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

by Yascha Mounk

The identity synthesis presents itself as a progressive ideology that tries to remake the world in a radical fashion. But this radical paint job fails to obscure its deep pessimism or the poverty of its ambitions. At the heart of its vision stands an acceptance of the enduring importance of dubious categories like race. It tries to sell people on a future in which people will forever be defined by the identity groups to which they belong; in which different communities will always be mired in zero-sum competition; and in which the way we treat each other will forever depend on our respective skin colors and sexual proclivities.

The core of the liberal tradition is a rejection of the forms of supposedly natural hierarchy that have traditionally justified historical rulers; according to liberals, all humans are created equal. Liberals derive three fundamental principles for just institutions from this premise: They believe in collective self-determination, allowing all of us to make the rules by which we live. They believe in individual freedom, allowing each of us to determine how we want to lead our lives. And they believe in political equality, ensuring that the way the state treats people does not depend on the identity group to which they belong.

These principles are attractive in their own right. But they also have important empirical benefits. In particular, collective self-determination helps to avoid the worst forms of government abuse, from politically motivated persecutions to famines. Individual freedom helps to keep the peace, allowing each of us to stay true to our conscience even if we are in the minority. And political equality helps to avert the most destructive forms of intergroup competition, making sure that all of us get a fair shake even if we don’t run the government.

Liberal democracies vastly outperform alternative regime forms on metrics that most people have strong reason to value. Nearly all of the richest and happiest countries in the world are liberal democracies. So are those with the highest human development index. This is no mere ...

One of the main culprits for this failure, Mitchell argues, is a simplistic understanding of identity. In the article, he takes particular aim at the way in which many activists and politicians invoke their heritage as a justification for their political position. “What’s implied,” Mitchell writes, “is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted.” But though this assumption may be popular, it is dangerously flawed: “Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position. . . . Genuflecting to individuals solely based on their socialized identities or personal stories deprives them of the conditions that sharpen arguments, develop skills, and win debates.”

It would be both silly and haughty to conclude that so many of our ancestors and compatriots are simply evil or stupid.

Though few people acknowledge defeat in the middle of an argument, most do shift their worldview over time.

On social media and cable news, it can seem as though society were cleaved into two mutually antagonistic halves. Most Americans are either “woke” or “MAGA.”

There is a reason for this impression. A small number of people really do take extreme views on the most controversial issues of the day. And because of the way politics and the media work, these voices are given an outsized platform and now hold considerable sway.

When More in Common, a nonprofit that aims to counteract polarization,

In short, there is a kind of overlapping consensus among critics of the identity synthesis. A surprisingly wide and varied set of political and religious traditions give their adherents reasons to view with deep skepticism any worldview that puts group identities like race and ethnicity at its moral and epistemological center.

In other words, they have become guilty of what, drawing on an idea by Emily Yoffe, I once called 180ism: “the tendency of many participants in public debate to hear what their perceived enemies have to say and immediately declare themselves diametrically opposed.”

One of the stranger aspects of the way in which social media has transformed America over the past decade is the fear of many institutional leaders to exercise their authority.