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

by Yascha Mounk

In the place of universalism, parts of the American mainstream are quickly adopting a form of progressive separatism. Schools and universities, foundations and some corporations seem to believe that they should actively encourage people to conceive of themselves as “racial beings.” Increasingly, they are also applying the same framework to other forms of identity, encouraging people to think of their gender, their cultural origin, or their sexual orientation as their defining attribute. And of late, many institutions have taken yet another step: they have concluded that it is their duty to make how they treat people depend on the groups to which they belong—even when it comes to such existential decisions as whom to prioritize for lifesaving drugs.

for the past decade, some influential doctors, activists, and experts have been pushing to make triage decisions on the basis of a different consideration: racial equity.

A new way of thinking about identity has gained tremendous influence

in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. Fundamental assumptions about justice, the value of equality, and the significance of identity have changed in deeply consequential ways.

What is at stake is no more or less than the basic rules, principles, and background assumptions that will structure our societies in the coming decades. Instead of pretending that these changes are irrelevant or imaginary, we need to analyze and assess them in a serious manner.

The lure that attracts so many people to the identity synthesis is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of implementing this ideology is a society in which an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition—a society in which all of us are, whether we want to or not, forced to define ourselves by the groups into which we happen to be born. That’s what makes the identity synthesis a trap.

right-wing populism and the identity trap feed on each other. The widespread horror at the election of Donald Trump accelerated the takeover of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions. But demagogues thrive when societies are deeply polarized and decision makers are out of touch with the views of average citizens. While the advocates of the identity synthesis often point to serious problems that do urgently need to be remedied, the principles they champion and the solutions they offer are likely

to drive more voters into the arms of extremists.

Right-wing populists and the advocates of the identity synthesis see each other as mortal enemies. In truth, each is the yin to the other’s yang. The best way to beat one is to oppose the other—and that’s why everyone who cares about the survival of free societies should vow to fight both.

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.

Bell’s article was written in the sober, even painstaking, tone typical of contributions to American law reviews, with lengthy citations to relevant cases often taking up the bulk of each page. But anybody who read it must have recognized that his conclusion was a political bombshell. Drawing on a line of argument that (as Bell himself acknowledged) had originally been advanced by racist opponents of desegregation, he warned that civil rights lawyers were trying to “serve two masters” at the same time.

“Having convinced themselves that Brown stands for desegregation and not education,” Bell complained, “the established civil rights organizations steadfastly refuse to recognize reverses in the school desegregation campaign—reverses which, to some

extent, have been precipitated by their rigidity.” It was time for civil rights lawyers to listen to their Black clients. And that, according to Bell, also meant becoming more open to legal remedies that would create schools that were separate yet truly equal. Many of Bell’s progressive colleagues regarded this conclusion as sacrilege. But he was undeterred. In his mind, casting doubts on the merit of desegregation was only the opening salvo in a much wider campaign to question the logic and the values of the civil rights movement.

All forms of scientific inquiry are (or should be) built on radical skepticism. Even scholarly traditions that believe in the possibility of approximating objective truth have long recognized that humans are never free from bias. Their cognitive limitations, even their crude self-interest, have a nasty habit of intruding on their belief systems. But these traditions also insist that the mechanisms of serious scholarly inquiry and public debate can help to combat such shortcomings. Insofar as academic debates are genuinely open to people of different beliefs as well as backgrounds, and scientists remain free to question the received wisdom, we can collectively make progress toward genuine knowledge. That is the goal of scientific research.

Most adherents of the “identity synthesis” reject this hope. For them, the way in which our ascriptive identities influence our perception of the world goes deeper than such “positivists” are willing to recognize. Building on the skepticism about “grand narratives” and the focus on the dangerous power of “discourses” championed by postmodern theorists like Michel Foucault, they claim that there is no objective truth, just an infinite series of viewpoints. Those who pretend otherwise aren’t struggling, as best they can, to understand the world; they are concealing the way in which they exercise power over the oppressed and marginalized.

The embrace of strategic essentialism also helps to make sense of the evolution in the feminist treatment of gender. In their early work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the feminist scholar Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, emphasized that gender norms are socially constructed, and encouraged readers to disrupt them in a playful manner. Today, by contrast, many adherents of the identity synthesis talk about gender in

a more naturalistic fashion. When they write about babies being “assigned a sex at birth” and suggest that children must discover their “internal sense of gender identity,” they often imply that the latter is an inborn and even natural trait.

