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

by Yascha Mounk

A key goal of politics was to create a world in which we collectively realize that the things we share across identity lines are more important than the things that divide us, allowing us to overcome the many forms of oppression that have marked the cruel history of humanity. But over the past six decades, the left’s thinking on identity has—for reasons that are in many ways understandable—undergone a profound change.

As awareness and understanding of the historical oppression of various identity groups grew, some parts of the left came to embrace the idea that the solution must lie in encouraging new forms of activism and group pride.

This body of ideas draws on a broad variety of intellectual traditions and is centrally concerned with the role that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation play in the world. So I will, for the most part, refer to it as the “identity synthesis.”

Advocates of the identity synthesis reject universal values and neutral rules like free speech and equal opportunity as mere distractions that aim to occlude and perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. Trying to make progress toward a more just society by redoubling efforts to live up to such ideals, its advocates claim, is a fool’s errand. That is why they insist on making forms of group identity much more central, both to our understanding of the world and to our sense of how to act within it.

Because of this focus on identity as a way of interpreting social reality, parts of the left are now more likely to invoke new concepts like “microaggressions” and “implicit bias” than they are to invoke older concepts like social class.

Because neutral rules like nondiscrimination laws are supposedly insufficient to make a difference, the advocates of the identity synthesis insist that we need social norms and public policies that explicitly make how the state treats its citizens—and how we all treat each other—depend on the identity group to which they belong.

But sadly, the identity synthesis will ultimately prove counterproductive. Despite the good intentions of its proponents, it undermines progress toward genuine equality between members of different groups. In the process, it also subverts other goals we all have reasons to care about, like the stability of diverse democracies. Despite its allure, the identity synthesis turns out to be a trap.

Far-right ideologies are so dangerous because they discourage people from widening their circle of sympathy in this manner. Placing specific ethnic or cultural identities on a pedestal, they encourage their followers to value their group over the rights of outsiders or the claims of universal human solidarity. My concern about the identity synthesis is that, in its own way, it too makes it harder for people to broaden their allegiances beyond a particular identity in a way that can sustain stability, solidarity, and social justice.

The identity synthesis is a political trap, making it harder to sustain diverse societies whose citizens trust and respect each other. It is also a personal trap, one that makes misleading promises about how to gain the sense of belonging and social recognition that most humans naturally seek.

Others will chafe under the expectations of such a society because they do not wish to make their membership in some group they did not choose so central to their self-conception. They might, for example, define themselves in terms of their individual tastes and temperaments, their artistic predilections, or their sense of moral duty toward all humanity. People with a wide variety of personal beliefs and religious convictions are likely to feel alienated in a society that most prizes a form of self-conscious identification with some group into which they were born.

It is surely necessary for a society to communicate respect for all of its members, irrespective of their race or origin, for them to feel a sense of belonging and social recognition. But it does not follow that most people will succeed in gaining such a sense of belonging and social recognition by making their membership in these kinds of identity groups central to their personal sense of self.

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.

But demagogues thrive when societies are deeply polarized and decision makers are out of touch with the views of average citizens.

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.

“The need for creative work [and] creative inquiry,” he argued, is a fundamental part of human nature. The task of political activists is to allow human beings to realize their nature by “trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion” that characterize contemporary societies. The best way to accomplish that would be to build “a federated, decentralized system of free associations,” also known as a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

Instead of embracing ambitious political goals that risk turning into yet another wrongheaded metanarrative, Foucault concluded, we should limit our aspirations: “In a society like ours, the true political task is to criticize the game of the seemingly most neutral and independent institutions; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that political violence, which they exercise in obscurity, is unmasked.”

For despite Foucault’s refusal to propose a better model for society, it was his rejection of universal truth, his skepticism about the possibility of progress, and his warnings about the power of oppressive discourses that ended up inspiring an ideology that has gone on to transform the left and gain unexpected influence in the mainstream: the identity synthesis.

