Many Jewish Americans were shocked by some of the reactions to the October 7th Hamas massacre in Israel. While President Biden expressed horror and pledged the American government’s support, some left-wing student groups and activists (including branches of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America) seemed to downplay the violence or blame Israel for what had happened. “The left in America has really let us down,” one disappointed Jewish Democrat told the Los Angeles Times. In the days that followed, social media was full of similarly disillusioned American Jews:
One person who probably was not surprised by the reluctance to condemn Hamas violence is Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In recent years Mounk has become one of the foremost chroniclers of illiberalism around the world. (Full disclosure: I have contributed to Mounk’s magazine, Persuasion, in the past.) In previous work he has documented the dangers of right-wing populism. In his new book, The Identity Trap, Mounk focuses his energies on the rise of a new left-wing ideology that he calls “the identity synthesis” but that is often known by other names, all of them contested, including wokeness, political correctness, social justice politics, identitarianism, and the successor ideology. (Writer Freddie deBoer complained about this dynamic in his plaintive “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.”)
In The Identity Trap, Mounk wrestles with the emergence of a new set of left-wing targets (structural racism, microaggressions, cultural appropriation, generational trauma), means (anti-racism, intersectionality, standpoint epistemology), and goals (equity, decolonization, inclusion). While plenty of ink has been spilled both attacking and defending these ideas, Mounk’s unique contribution is to offer a pocket intellectual history, tracking these concepts back to the groundbreaking work of scholars like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Derrick Bell and showing how they have migrated out of the academy and entered into mainstream political discourse in bastardized form.
Mounk is a bit of a culture warrior — he has risen to fame (well, at least public intellectual fame) defending free speech online — but he is far from a right-wing anti-woke demagogue. Instead, he critiques the identity synthesis from a liberal perspective. He shares left-wing concerns about racial injustice and economic inequality and he takes pains to explain why concepts like structural racism and intersectionality are valuable tools for understanding the world. He also avoids the trap of “nutpicking” (combing through the internet to find the most outrageous example of woke behavior to use as a straw man).
While he is a good-faith interlocutor, Mounk’s mission, at the end of the day, is to show why the identity synthesis is not an over-the-top version of liberalism, but rather deeply antagonistic to core liberal principles. In particular, Mounk believes that an emphasis on identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality as opposed to more universalist claims is dangerous:
My concern about the identity synthesis is not about the ways in which it has “gone too far.” Rather, it is that the identity synthesis is, even at its best, likely to lead to a society that fundamentally violates my most fundamental values and my most ardent aspirations for the future. 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 recognitions — 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.
Mounk argues that many recent “race-sensitive” policies and programs championed by progressives, such as dorms and affinity groups segregated by race, are counter-productive. Indeed, he suggests that these developments fly in the face of social science.
Citing the work of psychologist Gordon Allport, Mounk makes the case that a key weapon in the fight against prejudice is intergroup contact. The research suggests that people in integrated housing tend to have less biased views than those who live in segregated living situations, for example.
But in order for intergroup contact to work its magic, certain prerequisites must be in place. Members of different groups must have basically equal status (for example, interacting with one another as teammates). They must have a common goal that requires cooperation. And their efforts must be supported by the relevant authority figures (say, their coach).
“By contrast,” Mounk writes,
the social norms and institutional rules made fashionable by progressive separatism fly in the face of the key conditions that are required for intergroup contact to succeed. It is not only that many changes, like safe spaces and separate dorms, reduce how often students from different groups are exposed to each other in social settings. It is also that the kinds of rules and rituals that elite institutions are putting into place could have been custom designed to minimize the promise of greater mutual understanding through intergroup contact because they directly violate the conditions discovered by Allport and his followers.
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that many American universities have been struggling to keep the peace in the days since October 7th — they seem to have done very little in recent years to bridge the various divides among their students and to bolster a set of shared values on campus. Indeed, many proponents of the identity synthesis have actively encouraged students to see the world in terms of simplistic binaries (e.g. oppressor/oppressed, settler/colonized). Given what we know about the human instinct for social categorization, and the way that the creation of in-groups and out-groups can fuel bias and even violence, universities should proceed with real caution in this area.
The news from American campuses is concerning at the moment. For example, Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago, argues that
The extremes of political polarization on campus are hyper-charged at the moment—with one Columbia student hitting another with a stick over posted photos of Israeli hostages; with a Stanford lecturer segregating Jewish students in the class to decry them as “colonizers”; with the president of NYU’s Student Bar Association responding to 10/7 by writing in a student bulletin, “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” and having a job offer rescinded as a result.
Meanwhile, conservative groups have created “doxxing trucks” designed to expose students who engage in pro-Palestinian activism. And there have been reports of death threats against speakers at pro-Palestinian rallies.
Will this fraught atmosphere lead to more violence? Correlation is not causation, but the New York Daily News has already reported that hate crimes in the city went up in the aftermath of Oct. 7th. Those trying to hold colleges and other American institutions together at the moment would do well to absorb Mounk’s core message: “We must recover a moral universalism that, even in the darkest hour, reminds us of our shared humanity—and unhesitatingly laments the death of innocents, irrespective of the group to which they belong.”