Writers and orators from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama were up-front in their criticisms of America’s shortcomings. But they also insisted that the country’s founding principles could, if only they were fully put into practice, guide America toward a better future. The rejection of this hard-won optimism is a key theme of the identity synthesis. For a new generation of scholars, any apparent progress is liable to prove either illusory or short-lived. Racism, as Derrick Bell has repeatedly insisted, is a permanent condition that might shape-shift but has, so far, shown no real sign of attenuating.

In this popularized form, standpoint theory goes far beyond an exhortation to ensure that people from different backgrounds are involved in scientific research or political decision-making; it stipulates that there are some important insights that members of one group will never be able to communicate to outsiders. Over time, this thought has increasingly been translated into the even simpler form in which it is

now often repeated in activist spaces. In this way, the legitimate impetus for standpoint epistemology came to be the kernel for the idea that I have “my truth”—one that you have no right to question or critique on the basis of supposedly objective facts, especially if you do not belong to the same marginalized identity group.

“Tumblr was the first place many white people . . . encountered ideas about race and privilege,” one enthusiastic profile of the site in the Pacific Standard pointed out in 2018. “For many teenagers at the beginning of the decade, no matter their specific interests, their pages included posts about feminism, anti-racism, and social justice.”

Anyone who compares a copy of The New York Times or The Guardian in 2010 with a copy of those same newspapers in 2020 would be struck by the difference in their tone and content. One small indication of this transformation lies in some of the articles and op-eds that would have been considered too extreme to see the light of day a decade earlier.

“Can My Children Be Friends with White People?” one article in The New York Times, by an African American law professor, asked in November 2017. The conclusion he came to seemed to rule out the possibility of any genuine trust between members of different ethnic groups: “I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.”

Clear quantitative evidence backs up the speed and extent of this change in the content of the most prestigious newspapers in the English-speaking world. The share of New York Times articles using the term “racist,” for

example, increased by an astonishing 700 percent in the eight years between 2011 and 2019, according to an analysis by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral student in political science at Georgia State University. Over the same time period, uses of the word “racist” in The Washington Post increased even more quickly, by 1,000 percent.[*]

The popularization of the identity synthesis played a key role in the events of the past decade. It is only when a complex academic theory was translated into memes and blog posts that it became ready for prime time. And it is only when that memefied version of the identity synthesis migrated from social media platforms and upstart blogs into the pages of The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times that it could start to influence the mainstream.

The popularized version of the identity synthesis became so influential in part because a new generation of employees entered the workforce and fought to enshrine the ideas they had imbibed in universities and on social media as the operating system of major institutions.

administrators at the University of California have instructed students to refrain from using “offensive” phrases like “melting pot” or “there is only one race, the human race.”

A growing number of universities even empowers administrators to intervene when students use “microaggressions” in conversation with each other, encouraging students to report infractions to an anonymous hotline.

The influence of the identity synthesis is especially pronounced at America’s most ...

they have much more lavish budgets to pay an army of administrators to propagate the core theses of the identity synthesis, compelling students to participate in an ever-growing number of trainings and orientations. (Yale, for example, now employs more administrators than it enrolls undergraduates.)

they are too vague to capture the nature of the views that now predominate on campus. In particular, they fail to capture the distinction between professors who are both liberal in the political sense and liberal in the philosophical sense (like me) and those (unlike me) who both lean left politically and reject basic precepts of philosophical liberalism.

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.

There is good reason why we sometimes find it hard to tolerate the way in which some of our compatriots abuse the license granted to them by protections for free speech. But precisely because it is so important not to let the stakes of political competition escalate, an absence of free speech would be even worse. For if I have good reason to fear that my opponent’s victory would give him the power to stop me from speaking out for my beliefs, I would have much stronger reason to go to any length—including violence—to stop him from taking control in the first place.

Free speech acts as a safety valve that helps to alert all of us when something in our society has gone well and truly awry. So when certain positions or policies are put beyond reproach, the prospect for social progress diminishes.

limits on free speech raise the risk of locking societies into dangerous errors across a broad range of realms.

This leaves the biggest source of private power over free speech: social media. Facebook and Twitter function as key venues for political debate. And yet they frequently ban users on arbitrary grounds. They have also prohibited the expression of controversial points of view about matters of intense public interest. And while they have justified these measures with the noble goal of fighting “misinformation,” the concept is defined so nebulously that they have, in practice, ended up taking sides in highly important and complex public debates.

