The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is not principally about noticing what’s bad; it’s about constructing what’s good.”

This is the heart of the Matter

took place over the course of the past decade have been so rapid that they were virtually complete before most people even had a chance to understand their nature or their consequences.

Exactly!!! It happened so quickly and so overwhelmingly

Barack Obama warned that “sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells. They want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way.”

Some illiberal norms, including unforgiving social sanctions for unpopular speech, the need to pay lip service to a Manichaean version of antiracism, and the occasional witch hunt against innocents, are likely to remain part of the culture of America’s most influential institutions for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the growing resistance to the identity trap will make it more feasible to undo some of its worst excesses. Other illiberal norms, including the most extreme prohibitions on forms of so-called cultural appropriation and the most blatant attempts by the state to discriminate between citizens on the basis of their race, are likely to prove short-lived. The next decades will, in other words, consist of a protracted fight over the extent to which the worlds of culture and education, business and politics will be governed by the core ideas and assumptions of the identity synthesis. According to this third scenario—which I consider the most likely—the forces favoring the identity trap and the forces favoring its retrenchment will continue to clash for many years to come.

Let's see how the Hamas-Israel war will change his predictions. I think it is hastening the reckoning. But cancel culture is not gone. I fear we will wind up in a trump dictatorship as the left fractures and the disempowered go with the bully who seems fun and far away instead of the bully on their block.

The most radical advocates of the identity synthesis often refuse to accept that people may disagree with them for legitimate reasons; it is precisely their tendency to confuse political disagreement with moral failure that has transformed public discourse for the worse over the course of the past decade.

Remember That Today’s Adversaries Can Become Tomorrow’s Allies

Some conservatives fall into an identity trap of their own by maintaining that the ethnic, cultural, or religious groups that traditionally dominated their countries hold greater value and should therefore continue to have special powers and privileges.

I would argue most. Just like most liberals feel the same way about their cherished ideals.

“post-liberal right and [the] post-liberal left fundamentally prioritize the power of the state over the liberty of the individual.” The inevitable result is that both would diminish “free speech, economic freedom, private property, and religious liberty.”

institutional leaders are scared to speak their mind, especially when doing so might earn them accusations—however unfair—of being sexist or racist. But the real risks of doing too much have now become an excuse for the equally dangerous path of doing too little.

Clearly communicate that employees are expected to be tolerant toward different points of view.

one big nonprofit organization, for example, many young white staff members complained about pervasive forms of white supremacy, but most Black staff members reported being happy with the organization’s culture.

Don’t apologize unless you’ve done something wrong.

This is a gendered expectation.