issue as they expected, especially Republicans have learned that. You're frozen there. Are you there? I'm here. Yeah. So let's see if we can tie this together with the book. I have a lot of friends like you, good friends, who describe themselves as center left. I think you would describe yourself as center left, correct? I would. Yeah. And then I say, well, you can't be center left because I'm center right and we agree on almost everything.

So what's going on there? And I've tried to unwind that. I was tempted to think of like a zebra. You know that you ask a kid, is a zebra white with black stripes or black with white stripes? So you might see yourself as a white zebra with black stripes, which make you the conservative things that you believe in. And I'm like, no, no, I'm a black zebra and the white stripes, but actually we end up looking exactly the same. But what actually defines someone like you who considers himself center left is in some way, I think, the gravitational force of the Democratic Party and the people who, in general, you're more comfortable with.

You can correct me if I'm wrong. The thought of voting for a Republican, I don't really vote, but the thought of voting for a Republican and telling anybody that you voted for a Republican is probably more than you could bear. But I would still say that I think that the issues that you're writing about now

reverberate much, much more with people to the center and to the right of it than people from the center and to the left of it. And I'll say one more thing, you know, like, you want us on that wall, you know, that few good men, that the fight that you are going to try to fight with this book that you've written, the center to the right is essential. They're the people in the trenches fighting this fight for you. They're the people putting, you know, complaining about this stuff. They're the people who are ready to have the nerve to speak out at school board meetings, speak out on television, whatever it is. The people that you're mostly hanging out with,

although we all know privately they say these things, they won't dare, most of them say most of the stuff that they believe in public. So you are beholden, actually, to the center and to the right of it in a certain way that you're probably not happy about. Any comments on all that? Sure. Well, so the first thing is the way that I think about politics is that there's two distinctions. One is between liberal and authoritarian, and the other is between left and right.

So when I say liberal in this context, I don't mean liberal conservative. I mean believing in things like the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights and the importance of free speech and free assembly and all of those basic elements of a democratic republic or a liberal democratic political system. And I think that is the most important distinction. I'm very happy to be friends with anybody who is in that sense a liberal. And those people can be pretty far left, and they can be pretty far right. A lot of them happen to be center left or center right.

And I'm happy, in a sense, to think of all of those as at least my allies in an important sense, and in many cases as my political friends. And ahead, finish. There's a separate set of questions about whether you're left-wing or right-wing. Now, on the economic front, being much more left-wing would mean wanting to have much higher taxation on corporations, much bigger welfare state. Being much more right-wing would mean wanting much lower taxes and a much smaller welfare state. I can have disagreements with people on that,

but that's legitimate. Some of that could be about culture as well, right? How much of an incentive do you want the state to give people to get married? How do you feel about things like gay marriage? How do you feel about how lax our legal immigration system should be? You can have deep disagreements about that. Again, some of that I'm going to be passionate about.

I'm going to say, I disagree with you, but I'm ultimately happy to think of you as my friend as long as you are willing to stand up for the liberal rather than the authoritarian side of the political spectrum. And there are genuine authoritarians on both sides. Hugo Chavez is a left authoritarian. I would argue with somebody like Victor Orban

is a right authoritarian. And they I both regard equally as people who are not going to be my political friends, because a fundamentally important thing, they're on the other side of it. And then you're asking this kind of question of, all right, so how do you end up being on the center left rather than the center right?

And I think there there's a substantive answer and a biographical answer. And the substantive answer and a biographical answer. The substantive answer I would give is that I am a kind of social democrat. I certainly believe in the power of markets and the importance of economic growth and all of that, but I do fundamentally want

to live in a society where we have a strong and functioning welfare state that makes sure that when people are unemployed, when they're sick, when they're sick, when they're elderly, when they just happen not to have great marketable talents, we make sure that they have a humane life. And on a lot of those cultural issues, like you, I think I'm pretty progressive, not in the sense of what it means if you buy into

what I'm calling the identity synthesis or the identity trap, but I was in favor of gay marriage long before it was the law of the land. I think that immigration can be a great boon to this country where there's lots of amazing talented people around the world who should get a chance to

come here and contribute their talents to this country. And I think all of those give me good reason. I'm also not from a religious background. I'm Jewish, but I'm not religious, right? And so I'm not, I am a little bit wary of the role that religion might play in a country like the United States. I think a lot of my friends exaggerate that threat. I don't think America is ever going to turn to a theocracy. But naturally, I'm on the more secular side of those debates. And so in all of those reasons,

I think I have substantive reason to be on the center left rather than the center right. Now you're right, a lot of the time people on the center left have been cowardly about this. We haven't spoken out about these things. And that's partially because we belong in institutions where doing bad is more costly. But hey, I am, I'm on the center left

and I have written this book. I've written about it in the New York Times and the Atlantic, and it sometimes made me unpopular with my colleagues. I've sometimes worried about the personal consequences for that. But I still belong in these institutions. I haven't been thrown out of them so far, and I don't think I'm about to be. And part of the mission of the identity trap of this book is to show people a way for how to argue against these ideas substantively and in terms of how to do it, but empowers them to do that. So is it a fair criticism of the center-left

that we haven't fought against this stuff, especially in the last years in the way we should have done, that we've said one thing privately to each other over lunch and another thing publicly? That's absolutely a fair criticism, but it's not a reason for me

to change my political ideals or where I stand. Well, okay, let's just take one, I have a lot to say but let's just take one small example. They got rid of racial preferences in university admissions. Now, what's been

fascinating about that, I don't know if you've had the same experience, is that almost everybody I know has been like yeah, yeah, I guess that's probably a good thing. Like it just kind of all melted away. And especially Asian people I would speak to like, is it okay for me to say I'm really happy about this because I really never felt I could say it out loud. It kind of just, it kind of just seems like most people are not that upset about it. Now, and this, of course, the opposite, a different Supreme Court,

we could have put these in stone for the next 50 years if Hillary had been the president. So if you think this kind of zero-sum competition between ethnic groups in America for something as important as spots in universities is a formula for deep social turmoil, then you have to be happy that there was a conservative Supreme Court. And there was no way to get that except by casting a vote for the side that you don't like. The side that you do like, that you'll continue to vote for, is the side to entrench these problems forever. Because, I mean, nothing's forever, obviously, because some, after Trump, some moderate Republican actually could, I think, become very, very formidable if he starts to triangulate on a lot of these issues. But as it is now, I've run the thought experiment in my own mind. It's like, you know, we survived four years of Trump.

I didn't support Trump for different reasons than you didn't support him. I won't go into that now. But having survived it, I'm like, you know what? I'm kind of happy that we have this court. And if I had to do over, I would do it over. Because they're going to get rid of these horrible policies. And they're the only ones who can. So that's got to give you some, you know, pause, right? Well, let me say a few things, right? The first is that I'm a little bit less optimistic than you

about the impact of that ruling. Because one of the things that the justices have done is to say that, of course, nothing is stopping universities from using personal statements in which people talk about the hardship and making that a big part of their applications. And immediately, university presidents seized on that and said, this is a lot of what we're going to do. Some of them are now abolishing SAT scores. Yeah, but somebody could find that illegal. I mean, you know, somebody will say, no. They might or they might not.

But at least there's a law against it now. At least there is now a legal structure that says you can't do that. That's huge. Sure. It's huge. I think that actually, I just fear that the, my view on the American admission system, and I'm not a burn the system down kind of a guy, as I think is obvious from everything I've said so far, is that we should burn the whole damn thing down. I think it's absurd that my kids would have an advantage getting into university because

they would be the kids of a faculty member. It's absurd that- Or my kids who are mixed race. Sure. Or the kids of somebody who's an alumnus. Or the kids of somebody who is good at volleyball. Or somebody who's good at volleyball. Somebody who's decent at a violin and we need a second violinist for the university orchestra. From anywhere outside of the United States, this whole damn system looks baroque and absurd.

