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

by Yascha Mounk

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.