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by
Yascha Mounk
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December 16 - December 27, 2023
Indeed, virtually everything that has been written about this topic so far falls into one of two camps. Either it uncritically celebrates the core ideas of the identity synthesis as a necessary tonic to the injustices of the world, or it summarily dismisses them as a fad that need not be taken seriously from an intellectual point of view.
But even though social movements and legislative reforms can help to address real injustices, they rarely do so as quickly or as comprehensively as hoped.
The new focus on categories of group identity like race, gender, and sexual orientation is motivated by disappointment and anger at the persistence of real injustices. Most of the people who embrace it genuinely aspire to make the world a better place.
The identity synthesis has come to exert tremendous influence over a stunningly short span of time.
right-wing populism and the identity trap feed on each other.
In 2010, the identity synthesis held significant sway in universities but had no more than marginal importance in mainstream culture. By 2020, it had reshaped some of the most powerful institutions in the country.
that we should aim for forms of political solidarity that transcend group identities rooted in race or religion; and that we can make common cause in pursuit of universal ideals like justice and equality.
real power lies in the identity labels we use to make sense of the world and the normative assumptions enshrined in the discourses that structure our society,
Amatka is a powerful visualization of this philosophy. I should reread that book. It's the perfect illustration of how language shapes our world, indeed, transforms it.
The second lesson was a fundamental skepticism about identity categories. Foucault argued that labels like “mental illness” and “homosexuality” are tools of power rather than descriptions of reality.
Words matter - slogans win political battles. Whichever side gets their label used has a major advantage.
Chomsky remained astonished by Foucault and the wider postmodernist position he represents: “I had never met such an amoral—not immoral, amoral—person in my life.”
free.
Wow. The author is ending each chapter with a study guide to the topics. This is a clever book , designed to be read by mildly smart people who couldnt tolerate e reading Sarte or Foucault or Chomsky directly.
To deny that the United States has made genuine progress toward equality is to insult the memory of the millions who suffered open and explicit restrictions on their freedom to go where they wish or marry whom they love. And yet it is impossible to understand the present intellectual moment without taking seriously the reasons why a cohort of Black scholars and intellectuals came to feel bitterly disappointed. For, measured against the exalted hopes of the civil rights era, America really did—and does—fall painfully short.
But the Black clients on whose behalf they were working often had different goals. They wanted their children to have access to a quality education, irrespective of the composition of the student body.
Caught in a conflict between their clients’ wishes and their own ideals, they were wrongly prioritizing what they themselves thought was right.
When Crenshaw helped to organize a summer workshop at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, she called it “Critical Race Theory” without much deliberation, and the name stuck. A new movement was officially inaugurated.
Amazing that this came from student-led unofficial seminars!
“intersectionality” was an intuitively plausible concept.
this tempted some activists to place a very high entry barrier on anybody who wants to participate in a political movement. If somebody wants to join a feminist movement committed to intersectionality, these activists now also expect that person to agree with a set of specific positions about such varied topics as the nature of race discrimination, the injustices suffered by disabled people, and the conflict in Palestine.
This is the fundamental problem. You move from a big tent activism into a rigid set of ideologies. There is no room for small tents of d allied people. All must adopt the same broad ideology. No longer can the enemy of my enemy be my friend.
when the vocabulary and the ideology of class struggle fell out of fashion after the fall of the Soviet Union, the cultural left was poised for a takeover.
In virtually every developed democracy, activists now expend enormous efforts on changing the way in which ordinary people speak.
As many sociology professors tell their first-year students—and quite a few Instagram influencers like to inform their followers—“race is a social construct.” This creates a serious dilemma for adherents of the identity synthesis.
And it has also raised the price of admission to many progressive organizations, requiring would-be activists who agree with the adherents of the identity synthesis on one issue to accept the orthodox views on all other issues to become—or remain—members in good standing.
True. But I feel Mounk isn't helping me understand why people believe this. He can't effectively take down their philosophy unless he clearly articulates it. He is too dismissive.
The ACLU had abandoned parts of its historical mission, refusing to assist defendants whose speech it deemed too offensive.
Two core themes that have roots in the identity synthesis came to be especially important on Tumblr: standpoint epistemology and intersectionality.
it quickly became an article of faith that members of dominant groups, like whites or heterosexuals, could not in any meaningful way understand the experiences of members of disadvantaged groups, like “people of color” or sexual minorities. As a result, it became very fraught to criticize any position for which a member of a disadvantaged group could claim special authority derived from their “lived experience”—even when there was little evidence that most members of that group agreed with the person making the claim on their behalf.
The result was a powerful mechanism for keeping people in line. As
The original sin is really status-seeking. This is what leads people to behave immorally.
The moderate liberalism associated with the website’s founders gradually made way for the proudly progressive ideology that was dominant among its younger staffers.
This is why there is no place in public space for me anymore. I wonder if this is what happens to all middle-aged people everywhere. The gerontocracy may have clung to political power and business roles, but everywhere else, the old people are kicked out in favor of the young.
“White liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical Black voter.”
But over the course of the past decade, the organization has quietly started to abandon those commitments. “Once a bastion of free speech and high-minded ideals,” the feminist legal scholar Lara Bazelon recently concluded in The Atlantic, “the ACLU has become in many respects a caricature of its former self.”
They are backed up by an army of small donors who became members of the ACLU in the months after Donald Trump was elected in the hope that it would pursue all kinds of progressive priorities.