By the way, the fact that boys now get a huge advantage in college admissions because girls outperform boys in high schools, and God forbid that we have a campus that's 55% girls rather than 50-50. I mean, the whole thing is absurd. The whole thing is absurd. I just worry that this new super-crimical ruling actually is going to put even more emphasis

on the worst parts of the admissions process, which is the personal essay, which teaches Americans to lie about their lives and to put their kind of soft stories, whether genuine or often semi-invented, out for personal profit and gain in order to get the entry ticket into the American elite. The whole thing is unseemly, and I worry it's going to get worse. And that's one point. The broader point is, yes,

this is another particularly popular policy. In 2020, when Biden won the state of California with however many points, 20 points, 30 points over Donald Trump, Californians also voted against affirmative action in Californian state schools. So this is clearly something that in a majority-minority state that is very left-leaning was deeply unpopular. And to your broadest point, look, in the American political system, you have a choice between two political parties.

And that's a crabby choice. It's one of the concomitants of our system. There are many, many, many elements of a democratic party I'm unhappy with. But yes, if I have to choose between the overall package of the Democratic Party in its current form or the overall package of a Republican Party whose leader is Donald Trump, I will

vote for the Democratic Party. Because of Trump, but not so much. Well, I don't want to get into it, but I feel like it's more because of Trump, and that's a good reason. But policy-wise, okay, so let's, for instance, let's just go off for a second. There's a book, big, huge thing now about book banning, right? Now, you know, personally, I don't really care what my kids read. I think you might be similar. However, I looked at some of those books. I read both. I read Genderqueer and Flamer.

I read them last night. I was having an argument. These are the two most banned books. And after reading them, I asked myself the following question. If one of my daughter's friends came over and wanted to borrow this book from us, would I give it to them or would I say, no, no, you better ask your parents first. I'm not going to give my parents, my 11-year-old friends books that are this explicit. I said, well, if I wouldn't do that, then, you know, why would the schools think they could do that outside of the comfort of the parents. But then I thought, but it's even a bigger problem than that, because does anybody actually think that if there were zero school libraries in the age of the Internet and Google and TikTok and YouTube that a single LGBTQ plus child would not have access to information that they're

searching for because they couldn't find it in the school library. And this is a huge issue now. The book banners, the book banners. And I'm like, this is all a big lie. Nobody cares about school libraries. But okay, so a lot of these policies that we argue about are long past, in my opinion, the law of diminishing returns. Such that, like, labor law, for a long time, with a little bit of effort, you could make a huge change in people's lives. Civil rights laws, a little bit of a huge change in people's lives. Civil rights laws. A little bit of a huge change in people's lives. Now, with a huge effort, I don't know if you can make any change in people's lives with these laws and

the unintended consequences in terms of labor and workplace are huge such that every new labor law I know it's your interview I'm talking about. Every new labor law is now a new legal action. Just people start suing.

Every new law is that people are walking around with visions of being a plaintiff in their head. But if you ask anybody who I know who said, what was it like to be a waiter in the 70s and 80s? It must have been awful. They're like, no, it was fine. Well, you mean all these new laws, they didn't need them? They would say, no, I guess, you know, no, it was fine. You mean all these new laws, they didn't need them? They would say, no, I guess, you know, no, they were fine. Everything was fine, you know, except for maybe sexual harassment, which I think is a good thing. So I see a lot of the policies on the left is just like trying to scratch out some last bit of return on issues which are basically settled.

And I see this book banning as the same kind of thing. Nobody cares anymore. School libraries don't matter. But anyway, I took out some quotes of your book, and they're relevant to this. Yasha Monk says, The ease with which many American

colleagues and acquaintances express disdain and deprecation for the culture and beliefs of ordinary Americans. Has no equivalent in any other country I know. And this is not continued, but similar. You say, for a growing number of Americans on the left side of the political spectrum, their deep disenchantment with the state of their country has made this promise ring hollow. They have increasingly started to see the flaws of the country as a

feature rather than a bug. For them, the United States is defined by its injustices and imperfections. And you have a few things like this describing, I think, very accurately what is animating the Trump vote. And I'll add one other thing to that. You didn't write it, but I saw it today, and I thought it was by Norman Podhoretz, who said that he saw the current state of politics as a kind of war between the love of America

versus the hatred of America. He describes it to a domestic or civil war almost. And he continues to be pro Trump, I believe, because he feels that, well, I'll tell you what he said. He says, Trump is a type of person, there's a wonderful Yiddish slang word, a bull von, a bully, doesn't care, crashes through. Trump's bad side is a necessary accompaniment to his good side. And he describes him as an unworthy but necessary vessel for all these things. So, what is your sympathy to the Trump voter? And how do you convince your milieu to be more kind to them? Well, listen, I mean, I do think, and I've started to think about this more and more,

that part of what explains the rise of somebody like Donald Trump is the extent to which the American elite is out of touch with the rest of the country. And this is something that, as a kind of anthropologist today would say, insider-outsider, I've observed over and over. I'm an immigrant of this country, but I did my PhD at Harvard. I'm a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I know the American elite, and yet I have a slightly outsider view on it because I'm not of it. I didn't grow up in it. And I am struck, even by comparison to Germany and France,

where the problem also exists in a more mild form, by how extreme this trend is. You look at places like our Ivy League universities. Not only is an overwhelming majority of students in those schools from privileged backgrounds, but even if they're not, even if they come from generally average families somewhere in the middle of the country, they are put at the age of 18 into these college campuses where they're only around other people who probably come from elite families who certainly go on to be elites later in their lives, who move to the big cities and go to the fancy industries and by the time that they have genuine influence and power in the world, by the time that they have genuine influence

and power in the world, by the time they're 40, 45, 50, they have been in a echo chamber, hermetically sealed off for much of the country, for the majority of their lives. And this is not just the financial world apart, it is a political and cultural world world apart they have different ideas and values and watch different shows and so as a result it can become completely natural that you adopt certain kind of ideas and norms that to people outside of that world is just bewildering and

so I do think that that is Dain that a lot of my own friends and colleagues in my own world have taken on for average Americans explains a lot of big political missteps, explains why it's so hard for them to understand that more voters, I disagree with that judgment, but more voters today think the Democratic Party is too extreme and think the Republican Party is too extreme, right? And they genuinely do not get that. You know, if you asked them to put one of these complaints in a way that passes

what some researchers call the ideological Turing test, they would be recognized as people who hold those views as an actual articulation of their views. They would not be able to do that. And sure, of course, that is one of the things that makes a lot of people angry and makes a lot of people angry

for good reasons. Now, I don't think that means that their chosen political champion is in fact going to do anything good for them. Right? Well, he got them a conservative court. Yeah. He did that.

I don't know that the conservative court did that much for, you know, for people around the country. They may have passed certain judgments that they agree with. They passed certain judgments that I agree with. But I don't know that they feel, you know, my life is now transformed because of conservative justices. I think that's about as out of touch as those democratic elites are with all due respect and friendship. No, I don't.

Listen, things move very slowly. It's a start. But I think the decisions of the court meant a lot to many Trump supporters. But here's the thing do you remember when uh oj got off were you in america then or you must i was not in america but i watched the miniseries we we mused we we watched with amazement as after seeing as bill maher said hitler left less evidence i mean after seeing it absolutely more election denial, it was clear, clear, clear that he practically decapitated these two innocent people.

We saw black Americans cheering, you know, just intoxicated with happiness that O.J. got off. And this is kind of like election denial. Do they really believe OJ was innocent? I don't think they really believed OJ was innocent. But in some way, this satisfied them because they felt that the world was against them. And it was impossible for us to understand it, but we have

to recognize something was going on. And I think there's something is going on with the Trump voters, and it's easier to understand, which is that nobody wants to vote for somebody that hates them.

They are not stupid. They saw how there were so many lies told about Russia stuff. They saw how the same people would look down their nose at some college kids, you know, having fun at the beach during COVID. And then all of a sudden, as soon as there's BLM protests, they'd say, well, it's fine to protest during COVID for BLM. And, you know, they saw, I mean, I could go on and on at the things they see. And they just can't bear to support the side that hates them. So then when Trump feeds them some half-truths about the election, they swallow them because they want to, which is the most human thing of all.

And, you know, I was doing some research on that, too. Just to say, the other side is also a little full of shit on this. So, for instance, in the New York Times, I think this is 2012, there's an article here, Error and Fraud Issues as absentee voting rising. And it says, voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the winner. The whole article talks about how election experts believe that the fact there's all these paper ballots around are really open to making the system open to danger.

