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

by Yascha Mounk

In the last chapters, I have focused on five common applications of the identity synthesis to contemporary cultural and political debates. It is, I argue, a mistake to give up on the hope that members of different ethnic groups can come to have genuine empathy for each other; to put forms of cultural influence between members of different groups under a general pall of suspicion; to underestimate the dangerous consequences that stem from giving up on a genuine culture of free speech; to embrace calls for a supposedly progressive form of separatism that undermines efforts at genuine integration; and to make

race-sensitive public policies the government’s default mode of operation. In each case, I have instead advocated for a solution that takes concerns about persistent injustices seriously without giving up on long-standing universal norms.

In its most radical form, this claim explicitly entails the implication that it is impossible for a member of a historically marginalized group to be racist toward a member of a historically dominant group. Because racism does not have anything to do with individual attributes, and members of groups that are comparatively powerless are incapable of carrying out “systematic discrimination” against members of

groups that are comparatively powerful, even the vilest forms of hatred need not count as racist. As Manisha Krishnan put the point in Vice, “It is literally impossible to be racist to a white person.” The result has, again and again, been a form of selective blindness when members of minority groups have expressed bigoted attitudes toward supposedly more privileged groups, including those that are themselves minorities.

This inability to recognize the importance of the more traditional conception of racism has serious consequences. For example, it makes it impossible to name what is happening when members of one minority group are the victims of hate crimes committed by members of another minority group that has historically suffered greater disadvantages. In the United States, for example, Asian Americans are

usually said to be more “privileged” (or even more “white adjacent”) than African Americans. As a result, mainstream newspapers have been reluctant to report on hate crimes committed by African Americans against Asian Americans during the COVID pandemic, only rarely labeling such attacks as racist. This has hampered the country’s ability to take effective action against such attacks and exacerbated tensions between these groups.

it is a mistake to believe that the existence of “hard cases” that do not fall into a clear category means that the underlying dichotomy is incoherent. It would be wrong to say that the existence of people who have some hair means that there is no such thing as people who either are bald or have a full head of hair; similarly, it is wrong to say that the existence of people who are intersex means that there is no such thing as people who are biologically male or biologically female.

Looking at the United Kingdom or the United States today, it is tempting to conclude that meritocracy has led these countries astray. But the opposite comes closer to the truth: The legitimate aspirations of millions of people have been betrayed because too few people can access material comfort, and those positions that do come with special power or privilege are not distributed in a sufficiently meritocratic fashion. The problem is not that Britain or America is too meritocratic; it’s that they aren’t meritocratic enough.

Liberalism, in the sense in which I will defend it, is based on the rejection of natural hierarchy. Rather than believing that some people have a right to rule over others by virtue of their noble birth or their spiritual enlightenment, liberals are convinced that we are born equal. They therefore insist on political institutions that allow all of us to determine the rules that govern us; guarantee each of us the liberty to live our lives in accordance with our own convictions; and assure members of any identity group that the treatment they will receive from the state should not depend on their gender, their sexual orientation, or the color of their skin.

Over the past five decades, a large African American middle class has come into existence. Today, the median Black American has a white-collar job, lives in a reasonably affluent suburb, and is doing significantly better than his or her parents. As a result, African Americans are much more upbeat about their future prospects than you might expect by listening to adherents of the identity synthesis. According to recent polls, they are more likely to be optimistic about the future of America, or to believe that their best days are ahead, than white Americans.

A view of the world that falsely states that there has been no progress easily lends itself to the conclusion that the universal values and neutral rules to which liberal democracies subscribe are just a fig leaf for the maintenance of oppression, and that they should therefore be abandoned. A more realistic assessment comes to a different conclusion. It acknowledges that it’s not enough to pay lip service to universal values and neutral rules. But it also recognizes that earnest attempts to live up to these standards have helped liberal democracies make rapid and real, if inevitably imperfect, progress. The best hope to keep making such progress lies not in abandoning liberalism but in redoubling our efforts to live up to its animating ideals.

Statistics show that liberal democracies outperform their rivals on key metrics that virtually every human being values.

All twenty of the countries in which people report being the happiest are democracies. Out of the thirty countries with the highest human development index, twenty-seven are liberal democracies. Out of the thirty countries with the longest life expectancy, twenty-nine are liberal democracies.

Even on economic metrics, which are often thought to favor efficient autocracies, democracies enjoy a striking advantage: out of the twenty-five countries with over four million inhabitants that have the highest GDP per capita, twenty-two are democratic. (The exceptions are a semi-authoritarian city-state, Singapore, as well as...

Why the Identity Synthesis Isn’t Marxist

Far from being a mere adaptation of Marxism, the identity synthesis is a new challenge to liberal democracy that we must take seriously—and oppose—on its own terms.

To write a book is a lonely process. To write a book that swims against the current can be doubly lonely. So I have, in working on this manuscript, felt even more grateful than I usually do to have wonderful colleagues, loyal friends, and trusted readers.