Yascha Mounk on identity politics

At the October 2024 meeting we welcomed our new member Jon. The knowledge with regards to Mounk’s ideas varied quite a lot amongst the members of the group: he was a new name to Robbie and David, whereas Jon was halfway through Mounk’s book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time and Oliver has been studying him since 2018. He has a number of videos on YouTube, of which this 2023 interview with Coleman Hughes was David’s main reference.


Identity politics (aka “wokeness”) is of interest to us partly due to the recent proliferation of new sexual and gender identities, each of them making claims to recognition, validation and protection from the oppression of others.


While the aim of identity politics is to achieve equality or liberation for minority groups, their rapid acceptance (with almost no challenge) has had some disturbing outcomes: from a student scolded for “cultural appropriation” because she created artworks in traditional Chinese style when only one of her parents was Chinese; to an attempt by health administrators in the USA to prevent the targeting of the covid vaccine to older people because that age group is disproportionately white (!).


Mounk is also concerned that this ideological view of identity plays into the hands of right-wing politicians: a claim apparently borne out in recent days by the stunning election victory of Donald Trump, who made the rollback of Democrat gender identity laws an important plank of his programme.


To pin down what is going on here, Mounk uses the term ‘identity synthesis‘: a synthesis that brings together the separate strands of postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. To take only the first of these strands, a key figure is Michel Foucault, the influential postmodernist philosopher. Foucault rejects ‘grand narratives‘ of social progress including both liberalism and Marxism and, more generally, is deeply sceptical of claims to objective truth made by such movements.


Foucault also proposes a new understanding of political power, locating it not in institutions but much more broadly in the way people think and talk about the world. This gives rise to the idea that by changing this ‘discourse‘ you can change society. Thus we see activists promoting such novel slogans as ‘trans women are women‘ and ‘trans rights are human rights‘. No evidence or explanations are considered necessary to back up these statements, but by getting into positions of power the activists hope to make them political realities.


However Mounk’s account of Foucault also identifies aspects of his thought than run counter to the way ideas of identity have played out in modern society. Foucault was resistant to people being narrowly defined by a specific identity, thus in his own case he regarded the term homosexual as inadequate to describe his sexuality. And Foucault’s use of the concept of the Panopticon, a device that keeps society under constant surveillance by those in power, can be seen to anticipate the role of social media in policing opinions considered beyond the pale by social justice warriors. Foucault in fact seems close in some ways to the classic liberal George Orwell.


In our discussions we questioned whether identity was something that could be dispensed with. If the authorities have decided to impose an identity on a group of people they might have no choice but to adopt it and then work within it in their struggles for freedom. An obvious example is the Jews of Europe, who originally sought integration but were compelled to see themselves in racial terms, culminating in the Zionist idea of a Jewish national identity. And to return to issues of sex and gender, it’s hard to understand feminism as being purely about women wanting equality with men, as women are clearly subject to oppressions that are specific to the inescapable reality of their having female bodies and the centuries-old cultural baggage that comes with that.


We generally felt positive about Mounk and interested in finding out more about his ideas and those of the thinkers – especially Foucault – that he sees as the key players in the ‘identity synthesis‘.