And of course, in an election against Trump, if there was that danger, you would think that would be the time when people would really kick into gear. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not an election denier. You know that. I'm saying that. But what I am seeing is how arguments which were perfectly reasonable and even coming from the New York Times, all of a sudden become only the thing that an idiot would say if somebody expresses them in the context of Trump. And I note that.

I'm like, fuck these people. But no, I watched your interview with Philip Bump. Yeah. Well, that's another thing they see. Yeah. They see the incursus. Yeah, I thought like the rest of the internet that you got the better of that conversation.

But I'm very glad, but I don't think I'm being bumped today. No, no. Bump bumped himself. That's true. Perhaps you was worried about yourself that you might be vulnerable to bumping. But look, politics is full of hypocrisy.

And I certainly don't want to pretend for a moment that Democrats are immune to that sin. Stacey Abrams went around the country calling herself a legitimately elected governor of Georgia for a number of years on no strong evidence. And she was celebrated as a great defender of democratic principles and voting rights. And I think that that was shameful of her and a mistake by the sort of broader mainstream and the democratic world. So I'm not saying that there's no hypocrisy there. But the question that we have to ask is, what is going to get us through all of this? That is the question that I'm asking in my work consistently. I don't think that either the actions of somebody like Donald Trump, who did refuse to leave office, who did try to stay in office, who tried to get himself somehow confirmed for another term through all these alternative voter schemes and all of those things, even though he lost the damn election, as you're acknowledging, I think that's really bad. And by the way, I think what's also bad… It's horrible.

Don't get me wrong. It's horrible. I know you think that. But wait, wait, wait. But that's bad is... It's horrible. Don't get me wrong. It's horrible. I know you think that. But wait, wait, wait. But that's exactly my point. What OJ did was horrible. I'm saying, I'm not ready to say that, you know, the whatever, 70% of black America are bad people.

I'm saying something is going on there which can account for the fact that they're cheering at the fact that this murderer got off. Something is going on here that these people are supporting Trump. That's what I got off. Something is going on here that these people are supporting Trump. That's what I'm saying. By the way, something is going on that makes the identity trap, which is the subject of my book, appealing to a lot of people as well, which is that they feel America is unfair and injustice is possessed. And this ideology promises them to do away with this injustice in the most radical and consistent possible way.

That's why I think it's a trap, right? When you think about the metaphor of a trap, a trap has a lure. It has a piece of cheese. It has something which attracts you to it. And smart and decent people can end up falling into a trap, but it is ultimately counterproductive. So just to zoom out here a little bit, I think the question to ask is what is the set of ideas and principles that are actually going to get us

through this moment um and i think it's neither uh the the the kind of reactionary anger um uh that people like trump thrive on even if some of the reasons for that are understandable and nor is it the rejection of our basic constitutional principles, the rejection of principles like free speech and equal protection, that flows out of people who make up critical race theory, even though you might understand their age, too. I think the tradition that has allowed

us to make most progress in American history is the one that flows from Frederick Douglass through Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. So let me bring up Frederick Douglass because it's all part of this mix. Frederick Douglass from your book said, Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. And then you add, a culture of free speech is only possible when citizens don't have to fear that any errant remark is likely to get them fired from their job and shunned by their friends.

This is, you know, one of the things I noticed between my elite friends and my people who work in the real world is that if I ask a journalist, tell me the last government policy that actually had an effect on you like if they they they they hem and haw because there really is none there's like really no law no policy not nafta but for a huge swath of other people including myself like oh then the government did this, and that really, that was a nightmare for me. And then

the government was giving out money to restaurants, but not to white men, and then the government made new trade policies, and my factories closed down, and yeah, then somebody at my company said something, he made a joke or expressed an opinion, and he got fired.

And then my friend spoke up at the school board, and somebody tweeted it out, and nobody wants to talk to him. You know, this is a landmark, and they cannot bear to vote for anything that smacks of the people who continue that. And like, just the fact that, let me, I want, just the fact that the Democratic Party now, and I don't vote, the Democratic Party now stands for the default position that every law has to be racial in a sense like, well, you were part of stopping this. The new COVID vaccines, we're going to prioritize it by race.

There's a new antiviral drug, Paxlovid. They actually did. We're going to prioritize it by race. That the Overton window has carried liberal Democrats that far to that craziness, to me, is the gravitational force of partisanship more than anything else. And as much as I'm with you on so much of this stuff, there's a part of me that says, yeah, but there needs to be electoral losses. Otherwise, nothing changes. And that's kind of this dilemma.

A lot of the examples that you describe are in my book, right? I talk about Pax Levitt and I talk about the disastrous vaccine rollout in which the CDC decided. Yeah, but name a single Democratic politician who complains about it.

Zero. That's my point. You have to, only Republican will complain about it. My point in the book is not to convince people to vote for one party or another. My point in the book

is to actually look at these debates about American identity and the role that things like racial play in the society and come up with substantive answers for what would make for a better world. And I think that's a world in which we acknowledge that obviously injustices exist, that obviously racism and sexism and homophobia exist. But redouble our commitment to the kinds of universal values that have allowed us to make so much progress in history.

That's why I was bringing up Frederick Douglass, who called free speech the dread of tyrants. He knew that people in his days said terrible things in newspapers about black people who were still enslaved. But he also knew that that is what allowed us to fight for abolitionism and to get rid of slavery. That's why it's important to recognize that we have made progress in America, but America is not as racist and as sexist and as homophobic today as it was 150 or 150 years ago. And therefore, we need to redouble our efforts to live up to these ideas. And that's

why I talk through issues like free speech, like cultural appropriation, like this progressive separatism in schools, like race-sensitive public policies. Lay out both the principles that I think we should apply to our country, and the best arguments to push back against these ideas. But you're kind of still stuck in this logic of

partisanship, and to some extent that is the logic that the structure of American politics imposes on us, right? But I feel like too much of this conversation between us has ended up being, you know, which of these do you think is the worst pill to swallow? And we have disagreements about that. But I think the more important answer is, how do you actually make an affirmative case for the kind of values that should structure our country and for the way in which you push back against this have people on my side of a political eye been too cowardly in arguing back against a lot of these ideas absolutely but one of the reasons for that is that nobody has actually analyzed in a serious way this ideology and developed the arguments

that speak against that that are actually going to appeal to the reasonable majority of Americans. You can be Trump shouting about it, and that'll play to your base, but it's not going to convince the great majority of Americans. It might convince 47% just about, with half of them holding their nose, but it's not going to build the big majority that we need. You said, you know, there needs to be some electoral losses. I ultimately don't care whether those electoral losses come from the left or from the right. I think you could have a sort of reasonable

Democrat who stands up to the crazier parts of the political party who wins a big majority against somebody like Trump. Or you could have a mild right-wing populist if you want to use that term perhaps a Latino or black politician who is able to seize on

a lot of this anger but clearly supports democratic institutions and sets themselves apart from the kind of responsible and dangerous parties of Donald Trump. And I think they could also win a big majority. In fact, the best development in our politics over the last years is that knowing somebody's race now tells you less about who they vote for because there's a lot of voters, a lot of them non-white, a lot of them young, a lot of them reasonably progressive, who've shifted to the Republican Party because of their concerns over the kinds of things that you're talking about. But I think the question is, what is that winning vision?

What does that look like? No, Yasha, I'm with you 110%. I'm focusing on what I think is the realistic bind, the rub of it all, is that in order for your ideas, that although you are center left in your instincts, and I might be too to tell you the truth, and though you're writing your book from a center left point of view, it's really center-right at this point. This will carry at some point a critical mass of people will cross over to become moderate Republicans, I believe, is the way this is going to end, much more than the Democratic Party.

Look, you know what? You'll be fine with that. I mean, if Mitt Romney was president of this country, I'd be just fine, right? Like, I wouldn't be concerned. I don't see a sign of that in Republican Party politics. Well, do you find Trump... You have Donald Trump, by far and and away dominating the primaries. And then the next guy up in a lot of the polls is Vivek Ramaswamy.