This is why I believe that social media companies should voluntarily adopt stringent restrictions on their own ability to censor. Such rules would leave them free to ban users for forms of illegal, extreme, or uncivil behavior such as spreading child pornography, libeling people, or engaging in doxing. Social media platforms would also remain free to use algorithms that amplify content on the basis of such properties as being less divisive, for example by favoring posts that elicit few negative responses. But they would no longer be able to ban users or delete posts because of the substantive political views they express.

In a pluralistic society, freedom of association will always lead to some amount of “homophily,” the well-documented tendency of people to seek out those who resemble them. But the practices that are now in vogue go much further. In particular, many progressive educators believe that they must proactively encourage students to define themselves by virtue of the identity groups into which they were born.

For in the long run, it will succeed only in encouraging a zero-sum competition between different ethnic blocs. The only realistic alternative is to double down on the long-standing dream of integration—encouraging students and citizens to think of themselves in terms of broader groups that include members from many different backgrounds.

“I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it,” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose African American father grew up in segregated Texas, has vowed. “There are not fundamentally, inherently, essentially, Black or white lives. There is human life, and we have different ethnicities and cultural traditions, but we have to abolish the idea of race, full stop, or we’re always going to have the residue of racism.”

The evidence from hundreds of studies all over the world is overwhelming: when people who hold prejudices about outsiders come into contact with them under the right circumstances, they develop a much more positive view of them.

For members of different groups to enter into meaningful contact that reduces their mutual prejudices, they need to have equal standing within that situation (even if they don’t enjoy equal status in society as a whole). But many progressive separatists now actively oppose creating circumstances in which this would be the case. According to them, any interaction between a member of a historically dominant group and a member of a historically marginalized group should include an explicit emphasis on their difference in status. In both Britain and America, for example, whites are now often asked to “acknowledge their privilege.” This makes it harder for members of different groups to enjoy, even temporarily, the equality of status that is necessary for intergroup contact to build mutual understanding and solidarity.

the era of progressive separatism, many institutions are creating procedures that actively invite or even reward conflict. College campuses, for example, teach students from minority groups that prejudice against them often comes in seemingly innocuous or even invisible forms, encouraging them to be

constantly on guard against subtle signs of prejudice or “white supremacy culture.” Some universities have even gone so far as to create anonymous hotlines that allow students to report their classmates when they believe they have engaged in a microaggression. This erodes the trust that people need to manage conflicts in a cooperative manner. Because many institutions now send their members the message that they are unlikely to get along, it is hardly surprising that they often don’t.

Making meaningful progress on integration will, especially in countries that continue to suffer from some measure of segregation, also require substantial changes of public policy. The American system of financing public schools, for example, is in urgent need of reform. In virtually all countries, schools are governed by comparatively large entities like cities, counties, regions, or even states. Only in the United States, with its hodgepodge of different school districts, does the quality and the ethnic composition of local public schools depend so heavily on the income of residents in a tiny area.

Today, strict zoning laws and byzantine regulations regarding new building projects help to explain why some neighborhoods remain predominantly white. Giving people more opportunities to interact as neighbors and classmates hinges, in part, on seemingly wonkish measures such as more permissive zoning laws.

Inspired by these ideas, even mainstream Democrats have embraced a new set of goals. Ever since the French Revolution, the left has touted “equality” as one of its core values. But over the past decade, many politicians, activists, and writers have instead begun to emphasize what they call “equity.” Though both of these terms admit of many different definitions, making their meaning somewhat dependent on context, the most common interpretation of equity entails a commitment to eliminating group-level disparities, especially between different races and ethnicities. As Adolph Reed Jr., a Black Marxist who has long taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out, it should be thought of as a form of “disparitarianism.”

nobody sets out to remedy racial disparity by making everyone equally poor. But as it happens, the way in which the CDC advised public health authorities to distribute lifesaving vaccines is a striking example of what happens when policymakers are so focused on equity that

they end up ignoring the leveling-down objection. By reducing the disparity between different ethnic groups, prioritizing essential workers over the elderly really did serve equity. But because the policy had the foreseeable consequence of increasing mortality among all ethnic groups, making everyone worse off, it was obviously immoral.