The rejection of grand narratives led postmodern theorists to grow deeply skeptical of claims to both objective truth and universal values. It even led them to reject stable identity categories, like “woman” or “proletarian.”

The task of a critic, he now came to believe, was to “commit himself to descriptions of power and oppression with some intention of alleviating human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope.”

For when thinkers like Foucault attacked grand narratives, they had not only rejected the idea of universalist values or scientific truths; they had also argued that it is dangerous to refer to people by virtue of the identity groups to which they belong.

In 1996, the journalist Larissa MacFarquhar wrote one of the first profiles of the scholars who had founded critical race theory. After interviewing Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and other leading figures in the movement, she summarized their key precepts in a series of slogans: “law is subjective,” “neutrality is political,” “words are actions,” and “racism is permanent.”

At first gradually and then suddenly, the center of gravity on the left swung from class and economics to culture and identity.

Trained in postmodern skepticism about seemingly neutral values and concepts, many adherents of the identity synthesis like to emphasize that key aspects of the world are “socially constructed.” When somebody claims that some influential concept, like private property or the nation-state, isn’t “natural,” they emphasize that it was created by human norms and conventions. It could, they usually imply, just as easily be changed.

While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative to encourage the formation of identity groups that can become a locus for resistance against domination must take precedence.

Most advocates of the identity synthesis believe that their skepticism about past progress also has important implications for what to do going forward. Because there have, according to them, been no meaningful improvements in recent times, they naturally suspect that the core features of the current political system will continue to make genuine progress impossible in the future.

This interpretation of intersectionality has had a big impact on the nature of progressive political organizing. It has led to a broadening in the mission of many activist groups, which now feel a need to take a stance on important political issues even when these lie well outside the area on which they have traditionally focused. It has led to frequent demands for intellectual deference, in which organizations that represent a particular identity group claim a special authority to determine what stances other progressive organizations should embrace regarding the topics that touch upon their interests.

“Differences in power constrain our ability to connect with one another even when we think we are engaged in dialogue across differences.” 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.

Though some leftists had seemingly started to believe that people who belong to a group that has historically been victimized have some form of privileged access to moral virtue, “victimhood, alas, does not guarantee or necessarily enable an enhanced sense of humanity.”

The trend of supposedly progressive institutions “focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture, and traditions” wrongly suggested that members of marginalized groups were somehow “unable to share in the general riches of human culture”; in the description of the literary critic Adam Shatz, this struck Said as a kind of “apartheid pedagogy.” In the end, Said therefore embraced a form of universalism that stood in direct conflict with some of the core tenets of the identity synthesis: “Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”

“Tumblr became a place for people to fantasize and build upon ideas about real identities. . . . Most of the people involved had little lived experience as these identities.” As this culture came into its own, Tumblr developed wondrously protean properties: a heartfelt manifesto or even a casual joke could become the kernel of an entirely new identity.

When “working against the established institutions while working within them,” Marcuse counseled, activists should be “doing the job” by learning “how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, [and] how to organize production.”

The lasting influence of the long march is owed to the strength of its underlying mechanism. When college students are deeply steeped in a new and radical ideology, they are uniquely well placed to have an outsized impact on the world outside the ivory tower. For as these students join mainstream institutions, they have a lot of opportunities to advocate for change and even to rise to positions of power.

“The constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press would be meaningless if the government could pick and choose the persons to whom they apply,”

The ACLU’s transformation is, in part, rooted in a strong case of mission creep. Young employees who have joined the organization over the past decade want it to fight for a broad range of leftist values, not just those that are directly connected to its historical mission of defending civil liberties.

The answer to these questions requires a brief detour into the science of group psychology. For it is rooted in what makes groups tick, how dissenters can help to keep them sane, and when the pressure to conform becomes so strong that extremists gain the power to impose their views on everybody else.

Cass Sunstein has termed “the law of group polarization”: after groups of like-minded people have a chance to deliberate about some question of morality or politics, the conclusions they come to are more radical than the beliefs of their individual members.