You know, and the people who I would think of as center-right politicians within the Republican coalition, some of whom I find more appealing than others, you know, that's 6%. So, where's the evidence that the Republican Party is about to... I hope so. We need a right-of-center party that is sensible in this country. Is Trump an authoritarian? Listen, I should probably say, the reason I don't

think Trump should be president, and I said this, I have emails saying this in 2015 probably, is that he's unhinged and that if you need a president to be competent, which happens periodically in history, you need a president who's – And you really need a president to be competent. Can I picture Trump fighting World War II or taking on Brezhnev or any of these serious situations in history? No, I can't. I was scared the shit out of me

when he was calling the North Korean president Rocket Man. Like, this is just reckless behavior. And I wouldn't hire a guy like that as a restaurant manager. But other than that, and that's huge, and that's disqualifying, do I think he's authoritarian? No, I don't think he's authoritarian. Do I think he's authoritarian? No, I don't think he's authoritarian. Do I think he's looking to end democracy?

No, I thought he was looking to cheat to win another election like JFK may have done. I don't think Trump was... So perhaps it helps to talk about why I do like the concept of populism, why I think that it's a helpful way to understand the world. And part of the problem with this is just verbal. Like in America, there's always the confusion between populists in the sense of a late 19th century populist party,

which is the kind of way in which Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren are populists. They're just kind of very lefty on economic issues or something like that. That's not the sense of populism that I mean. When I talk about populists, I talk about people like Recep

Erdogan in Turkey, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, like Narendra Modi in India, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, like AMLO in Mexico, and I would argue like Donald Trump in the United States. Now what do they have in common? In a way they're very, very weird heterogeneous bunch, right? Some of them are left wing, some of them are right wing, some of them are Christian, some Hindu, some Muslim, you know, all kinds of important political differences. One thing they have in common is that they say, I and only I truly represent the people and anybody who disagrees with me is by virtue of that fact, illegitimate, is a traitor, is un-American or un-Turkish, or as well. And that, I do think, makes them dangerous.

Not just the anti-elitism. It's not that they rail against the political system. That can be legitimate. There's lots of reasons to distrust the elite. It's the anti-pluralism. It's the fact that we cannot have a legitimate political disagreement. It's the fact that we're not willing to do what John McCain

did in the last days of the 2008 presidential campaign when somebody at a town hall said, you know, Barack Obama is a dangerous man and if he becomes president, I'm worried for this country. And McCain said, I think I'm better than Obama. It's really important you vote for me. You know, my policies are better. I'm going to be better for the country. But you know what? Obama is a decent man and you don't have to be afraid if he becomes president. It is the refusal to do all of those things. And I think that does make Trump an authoritarian. Not because on day one he thought he was an authoritarian, not because in his secret dreams he's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to destroy American democracy. But because whenever there is something in his way, whenever somebody tells him, Mr. President, actually,

you don't have constitutional authority to do that. Mr. President, actually, these people have decided something you don't like. He says, how can we do that? I'm a president. I should be allowed to do whatever I want. No, no, no. We know Biden was told he couldn't do loan forgiveness.

He didn't have authority. He did it anyway. We know Obama was told he couldn't do loan forgiveness. He didn't have authority. He did it anyway. We know Obama was told he couldn't legalize the Dreamers, and he did it anyway. Every president has done that. We know when Trump did it. No, but we're making this argument like it's 2018. I mean, what about January 6th?

We don't have to get into exactly what words Trump said on that day or whatever, but the larger movement to discredit the election and to say... You're right about January 6th. We don't have to get into exactly what words Trump said on that day or whatever, but the larger movement to discredit the election and to say... You're right about January 6th. Right. So how, you know, we don't have to go back to the arguments of 2018, 2019, where I think you would have had a case, we could have argued that before. You're reading my mind.

The proof is in the pudding. I mean... You're right about January 6th in terms of him trying to cheat to win this election. There's a lot of fuzziness about that. Because if you go and read the Green Bay plan that they had with Navarro and Eastman and Bannon, it never imagined violence. It imagined a very, very bad faith procedural challenge, which presumably would have wound up in the Supreme Court. This is, call it authoritarian, call it whatever you want. But I just want to state for the record that everything you're saying was said by people for four years, right up until midnight on, they didn't have much to go on,

except they correctly had a feeling in their gut that this guy would be capable of things that other people would not be capable of, and they were right about that. They were right about that. I would say they were right about that for a reason, which is that one of the analytical tools I have for understanding politics is to look at whether somebody is a populist in the sense that they're anti-elitist, but they're also anti-pluralist. Obama was anti-elitist when he first ran in certain ways, saying there's all kinds of

problems in DC. The question is, are they anti-pluralist? Do they make these claims? But if you don't agree with me, if you're not on my side of the political aisle, then you're not just a political adversary, but you're really an anti-pluralist. And I think that does, in fact, predict people's actions when they're in office.

Well, it doesn't mean that every populist always destroys the country, because there's obviously people who then try to stand up to that, and so sometimes they win and sometimes they lose but that is what people who have managed to destroy the democratic institutions of the country by the way of originally being elected do have in common people like Chavez and like Erdogan and that's what I saw. So it's not just like a random hunch.

It's applying an analytical framework that has helped to explain politics in other countries to the United States. The problem is you know too much. And you will, without meaning to ascribe to people on the other side, inform decisions that they're not making about election fraud or whatever. And I think really the key here is if we want to solve this, we have to figure out why do they keep inflaming these Trump voters.

So I said the other day, it turned out that the real lasting damage of COVID was not that people stopped shaking hands and not that people wouldn't go to businesses anymore, not that people would stop congregating in spaces. The real lasting damage of COVID is a total mistrust of institutions. And that's staying. Let alone if we have another virus that doesn't have a, you know, case fatality rate of, you know, whatever it ended up being with COVID, 0 point something percent. 10 or 20 percent, right? Like nobody is going to be willing to take the actions it would take to stop it. But we don't trust what we're told. We don't trust the experts. The Trump voters especially because they're not doing deep dives like you and I do. They're not forming nuanced opinions. Yes, they are in some way

being fed stuff from sketchy sources but they also know that the other side lies. I'll give you a perfect example. Do you remember how many articles we've talked about at the conversation, how many articles and TV segments we saw

about Trump likely being in cognitive decline in like 2016 and 2017. The Atlantic ran two articles about it. Stat News. You might correct me if I'm wrong here. In all the tell-all books that have come out since Trump left office by people who hated him, Bolton, all of them, not one person has talked about him having cognitive decline this was clearly and so far as we can tell at this point he clearly does right this was concocted and it was it was told to us as news it was such urgent news that even the normal ethical boundary

that people shouldn't ever uh diagnose somebody they haven't was suspended. The Trump voters see this and say, now you want me to believe everything you're telling me about the election. You've concocted thing after thing after thing to me and now you're holding it against me? It's OJ again. Now you want me to believe the police? You don't know what life looks like

for me vis-a-vis the police. I agree with all of that the question is how do we move out of that right like if you if you're diagnosing why is it that so many people uh have mistrust in the institutions why is it that so many people think that trump is the lesser of two evils um i know i know how to move out of it the president united states should make a speech that shows he understands that and and if I was his speechwriter, I would be advising him to do that. Instead, he doubles down on the fact that they want to bring back Jim Crow, that they want to do this, want to do that. He gets up with his red background and they read him loud and clear.

They read him loud and clear. And it's you know I it's it's it's upsetting right it's upset like how do how do we break out of this well I think part of how we break out of it is to actually explain to people on that side of progress spectrum why the ideals are wrong-headed and so both this book my last book I wrote I good against them if we haven't made any progress on stuff right like this idea but but that basically we're about to have reintroduction of Jim Crow is based on a denial of being able to make progress,

which really is at the heart of this ideology. Let me tell you this. We've talked about the main theme of the identity traps, the skepticism of truth and the embrace of strategic essentialism and so on. Another way to think about it is what are really its core tenets? What are really the core ideas that this ideology has? And it goes to basically that point. In a way, Joe Biden, when he's saying that, is channeling this tradition.

