Yascha Mounk is the founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion. His latest book is The Identity Trap, which is out in paperback with a new afterword on September 23.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a contributor to The Atlantic. He is a commentator on The PBS Newshour. His latest book is How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Brooks discuss how Yascha’s personal history influences his thought, the intellectual history behind the identity synthesis, and how to create a vision for the Democrats to inspire voters.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I know this is very strange. You should say, Yascha Mounk, welcome to my podcast, because you have very kindly agreed to interview me today about the paperback edition of my latest book. Thank you so much for doing that.
David Brooks: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to turn the tables on you. I’m gonna put the fight in The Good Fight. I’ll try to pick as many fights as possible with you in the next hour or so. But it’s a pleasure to celebrate the second anniversary of The Identity Trap, which I truly enjoyed. But before we get to that, I was hoping to just ask you a little about your intellectual formation. Because when I listen to the program—which I do constantly—I get to hear about Cass Sunstein’s intellectual formation or Jonathan Haidt or that Nobel Prize-winning economist whose name I can’t pronounce. But I haven’t heard about yours. So I’d just like to ask—because obviously you’re from Germany, but I’ve heard you talk about Poland, so I get the sense there’s some Polish there, and I’ve heard you say your family has a home in Italy somewhere—how your personal history interacts with your intellectual interests.
Mounk: I have a specific memory of watching the Berlin Wall fall on television. I would have been seven years old at the time. The strange thing is that I moved around a lot as a kid because my mom is a musician—she’s a conductor, and so whenever she’d change orchestras, we would change cities. And the apartment in which I picture myself watching the fall of the Berlin Wall is one that we didn’t live in until I was about nine years old. So I think that instead of the event itself, I must have a vivid memory of watching a documentary that, perhaps for the first time, explained the Berlin Wall to me in terms that I could understand. I think I was just too young to fully comprehend what it meant.
But of course, I come from a family with a long and complicated history with communism, which is to say that my grandparents, who were born in shtetls around Lviv in Ukraine and then spent most of their adult lives in Poland before being thrown out of the country in 1968, had become communists as teenagers and had put their life’s hopes and ambitions into building a better world through communism. Then they lived long enough, sadly, and were wise enough, thankfully, to recognize that that hope had been very much misplaced.
As somebody growing up in Germany, I understood that the fall of the Wall was very exciting and that this meant the country was now reunited and that an evil political system was falling. But I think I also got some ambient sense of sadness through my family that this project, which had promised to be so liberatory, had turned out in practice to be so, so oppressive.
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The strange thing is that like many post-war German Jews, I am Jewish and I’m German by virtue of having been born and raised there, but my family is not German, but Eastern European. When the war started, most of my family was in Poland or east of that. In fact, the reason why my maternal grandfather, for example, survived, but most of his siblings died, is that as a communist, he went east when the war started and he survived the war in the Soviet Union, whereas most of his family members who stayed behind in their native region ended up being murdered during the war.
I do remember being interested in politics since I was very young. In fact, I tried to join the German Social Democratic Party when I was 13 years old. And I was told that you had to be 14 in order to join the party. I was also told that you could always write your birth year in a slightly misleading way, so I backdated my birth by a year in order to join the party. So I was probably the youngest member of the party at the time, since I was younger than you were allowed to be. I understood in a way that many people around the world do—but perhaps not that many Americans do—that history shapes personal lives in very deep ways. It shaped the lives of my great-grandparents and my grandparents during World War II, but it also shaped the lives of my parents, who were young students in Warsaw in their late teens or early twenties when there was a big anti-Semitic wave in Poland and most of the remaining Jews in the country were thrown out in 1968.
But I actually originally wanted to do theatre. I went to see a lot of plays and as a teenager I did some amateur theatre myself, directed a lot of plays when I went off to Cambridge to study and then took a job in theatre in Germany as an assistant director. But I did not like that milieu for all kinds of reasons and sort of fled back to the university and that’s the beginning of how I became an academic and later a writer.
Brooks: I’ve always wanted to be in theater. I wanted to be a playwright when I was a kid. I wanted to be Clifford Odets, who was a lefty playwright. But I think I was not emotionally open enough.
So now you’re a U.S. citizen—what prompted you to move across the Atlantic? Did you feel more comfortable here, or did you just think that it’s a bigger field, or was it random chance?
Mounk: So I ended up in England for my undergraduate education, and that’s part pull and part push. I never quite felt at home in Germany growing up there. There also weren’t really very selective universities in Germany. I’d ended up somewhat by happenstance going to an English speaking school for the last two years of my high school education. I wanted to have an adventure. I wanted to go and discover another country and live somewhere else. The United States at the time felt impossibly far away and expensive. Whereas England still had only a thousand pounds a year of tuition fees. And so that’s something that was doable within my family’s budget. So I ended up going to Cambridge and studying history there.