This small donor phenomenon is also what is hurting the republican Party. On the other end of the spectrum, we have large donors at colleges pushing their notion of safe spaces. Just because I agree with large donors more than small ones doesn't mean much.
Under pressure from young staffers deeply steeped in the identity synthesis, wary of viral posts on social media and the mainstream media attention they might attract, and fearful of losing favor with their donors, they too have embraced a ragbag of progressive causes—or given up on key elements of their historical missions.
This is why the lwv is harder to support. I support voter protection. I dot want to fund activists working for reparations.
a result, the distinction between different advocacy groups has become increasingly fluid, and the ideological price of admission to all of them increasingly steep.
“Philanthropy is veering left.” Deep-pocketed foundations are increasingly pursuing equity, “defined not as equal opportunity, but rather as equal outcomes.”
they have of late shifted to inculcating DiAngelo’s core conviction that even well-meaning employees are inescapably sexist or racist.
Suppose that you’re a manager who reads the academic literature, sees that the heavy-handed self-criticism styles of sexual-harassment or racial-diversity training are somewhere between useless and counterproductive, and proposes canceling next year’s training. Legal is going to complain that this will look bad if you face a wrongful-dismissal suit anytime soon. . . . Many employees will complain that they expect the firm to express their values, which includes holding seminars featuring “privilege walks” to reaffirm the firm’s commitment to ending white supremacy and other forms of
...more
These HR courses are counterproductive, but utterly necessary to innoculate the corporation from liability. It is a cheap solution to the issue of litigation that only makes the problem worse. Courts need to realize this & stop allowing companies to sidestep liability by claiming they did all they could with trainings PROVEN to be ineffective (and sometimes to even harden biases.
But as the high hopes of the “resistance” movement were dashed, some of its members reacted very differently: instead of continuing to protest or tuning out politics, they redirected their anger toward the inside.
For much of the Trump era, big segments of progressive America seemed to be directing more anger at aberrant members of their own tribe than at their nominal enemy in the White House.
I wish he would point out the degree to which this is also happening in Republican circles
The pressure to conform, social psychologists have found, becomes much bigger when a group is in the middle of a conflict that involves high moral stakes, making its members feel that they are under threat.
sense of powerlessness is a big part of the reason for the fading tolerance toward dissenters under conditions of perceived threat. When the real target of your wrath is beyond your grasp, and the moral stakes of the moment are high, the inability to do anything useful becomes intensely frustrating. Some people who are desperate to do something—anything—to keep the threat at bay then start to direct their anger at those who are under their control.
Members of marginalized groups, for example, really do face forms of injustice that are easy for members of dominant groups to overlook.
The core claim is that a member of a privileged group will never be able to understand a member of an oppressed group, however hard they may try to do so.
according to standpoint theory, say something along the following lines: “I do not understand your experiences and I am in no position to evaluate your demands. But since I recognize that you are more oppressed than me, I will endeavor to be a good ally and support what you ask for.”
This is why i can't support feminist causes anymore. Because I am privileged, I must be voiceless and defer. Feminists are telling women to be silent and submissive.
It wrongly claims that people from different groups are incapable of empathizing with each other’s experiences of injustice—and that it would be better for them to stop trying.
I don't know if they want people to stop trying. I think the view is that the futility of the quest is appropriate suffering and performative penance to be endured forever. This is a vindictive and cruel philosophy
But does the concept of “cultural appropriation” help us understand why it was offensive?
Good point! It was the mockery, not the idea of cultural crossover
When a critic at The Toronto Star got a small business shut down in the middle of the pandemic for the crime of serving an inauthentic version of pho, the popular Vietnamese soup, for example, she justified her anger by invoking the times classmates in elementary school had mocked her for the contents of her lunch box.
Vindictive. This is an abuse of power that is not justified merely because the wielder won in the oppression Olympics
“We know from personal experience,” they answered their own question, “that rights granted to wealthy, white, cis, male, straight bodies do not trickle down to marginalized groups.”
So the idea is that because free speech is not a universal right, we ought to attack anyone making statements we do not like as long as they are relatively privileged. Not that we should fight for more speech rights for the unprivileged
Some deny that cases in which people suffer severe personal and professional punishments for trivial or imaginary offenses amount to a concerning form of “cancel culture.” Others actively celebrate such cases as examples of a healthy “consequence culture.”
the ideas of the powerful are going to be systematically favored over those of the powerless, perpetuating the kind of injustice that progressive opponents of free speech rightly abhor; the stakes of who gets to hold power vastly increase, incentivizing political partisans to refuse to accept the outcome of elections or even engage in violence; and society will lose a crucial safety valve that allows the victims of bad public policies to protest the status quo, making it harder to achieve much-needed social change.
I'm surprised he doesn't mention the real problem of the echo chamber when words lead to deeds. Any business or military leader can speak to the need for viewpoint challenge to arrive a good decisions
The first step should be to ban companies from firing their employees for saying unpopular things.
However, i believe strongly in freedom of association. I don't want to work with someone who expresses misogynist opinions on Facebook, I shouldn't have to. Even if she behaves and speaks nothing like that in the office
even consists of a form of “race abolitionism,” the insistence on building a society in which race has lost virtually all of the importance it now holds.
Thomas Chatterton Williams,
I love the idea of race and gender abolitionism