I think, in my mind, the three main claims of the identity synthesis is, number one, that the key way to understand any social situation or any political question is race, gender, and sexual orientation. This is the key prism that allows you to understand the world. Robin DiAngelo says that every time a white person interrupts a black person, they're bringing the whole apparatus

of white supremacy to bear on them. Number two, that the Bill of Rights, the Civil Rights Movement, those are all just an attempt to pull wool over people's eyes. They actually have a purpose of perpetuating racial and other forms of discrimination. And then number three, therefore, as Der Derek Bell puts it, we have to reject, quote-unquote, the defunct racial equality ideology, end quote,

of the civil rights movement, right? What we have to do is to create a world in which how we're treated always depends on the group we're from, a world in which you're split up into different racial groups and all kinds of different contexts, right? Now, I think that people, whether on the center-right or the center-left, should have a coherent response to that, a coherent response which helps to understand

why some people are attracted to this ideology that commits itself to making the world a better place, to remedying the injustices that do persist, but that doesn't throw the baby out of the bathwater. And so here's the three responses that I think we need to give. Number one, sure, in some context, race, gender, and sexual orientation are important to understand reality. There is racism in America. Of course, there is. There's homophobia and all of those things. But it is not the key prism. It is not the only prism to understand society. As John Haidt has put it, if you have a monomaniacal view of a world where you only look at it through one prism,

you're gonna go wrong. There's also social class, there's also religion, there's also individual character and ambition and aspirations and taste and aesthetics, right? And so rather than looking at each situation and imposing a view on it, we have to look at it and letting it teach us what is most important. In some contexts, that might be race.

In other contexts, it's going to be other things like class and religion and individual attributes. Secondly, it is a lie that America is about to return to Jim Crow. It is a lie that we haven't been able to make any progress. We have made progress, and we've made progress precisely because of people who have insisted that we live up to those values. Frederick Douglass recognized in his famous speech

on the 4th of July that his compatriots were being hypocrites by talking about how lovely it is that all men are born equal while slavery is still persisted. But he didn't say, rip up the Declaration of Independence. He said, live up to it. If you mean these values, how can you exclude me from them? Martin Luther King didn't say, he recognized that the promissory note issued to African Americans

has so often been broken in American history, but he demanded the Bank of Justice honor that check. And so that's what we should be doing. We should recognize the progress we've made because of the people who fought for those values, and we should have a vision for the future in which we live up to our universal values rather than giving up to them. And I think that helps us get out of this, you know, Trump is bad, but it's understandable why the people hate him, and so therefore, all of that is right,

and that's an important conversation in itself sure but but I think the really important question is what is the moral center what is the set of values in the language and the actual arguments on specific issues like cultural appropriation like free speech like these new practices in schools of segregating kids by race but allows us to push back against this stuff and then you can talk and shout at all of your center-left friends, of which I know you have many, and say, do more.

I think I'm doing my bit. But others should do that too. I agree with you 100% on that. It would feel as lonely for me as well. A couple other things. I agree with you 1,000%. Speaking of Martin Luther King, it's a very nice illustration

of just how far the Overton window has shifted to the center and to the left in the Democratic Party and in elite America that Coleman Hughes had to scratch out the ability to have his TED Talk platformed when they wanted to de-platform it, or whatever the phrase is, simply because he gave a speech advocating colorblind policies. And in all the talk about it, one of the, that you might read online, a few people have really focused on that.

They kind of say, well, some things are over the line and people have to, you know, where do you draw the line, whatever it is. And nobody stopped to say, wait a second, are we really ready to entertain the idea that somebody advocating for colorblind policies is even near the line? And, you know, when I see that, I'm like, I'll forget it. Chris Anderson, the head of TED, said that, you know, he wants to have this open debate, but also he has to be very sensitive to his staff when somebody's attacking their identities. And the idea that Coleman was in any way

attacking their identities is really a form of calumny. I mean, it's just an entirety basis. Well, you end up agreeing with Komen or not or whatever. The idea that he was attacking the identities of TED employees by arguing for his vision of colorblindness is, I agree. It's just as crazy as the crazy stuff the Trump supporters say. It's a more refined, better presented crazy, but it's just as, and it's, it's maddening. And, you know, I just, I wish Trump would, you know, just pass from the scene so that there can be a, an intelligent

conversation about this stuff. So an example, we're going to wind up the wall. I was thinking about the wall the other day. I'm like, and I'm trying to take it. The wall. I was thinking about the wall the other day. I'm like, and I'm trying to take it step by step. I say, well, obviously we have to control the border. You have to control the border. As I told Juanita, we can't really argue about who comes in and out of our house. Can't have a policy on that unless we're prepared to lock the doors and lock the windows so that we can decide who comes in and out. Otherwise, it's just a waste of words because if anybody can walk in and out anyway,

policy is meaningless. So in order to have an immigration policy, you have to control the border. To control the border, you have to have a barrier. And it's not unlimited types of barriers. You can have snipers, you can have dogs, you can have landmines, or you can have a wall. And also, I found myself saying, you know what, the wall may be by far the most humane barrier anybody can think of. Or we can just talk nonsense for the next 20 years and say, we're going to have some policy that's going to stop. Kamala Harris is going to go down to Central America, and she's going to cure the economic problems there and they'll just stop. But this is what they say, right? Again, this is like how dishonest it all is. Very, very credible,

smart people will listen to the president. I'm going to send the vice president and she's going to solve. I say, yep, now we have a policy. And this, yep. And this is nonsense. Everybody knows it's nonsense. And you know who also knows it's nonsense? The Trump voters know it's nonsense. And they also know that every time they complained about immigration being a tax on their resources, they were called racists until it happened in New York. In which case now, you haven't heard anybody. It's not a racist.

To be fair, a lot of people called the black mayor of New York a racist, too, after he spoke about it. There was a little, but in general, the Democratic Party has stood down on the notion that this infuriates. The interesting thing politically here is that there was this famous post-mortem report in 2012 within the Republican Party led by Reince Priebus. And they're like, how do we lose again to Obama, right? And he said, well, the problem is the Democrats do so much better among non-white voters, and so we really need to make a play for Latino voters as well as African Americans and Asian Americans.

And the way to do that is to move towards the center on politics, and in particular to embrace, finally finally a grand bargain on immigration reform, which by the way I think is a good idea on the merits of it. But that's us showing that we're moderating on immigration. That's what's going to allow us to make a play for those Latino and other voters. voters right and Trump has always been interpreted as rejecting that strategy and saying I'm gonna double down on the white vote and that's how I'm gonna become president when everybody said it's not possible that's why in 2016 all of these articles and NPR and so on were saying you know there's just not enough

white people left to elect Donald Trump and yet he did win in 2016. He won a surprising share of the vote in 2020. And he's running even in 2024. And the fascinating thing that happened is that in 2020, Joe Biden won because he significantly increased the share of the vote among white voters. And Donald Trump came close to winning because he significantly increased the share of the vote among non-white voters. And that polarization has continued since. So basically, Trump has carried out Reince Priebus' plan. He has figured out how to get Latinos into the Republican Party. It's just through a very, very different set of

policies than what basically everybody, probably including Donald Trump, thought was necessary in order to do that. And one of the keys to that is that there's a majority of people in favor of building a wall on the southern border of which country you think, Norm? I don't know. What? A majority of Mexicans favor building a wall on the southern border of Mexico. I misunderstood the question. Yeah, I've heard that, yes. So there's a sort of simplistic idea that all Latinos have this mythical solidarity with

each other, which is absurd if you look at the history of any Latin American countries where there's complicated racial tensions within those countries, and it's absurd because a lot of Latin American countries don't want immigration from other Latin American countries, right? And so, you know, just as a political matter, I think there's a real naivety here

in terms of how people think and talk about it. Part of the question about the wall is what role a physical barrier plays versus a broader fight against the poor factors, right? When I was on a fellowship in England recently, before I could take possession of the apartment they'd given me, before I could get, you know, a college card that would give me access to the facilities and the dining hall, I needed to come into the office to prove that I have legal entitlement to be in the country. And that is true for any job that you're going to have in the United Kingdom and in Germany and in Italy and practically anywhere else in the world.

It is remarkable in the United States that in so many contexts you don't have to do that. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for the undocumented immigrants in the United States. Many of them are incredibly hardworking people who come from genuinely harsh backgrounds, sometimes fleeing political oppression in places like Venezuela. And most of them are very decent, hardworking people whom I wish the best to. Who we absolutely need to run this country, by the way. Absolutely. But, obviously, you can't create that incentive to come

work here, right? To say, if you're willing to pay human traffickers and run across the desert and take all of these risks, and then once you're here, then you're going to have a much better standard of life. It's the same in Europe.