Sometimes, it takes deliberation with like-minded people to recognize that the radical answer is the right one. (Perhaps we would, for example, all be safer if companies always had to pay enormous damages for their negligence.) But given that consensus on a radical position within a group is often based on peer pressure, and can fly in the face of clear and objective evidence, it is especially important for groups to have some built-in mechanism to stop them from going off the rails.

A 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.

Two assertions became especially effective enforcers of the new identity orthodoxy, and neither would be surprising to anybody who has read the psychological literature on how groups vilify dissenters under conditions of perceived threat. The first claimed that there are only two sides in the fight between racists and antiracists, making anybody who refuses to join the (supposedly) antiracist side a racist—a very effective way of portraying those who are not in full conformity with the new norms of the community as moral deviants. The second insisted that any form of resistance to this orthodoxy must be motivated by a self-serving refusal to acknowledge one’s own complicity with racism—a very effective way to portray all dissenters as having nefarious intentions.

Rather than living in fear of extremists who express loathsome sentiments, we should trust that we can beat them back without giving up on the right to free speech. Far from encouraging the creation of separate identities and institutions, we should foster real integration and encourage people to see what they have in common. And instead of making the treatment that individuals receive from the state depend on their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, we should embrace policies that benefit everyone who is in need, whatever the identity group to which they belong, while helping to remedy the lingering effects of past domination.

Building a fair society will take great willpower and serious effort. And yet the set of solutions that is now in the ascendant in areas from free speech to cultural appropriation would merely serve to aggravate existing problems. Rather than helping to build a society in which members of different groups are better able to understand and support each other, it would entrench current divisions and deepen mutual hostility.

Stein interpreted this story as a testament to the ability of art and literature to cross boundaries of language, religion, and race. The show he created had somehow managed to tap into something “universal: the breakdown of tradition, the differences between generations, the eagerness to hang on to a religious background. These things are very much a part of the human experience.”

The second problem is that standpoint theory fails as a set of practical guidelines for how to take effective political action in the real world. In particular, its growing influence is unlikely to empower the marginalized and may even make it harder to sustain the forms of true political solidarity we need to overcome real injustices.

To emphasize how each person’s ability to understand the world depends on some such social “standpoint,” feminist theorists called the field of inquiry they founded “standpoint epistemology.”

To know what it feels like to eat a blueberry, you need to have tasted a blueberry. But the same does not apply to what philosophers call “propositional” knowledge. Such knowledge is typically thought to consist of statements that are true or false; to know that blueberries are in the genus Vaccinium, for example, you need never have eaten or even laid eyes upon a blueberry. The key question, then, is whether the most important insights drawn from experiential knowledge can—especially insofar as they are relevant to social and political debates—be shared in the form of propositional knowledge.

Though you or I may not share their experiential knowledge, we are able to understand and act on the propositional knowledge they derived from it. “The role of experience in politics,” Fraser concludes, “should not be overstated.” Who we are will shape what we learn about the world, but it need not constrain our ability to communicate those insights to others.

“While the oppressed may often have a contingent epistemic advantage deriving from their tendency to have more informative experiences of the workings of social marginalization,” Dror concludes his consideration of the subject, “there are only extremely limited grounds for thinking that they have an epistemic advantage derived in principle from being oppressed.”

But we are yet to consider the fourth claim: that the comparatively privileged should defer to the claims of the comparatively marginalized. This claim requires a different kind of analysis because it is fundamentally political rather than philosophical in nature.

The key problem with Pressley’s position consists of the difficulty in determining who can call themselves a legitimate spokesperson for a particular group. (The same problem is even more acute in the U.K. because the Conservative Party has been much more successful than the Republican Party at diversifying its leadership and attracting a large number of voters from ethnic minority groups.)

But in practice, the determination of who is a legitimate representative and what policies or norms a group favors is almost always made by people who are comparatively privileged.