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

by Yascha Mounk

A society that encourages all of us to see the world through the ever-present prism of identity will make it especially hard for people who don’t neatly fit into one ethnic or cultural group to develop a sense of belonging.

Others still are going to take up the call to conceive of themselves, first and foremost, as members of some ethnic, gender, or sexual group with great enthusiasm, hoping that this will allow them to be recognized and appreciated for who they truly are. But since all of us are much more than the matrix of our particular group identities, many are likely to find themselves disappointed. For a culture that thinks of people primarily in relation to some collective is incapable of seeing and affirming its members in all of their glorious individuality.

And finally, the election of Donald Trump supercharged well-founded concerns about threats to minority groups, making it seem disloyal for progressives to criticize any ideas associated with the left and rendering criticisms of the identity synthesis taboo in many milieus.

They argue that members of different identity groups can never fully understand each other. They are suspicious when members of one group are inspired by the culture of another group, decrying such instances as a harmful form of “cultural appropriation.” They are deeply skeptical of long-standing principles such as free speech, insinuating that those who defend its importance must be motivated by a desire to denigrate minority groups. They embrace a form of progressive separatism, favoring the creation of social spaces in which members of different communities remain apart from each other.

And he would have abhorred the ways in which big social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have transformed public debate into a modern-day panopticon, with every misstep subject to draconian punishment and all users trying to follow an amorphous set of rules about what they can or cannot say in an act of anticipatory obedience.

People, she points out, “often want to say that the fruits of oppression are a kind of virtue, a kind of admirable illness. I think that’s just not there in the intellectual tradition.

Over the past few years, it has, in a striking number of cases, been the most privileged and progressive institutions—from Smith College to the Guggenheim Museum—that experienced the greatest difficulties with mutual tolerance and comprehension. That might, at first sight, look puzzling. Why do people at ethnically diverse campuses like Yale and Oxford struggle to get along while ethnically diverse employees at McDonald’s or Burger King tend to do just fine? Allport’s intergroup contact theory helps to provide part of the answer: it is because many ordinary businesses and institutions still try to facilitate the conditions for greater mutual understanding, while some of the most elite ones are systematically undermining them.

But when public policy is formulated in race-sensitive terms, each group has an interest in mobilizing along ethnic lines to fight for its own interests. And in a democracy, fights over the distribution of scarce resources are, virtually by definition, usually won by more numerous and more powerful rather than less numerous and less powerful groups—making it, at best, an extremely risky tool for overcoming historical injustice.

Most people want a meaningful say over the rules that structure their societies. They want to feel that their government is treating them with the same respect and consideration it extends to their neighbors. And they don’t like being told what to say or whom to worship (unless they fantasize that the government will impose beliefs they already hold and customs they already practice on everybody else).

In a society that does not guarantee the freedom of speech or worship, anybody who wants to stay true to their conscience must curry favor with the powerful or wrest control of the machinery of the state, enormously raising the stakes of political competition. Historically, this has led to constant conflicts, from the religious wars of early modern Europe to the sectarian battles in today’s Middle East. In a liberal democracy, by contrast, every citizen knows that they can lead their life as they see fit, expressing opinions even if they are deeply unpopular and worshipping their god even if their compatriots believe such behavior to be blasphemous.

A similar danger now confronts some critics of the identity trap. Its opponents are united by what they oppose, not by what they endorse. This creates a temptation to outsource their moral judgments to their opponents. Instead of militating for a positive vision of the future, these critics of the identity trap have started to rail against anything that somehow seems “woke.” 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.”

And by portraying society as being full of bigots who pose a constant threat to members of every conceivable minority group, they encourage more and more people to feel adrift in a relentlessly hostile world.