You can't say, hey, our system is going to be that if you're genuinely poor and oppressed, but you don't have the money to make it here, well, tough luck. We're not going to help you. But if you're somehow able to risk your life crossing the Mediterranean, you get lucky enough not to drown, welcome in. That is clearly the wrong set of incentives. And that's something we have to deal with in a systematic and humane way. Would you say – I've got two more minutes.

Trump is correctly called a huge liar, obviously, without January 6th. I mean, you know, he lies and lies and lies, says whatever he wants. But I would imagine, I don't know this, that if you were to list the 20th and 21st century presidents in order of who did the most polling before they uttered policy positions, I think Trump would probably come in last. I don't think Trump was putting his finger to the wind very often about anything. I think it was in the Atlantic, where they actually had transcripts of him on the phone with a guy,

with the president of Mexico, where he was very earnestly saying, no, we need to build a wall. I really need you to pay for it. You know, it was shocking. And it struck me, again, no, we need to build a wall. I really need you to pay for it. It was shocking. And it struck me, and again, you're not supposed to say this, that in terms of honesty of his basic intentions,

what he said he cared about and wanted to do and what he really seemed to try to do, Trump was among the most honest presidents we ever had. Is that crazy talk? I would say he was one of the most unvarnished presidents we've ever had. I mean, look, we can wordsmith over exactly how to express this point. I take the larger thought that you have. I mean, I always go back to the moment in the presidential debate in 2016

where Hillary and Trump were both asked why Hillary had been at Donald Trump's wedding, an amazing little fact about American politics. And Hillary said in a way that is exactly the kind of disingenuous political answer that you would expect, oh, I thought it would be fun, right? I mean, now, you don't need to know very much about Donald Trump. You don't need to know very much about Hillary Clinton to recognize that Hillary Clinton did not think it was fun. I bet that morning she wasn't saying to Bill, oh, goody, we get to go to Donald's wedding. Said, oh, my God, why on earth do we have to do this? But I guess we have to, right? And Donald Trump said, I'm a real estate guy. I need political connections.

Of course I invited Hillary Clinton. So he was admitting to playing the political system in a sense in a dishonest way. I know you want to call it corruption or not or exactly what you want to call it. To get shit done I have to have these connections. I have to butter people up.

It's a kind of admission of a basic corruption in the system at least. But he was surprisingly honest about the existence of that corruption in a way that Hillary was not. She said, oh, I thought it would be fun. She didn't say, well, let's go along and get along. And even though I never liked Trump and always thought he was kind of a crude asshole, you know, I thought I kind of better keep on the good side of him. And he hadn't declared his... That would have been, I assume, something like the honest answer. But of course, she didn't give an answer.

She said it would be fun. And Trump, in that context, gave an answer that actually is much more forthright. So I agree that there is something unvarnished in a real way about Trump, which is a lot of his appeal. Your eyes can glaze over at all the dishonesty in our system. The Trump tax cuts. We heard this was a terrible tax plan. It's bad for the middle class. It's bad for the poor, blah, blah, blah. And then the

Democrats take both houses and the presidency. And what change do they fight for in this tax, this horrible tax plan? They can vote whatever they want. They want to get rid of the SALT tax, which is a state and local taxes deduction for over $10,000 for the rich people. No talk of going back on this tax plan that was so terrible. They wanted to service the wealthy. But you've got to admit that it goes both ways. Yes, yes, yes. Trump in 2016 promised to be a great spokesman for working class people in ways where I get why it appealed to some people, right?

But in reality, his economic policies did not stand up for the working class. But that wasn't a lie. That wasn't a lie. But I'm going to stipulate that there's no difference between left and right. It's a human thing. But, I mean, Trump was into this way of this wacky economist Navarro about tariffs and stuff like that, which maybe you're a super genius, but you know, every time I hear them... He claims that he cares genuinely for the economic well-being of, you know, hardworking

Americans in the same way in which he has always been a kind of scam artist with Trump University and all of those kinds of things. He doesn't give a damn about the economic well-being of a working class, which is part of sort of what actually upsets me about this. I mean, at the moment, the American working class doesn't have a political spokesperson. That used to be the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party, both in terms of votes for it and particularly in terms of its politicians, its staffers, its larger nonprofit world, its donor network has become a party of the elite.

And the Republican Party has the working class votes, but when push comes to shove, they don't actually vote for working class economic interests. And so the people who are actually getting a hard deal in America right now don't really have political representation. I was reading a new paper by Angus Deaton and Anne Case at Princeton showing that America, they came up with this data 10 years ago, that America now has much lower life expectancy

than other wealthy countries, that it's gone down for the first time in American history outside of times of pestilence and war. Among Trump voters. A lot of it among Trump voters. And the main thing that predicts that is whether or not you have a BA degree. If you have a BA degree, your life expectancy is comparable to Switzerland and Sweden. If you don't have a BA degree, you are getting screwed.

Your life expectancy is similar to some third world countries, right? But Trump hasn't done anything to revert that. And so if you're angry about the hypocrisy, then you should have equal opportunity anger. I don't want to defend him because, but I don't, I'm saying that when they talk about the tax policy, it was a lie. Trump is ill-advised. It may not be possible. We all know this. It may not be possible to help these people. The economy is global now, and it just may not be possible for them to make a living wage doing anything related to what people in other countries can do at one-tenth the price.

That's just the reality. Trump may try. Things may change. That may or may not be reality, but I don't think that Trump tried. I think it's important to criticize hypocrisy, but I think too much of your affect is anti-anti, right? Yeah, I'm anti-anti-Trump. That's exactly, I'm anti-anti-Trump. That's exactly the way I'd put it. I'm not pro-Trump, I'm anti-anti.

Yeah, but I think you need to go beyond that to actually assessing the things, not just from, you know, all of what you're doing is imminent discourse critique, and you're a master at it. I mean, you have called bullshit on things way before other people. Jussie Smollett, you were the first person to tell me, you know, very early on when a lot of the details went out yet, this doesn't smell right. So you're a master at smelling bullshit, and that's a lot of your skill. But I worry that at some point, as the famous saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And sometimes it's important to go out of the discourse and out of what's bullshit in the discourse and out of your mastery at recognizing what's bullshit in the discourse to zoom out and say, all right, so what are the overall contours of this debate and how do we actually have a path through it? You could be right that he didn't try. It seemed to me they made some moves with tariffs. That's a misguided, I don't know if they were going to work, but that he took steps in that direction. And why wouldn't he? You could say he cares about them, not care about them,

but he's a politician. So it's in his interest to try, even if he doesn't care about them. I think Trump, I don't know if he's capable of caring about others, but I think he is sincerely nostalgic. And this is both a plus and a minus for a certain more nimble America that was less dependent on the foreign world and was more the center of the universe. And I have that nostalgia too. Our last question. I saw your interview with Stephen Levitsky.

And he said something interesting about how the Republicans have lost the popular vote since – have won the popular vote only once since – what year is it? Since 2000? I think, yes. The only time they won the popular vote was 2004. Yes, but 2000 they lost the popular vote. Since 2000 they've only won the popular vote once. And he said that, you know, what's the matter?

They should change course and blah, blah, blah. And it made sense. And then I had a horrible thought. You know, in Israel, and then I asked, tried to find the date on this. In Israel, the Orthodox vote so uniformly as a block that they're able to exercise an outsized influence and steer the election.

In America, black people vote something like 93% for the Democrat, no matter what. And I asked somebody for the data. I said, what percentage of black people would have to vote for Republicans such that Republicans would have won 100% of the election since 2000, the popular vote? And the answer that came back was somewhere between 11 and 20. 11% would have been enough for most of them, I think, and the worst at 20%. So it's an interesting way to look at identity politics that, yes, on the one hand, you'd say it really seems like the Republicans are trying to subvert the popular will, whatever it is. But then when you realize that there's one that if Black and I'm not gainsaying or I'm not disputing their wisdom in voting 93 percent for Democrats, they know what's in their own interest, probably, and they're probably right.

But it is still noteworthy that that one group is able to then – they really control – it's not quite what Levitsky says. It's not as if there's this popular will out there and they're hoping to get with it. But you could make the same argument for any similar-sized demographic group. So it doesn't matter what Jews or Native Americans do because they're too small – the groups are too small. more. But if Asian Americans moved in significant numbers towards Republicans and certainly if Latinos, who are actually a bigger group, moved in significant numbers towards Republicans, that would have a huge impact on the vote as well.

So I think it's slightly weird to isolate this one demographic. Well, we only... We only have one group that votes. If blacks were to vote only as democratic as Jews vote, Republicans would have won every single popular vote election since 2000. I think this is the strongest argument. So the thing that really drives me nuts,

here's where I'm anti-anti, right? There's this idea of the United States Census Bureau that America is going to be majority-minority. That by 2043 or 2045, 20 2047 they keep changing the exact prediction a majority man's gonna be people of color and and it's these two blocks whites and people of color right and then the political upshot of this has become for many people that since whites tend to vote more for Republican Party and non-whites and vote more for for Democrats Democrats. Then Democrats will have this natural emerging majority.

And again and again, we've seen that this is bullshit. We've seen in California, which is very Democratic-leaning, that they vote against affirmative action, so against one of the key planks of a Democratic platform. We've seen in Florida, which is now just on the cusp of being a majority-minority country, that a purple state has turned into a very red state, in large part because so many Latinos in Florida

have moved towards the Republican Party, and not just those who come from Venezuela or Cuba, but people from all over Latin America, including a lot of Mexican Americans, right? And actually, I think that's a great thing. I, as we've been discussing throughout this conversation, prefer the current Democratic Party to the current Republican Party I'm not a big fan of it right but I don't want to live in a man

and in America where I can come to a comedy cellar and look at the crowd and look at somebody's color of the skin and know who they're voting for there'll be a terrible America right and so I think that the fact that the American electorate has depolarized by race is a very, very good thing. It's one of the few genuinely good piece of news about our politics in the last eight or 10 years. And when you talk to African Americans, and when you look at polling questions about their political views, the idea that they uniformly have the progressive politics of a Harvard graduate seminar room is laughable.

A lot of them are quite socially conservative. A lot of them should naturally vote for Republican Party. And so here, I think there's a great opportunity for the Republican Party. Because one of the reasons why people don't vote, one of the reasons why African-Americans don't vote for the Republican Party is Because one of the reasons why people don't vote, one of the reasons why African-Americans don't vote for the Republican Party

is that they say, look, on a whole bunch of stuff, I agree with them. I might agree with them on some economic policies. I might agree with them on some questions regarding trans rights.

I might agree with them on all kinds of things. But in the end, I just don't trust that they're looking out for my interests. In the end, I just don't think

they're on my side. And I think the Republican Party can do things to change that. And it started to do things to change that in certain respects. I hope it will, because even if I don't want Republicans to win in most elections, perhaps, I think that would be a really good thing for American politics. And so I hope that people in the Republican Party take the data point you're talking about and say, hey, we might not win a majority of African Americans, but getting to 20% is going to make a huge difference. And that is eminently achievable for a Republican Party that firmly welcomes black people into its ranks.

This is exactly my point. This is why, and Levitsky would be, I mean, the rug would be pulled out from under him because it's not that the Republicans necessarily even need to change their position so much as they, it's what you said, they need to convince. Now this won't, they won't be able to do what I'm saying if they don't mean it. And they probably, and they may not mean it, but if they could convince black America that they actually do care about them in the same way, if the Democrats could convince the Trump voters that they actually do care about them, then they will be able to peel off some numbers. And there's no question, just like it is among Jews, there's a psychological aversion within Jews and within

the black community to vote for Republicans. You know, like I don't, I don't vote for Democrats, but to vote for Republican would be very hard for me. I just, it's just the way we're raised. You're not supposed to vote for, but I know it's not rational. It's just the way we're raised. You're not supposed to vote for, but I know it's not rational. It's, and I'm sure it's three times. I would say in the country, it's your rational side pulling you away from Donald Trump. Well, and I'm sure it's the same in black America,

but it just, it's really on a knife's edge. And it would be, and it's amazing that Trump is being able to break through where other people haven't. And it may have something to do with the fact that they like that he shoots from the gut. You know, it's like they like the fact. I mean, we got to go. But just, you know, like when how many candidates over the years dropped out of races because some minor scandal came out.

And so you're done. Yes, I resign. And then Trump had that that that pussy grab tape and everybody around him. I think previous said, you know, Donald, you need to get out. You're never going to win. And he's like, people don't really care about that stuff. Trust me, they don't really care. He had this gut that he knew that it's all false. And he was right. They didn't care. So let me say one thing to this and then let me get one more plug for the book. Go ahead. So I'm not a huge

fan of Trevor Noah's but I think he had one great segment which is when he was saying Donald Trump. I know Donald Trump. He's an African president. That's the best. You know like that's what politics looks like in Africa. This idea that there's you know. Everybody YouTube that president. That's the best. That's what politics looks like in Africa. This idea that there's...

Everybody YouTube that clip. It's so good. It's so good. Sorry. Go ahead. Because it's strongman politics. And that exists all through the world. There's nothing specifically American about it. And so the fact that that can appeal not only to white voters but to others as well, when we don't feel

personally targeted by it, when we don't feel threatened by it it should be unsurprising right um uh i just want to say uh to everybody listening i love talking to a gnome and i love this podcast and we agree on lots of things we disagree on lots of things and we can celebrate the disagreement that's great if we don't disagree on that much we don't disagree on that much go ahead sorry we will actually dwell on what we disagree on if you want to get out of his pose of being anti-anti-Trump, if you want to think, you know, what is this ideology and what is the best way to argue against it, claiming the moral high ground and standing on principles, you know, I hope that this book is for you. But the two audiences I want to reach for it is people who already worry a lot about woke

ideology, about what I call the identity trap, and who want to have the best arguments to push against it, and to target people who perhaps feel a little bit drawn to it, who feel the law of it in certain ways, but who can also smell that there's something wrong about it.

So if you fall into the first category, buy the book. If you have a sister or a brother-in So if you fall into the first category, buy the book. If you have a sister or a brother-in-law who falls into the second category, send them the book. I really hope it'll help more people actually push back against this ideology, because Norm, you're absolutely right, but a lot of people have shamefully

absconded from that fight for the last years. Alright, Jascha, it's always a pleasure. I'm pessimistic, but nothing will stay the same, I guess. I'm very optimistic about the future of America. I'm pessimistic about this issue for a while, but we'll see what happens. All right, that's it. Sign off. Sign off. It was great. Let me press stop. in our interview yasha also discussed the intellectual origins of the identity synthesis which is pretty fascinating so i'm adding it in here as kind of an appendix to the interview i i read the book months ago and i learned an enormous amount from it i there's one part of the book which i found fascinating i don't want to spend too much time on the interview because i don't think it's um enough to hold the audience.

But I do want you to touch on it, which is you went back and you traced the identity synthesis, which I'll let you define. And this is essentially, in layman's terms, identity politics and wokeism and stuff like this to certain founding intellectuals, Foucault, Edward Said, and this was all big news to me. As a matter of fact, I don't even know who Foucault was, and everybody's astonished to hear that, but I didn't know. So in a nutshell,

tell us how these intellectual movements led to where we are today. Well, if you don't mind, let me set the stage a little bit. I have worried about populism, and if I write for a long time, but as somebody who teaches at an American university, who's a member of a think tank who writes in the media, I've also come to be

really worried about something that I know you share, Noam, which is a concern about a new set of ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation that have become really influential in American society and politics. And this is part of the bouquet of concerns you have about the threats to American democracy, correct? Yes.

I think in certain ways they reject the basic constitutional principles in which America is built, quite explicitly so in the case of many of these theorists, as I'll talk about when we talk about the intellectual history. I also think that though at a superficial level they seem to be the antidote, the opposite of something like far-right populism in practical and political terms one is the yin to the other's yang so one of the reasons why these ideas became so prominent in progressive spaces after 2016 is that once Donald Trump was in office it became sort of an act of treason to criticize anybody on the left because you could be accused of running interference for Donald Trump right butely, I think one of the reasons why Donald Trump is doing so well in the polls and looks like he might beat Joe Biden in 2024,

if there's a rematch, as looks likely, is because a lot of Americans are deeply worried about the these ideas have over the Democratic Party, but more broadly over mainstream institutions. So tell us quickly about Foucault and Said, just because I don't want to skip over that because it's really fascinating, and then we'll jump right back to where you left off with that. So, you know, it's really astonishing that this genuinely novel ideology has taken on so much power. And very few people have tried to explain it.

And basically no academic has tried to trace its history or to assess its ideology in an even-handed way. And that shows you how much of a taboo it is in parts of the academy. And so the only explanation we've really had is from a bunch of frankly right-wing polemicists who call it cultural Marxism. Now as we were saying, my grandparents were Marxists, I know Marxism very well.

I just don't think this is cultural Marxism. For one thing, Marxism is so much about the economy that it's sort of unclear what is left of it if you take out economic categories like class and put in things like race, gender, and sexual orientation. It's a little bit like saying I've taken bats out of baseball. It's unclear what's left. But most importantly, it doesn't explain the main themes of our politics today. And I think the intellectual history does. So I start not with Karl Marx or Herbert Marcuse or somebody, but with Michel Foucault. And Foucault was a member of a French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953, but rejected Marxism and rejected communism.

He rejected, more broadly, grand narratives about history and politics, which included Marxism as well as liberalism. And he became very skeptical of the ability to have neutral truths or universal values. He doubted that his society had made any progress relative to the past and how it treated the mentally ill or criminals. And he adopted a very different notion of how to think about power rather than thinking of it as a kind of top down process where we have laws in the state and the police force

and the bureaucracy and they impose the laws on everybody else. He thought of power as this has come to be sort of to flow in our water in a way as discourses. The real way that the exercise power is through this kind of conversation

and the concepts we use and that helps to construct reality in a way that really constrains the kind of moves that people make. That is the real power. Now... So the universities are very... would be a seat of power then, correct?

The education system. The universities, the newspapers and all of that, but it's really, you know, the thing you have to pay attention to is really the way we use language and construct language. And what's interesting about Foucault is that this was an incredibly effective solvent. It could

allow you to look at reality and say, everything's terrible, and I don't believe in our institutions, I don't believe that we've made progress, I don't believe in truth. But it was also apolitical and quietist in a certain kind of way. Foucault thought that there's no place of great resistance.

You can oppose our current discourses, but all you'll succeed in doing is to create a new discourse. And that's going to be just as oppressive as the one that came before. And so what we take from that for today is this deep skepticism towards universal truth and universal values. That's the piece of it that we keep.

But in other ways, subsequent thinkers make moves that really switch the nature of that philosophy. So the second wave, and I'll try and be brief, is the post-colonial thinkers. And they are trying to figure out, you know, we have these newly independent nations in the global south, and we have to figure out how to rule ourselves. And so Foucault's and the postmodernist ability to critique stuff is really attractive to us, because we don't want to be ruled by the old Western ideas, right? But we got to do actual politics. We can't be as apolitical as him. And so there's two key moves here.

The first, Edward Said in in Orientalism, says, look, applying the Foucaultian notion of a discourse, he says, one of the ways in which the West could build the colonies is that it had this notion of Orientalism, this conception of the East that justified colonial domination. But the point isn't just to describe it. The point is to invert the power relationship so that the people who were previously oppressed can now go and be more powerful, can actually fight back and perhaps win in that struggle for power. And so from

that we take a kind of politicized form of discourse analysis, which is still with us today. What it is to do politics today for a lot of people, if you're a feminist, might be fighting for abortion rights. But part of it is celebrating or critiquing or finding problematic the Barbie movie. The idea that part of political battle is to fight over what words to use and how to construct reality is something that's very familiar to us,

and it comes from Said's move. The next step that is important is Gayatri Spivak, another post-colonial scholar, who says, look, people like Foucault, they're skeptical of truth and they're skeptical of objective categories of identity. One of the things that actually makes Foucault appealing in a way. Foucault, in our sense, would be a homosexual.

He was a guy who had sex with guys. But he didn't like the term. He said that constrains too much how to think about sexuality and variety of sexual experience oh thank god, go ahead and so we shouldn't put people into these boxes and therefore intellectuals shouldn't, like Marxists

wanted, speak on behalf of a proletariat you know the proletariat would have to speak for itself, people would have to speak for themselves and Spivak listens to all of this and she says, look, that might be true for privileged, working class people and trans. It's not true for the kinds of subaltern, she calls them,

that I grew up with in Kolkata, for example. They can't speak for themselves. They don't have the resources, they haven't had the education. So somebody needs to speak for them. And so we need these identity categories. So she comes up with this paradoxical idea of what she calls strategic essentialism.

She says these essentialist notions of identity, like the label of homosexuality that Foucault rejected, really are suspect in a philosophical sense. But for practical political purposes, to allow people to fight against oppression, to organize and to allow intellectuals like me to speak for the oppressed, we have to embrace them nevertheless. For strategic purposes,

we have to act as though that essentialist truth was right. And again, you see that in activist politics in the United States today. You go to an activist meeting, somebody's going to say, race is a social construct, but we need to listen to what black people say. We need to listen to brown voices, right? So there's a kind of acknowledgement that essentialism is wrong, and then you go straight on talking as Fowler was absolutely right, and you separate people into different racial groups in elementary schools, in middle schools, in high schools, in colleges, and diversity trainings, and corporations, right?

That is an applied form of strategic essentialism. And then finally... Yeah, go ahead. No, no. And then finally... Yeah, and then finally, the last step, you have the rise of critical race theory. Now, critical race theory is this weird thing where, you know, a bunch of people on the right say teaching kids about slavery in school is critical race theory or something. I mean, as a result, MSNBC says that critical race theory is just wanting to think critically about race in society. And what's wrong with that? You listen to the founders of a tradition,

and it's very, very clear and explicit that it's more radical than that, that they actually attack certainly the American founding, but also the Civil Rights movement. So Derrick Bell, the key figure in this, is this heroic work with the NAACP desegregating schools and businesses and other institutions in the American South throughout the 1960s. But then comes to think of much of that work as a mistake. And he basically says, you know, the segregationist senators who claimed that civil rights lawyers weren't arguing in the interest of our clients. They were just trying to impose their ideology of integration,

of desegregation. They were actually right. My clients wanted better schools. They didn't care whether we were all black or not. And so in a certain kind of sense, Brown versus Board of Education was a mistake. To do better, we should have had schools that were separate, but truly equal.

And by the way, the idea that the civil rights movement was progress is a mistake. America today is as racist as it was in 1950, as racist as it was. Does he mean that for real? Like he would like to see segregation in law have continued so he does I mean the the the let me look this up for a second you can cut this right sure go ahead word. So he quotes, okay, well, what he certainly thinks is that integration didn't work for his clients. And that at least in some circumstances, what we should have done is to give more money to black schools rather than to integrate them. So you know the first significant academic article he writes is called Serving Two Masters which is

this segregationist critique of civil rights law, integration ideals and client interests in school desegregation litigation and the very first thing he does is to quote a coalition of black community groups in Boston saying that in the name of equity we seek dramatic improvements in the quality of education available to our children very reasonable any steps to achieve desegregation must be reviewed in light of the black community's interest in improved pupil performance as a primary characteristic of educational equity. We think it neither necessary nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurance that our

children will instructionally profit. It's implicit in everything that he's writing that his understandable critiques of how desegregation has played out, which really has gone wrong in some ways, has led him to the conclusion that in many circumstances, it might be better to treat those groups separately, but give each of them equal status. And so that sort of becomes a founding stone for a lot of race-sensitive public policy today, right? When during the pandemic,

the Biden administration decided to make COVID relief for restaurants a priority for minority business owners, right? So that if you're non-white, you're first in line for those kinds of things. That is in some ways downstream from that kind of thinking, saying that in order to have any achievements,

it is not enough that we treat people equally. We have to make how the state treats people and how we treat each other explicitly depend on the kind of groups that we're from. You could add to that Kimberly Crenshaw and her concept of intersectionality and what becomes of that, but you start to see a lot of progressive politics emerging.

The skepticism of objective truth and universal values that come from Foucault. The applied discourse critique that comes from somebody like Said. The embrace of strategic essentialism that comes from Spivak. The rejection of race-neutral public policies. The embrace of race-sensitive public policies, as well as the deep skepticism about the ability to make progress on racism, on sexism, on homophobia, on other kinds of metrics that come from Bell, that gives you a lot of contemporary social justice movement politics.