But I have some relatives in New York, and I visited for the first time when I was 15 years old and then went back nearly every year after that. And from the moment I set foot in New York, I fell in love with the city and I wanted to come here. The irony of my life in the United States is that I came to study as a student-at-large at Columbia for a year through a fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service, kind of a German government fellowship.
I applied to Columbia University for my PhD and kind of wanted to stay there, but the program that I had applied for in political theory was kind of falling apart a little bit when I applied. One of my very kind advisors said, look, you got into Harvard, you should go to Harvard. Our program is not in a good state right now. So I spent the years during graduate school living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in some part of Massachusetts, but taking the Chinatown bus down to New York, at least every second week, if not more often. And now, I teach at Johns Hopkins University and teach partially undergrads in Baltimore, partially grad students in Washington, D.C., but I mostly live in New York City because this is the city I love the best.
Brooks: Bless you—I’m a New Yorker and would live there if my wife would allow it, but that is a battle I’ve lost. Now, when you were at Harvard, was there an intellectual advisor who we would have heard of who helped form your opinions?
Mounk: My doctoral advisor was Michael Sandel, who obviously is a very well-known political philosopher. He taught what—as long as he was teaching it—was the biggest class at Harvard. It was called “Justice,” and it was somewhat famous. Michael is a communitarian, but he did not always invest in community. So I think I saw less of him than any of the other members of the dissertation committee. Sometimes he’d summon me for meetings for about 15 or 20 minutes, and that’s the most I’d see of him in the course of a term. But he’s actually a talented advisor, because some advisors I know of would spend hours with the doctoral students telling them, these are the 50 books you should read in order to build on this footnote you have. Michael would read what I sent him and say, look, you’re trying to write a book, not a dissertation. This is a question you have to answer. Here, I think you’re running off into some interesting direction that’s not actually helpful to the project as a whole. And after 15 minutes with him, I actually had a route, which helped me write my PhD dissertation in a way that then didn’t take enormous effort to turn into a book.
I don’t know how influenced I was by Michael. I have my disagreements with him. He’s a communitarian who at least pretends not to be a liberal. I proudly embrace the label of a philosophical liberal. But he really helped me write my PhD thesis in a way that I’m very grateful for. And I think he taught me some things about pedagogy, about how to, for example, hold a lecture in front of a lot of people in an entertaining way, and also get them to talk, get them to speak to and argue with each other.
I think a lot of advisors think the audience for your PhD dissertation is the four members of your committee, and perhaps three other members of the field. Whereas Michael, from the beginning, said, look, write something that’s going to be interesting. Try to reach an audience of a thousand, of 5,000 or 10,000 people rather than five people. I think he was encouraging me to think of it in some ways as a book project rather than something where the point was to make every footnote as unassailable as it could possibly be. So he had an ability to help shape an intellectual project that an editor would need to have. And to those PhD students who may be listening to this podcast—find yourself an advisor who can do that. The dangerous PhD advisors are those who are very happy to chew the shit with you and talk with you about ideas endlessly, but who have no sense of how to actually shape an overall intellectual project that is coherent and that can turn into a finished product that people are interested in engaging with.
Brooks: For what it’s worth, when I’m talking to academics about how to write for the general public, my first piece of advice is: don’t try to anticipate objections. Academics are always trying to make an airtight case for something. Instead, just throw the point out there and let people object. It’s just a more dramatic and stark way to do it. You’re not trying to tell people what to think. You’re trying to provoke them into thinking.
Mounk: Well, the thing you’re picking up on is that academics always have in their mind the guy who most hated them in grad school, who’s now a professor at a rival university. And what would he say in response to this? And if that’s your internal audience, you’re not actually going to be able to communicate interesting points.
Brooks: Let’s turn to The Identity Trap, which came out in September 2023. Actually, I was a little startled by that because we’d been surrounded by this ideological system, which you call the “identity synthesis,” and which we used to call “identity politics.” It’s been prominent since 2013, 2014. But it didn’t really have an intellectual history until you wrote it a full 10 years later.
Mounk: The striking thing is that I didn’t want to write that much about the intellectual history of this movement. I was mostly interested in engaging with the arguments that were really dominant, perhaps hegemonic, for that brief moment in American history. My editor rightly pushed me to tell the story of these ideas as well. He recognized that this would be a story that readers would find really engaging and fascinating, and that both to critique these ideas in a fair and rich way, and to tell the history of their evolution, would be a really powerful way of doing that. And so then I thought, okay, I’m partially trained in intellectual history. I studied the history of political thought in my undergraduate years at Cambridge, and it’s a part of what I did in my PhD work at Harvard. Let me go and read the smart intellectual histories of (what I came to call) the identity synthesis. I can summarize them in a chapter or so and then I can move on to the, you know, core work of philosophical critique.
When I did that, I recognized that there just wasn’t a serious intellectual history of these ideas that had been written. That even though these ideas had become so dominant in parts of the academy, people somehow had not recognized that as a real ideological tradition worth engaging with—or perhaps they were worried about engaging with them in that way. In fact, I turned to one prominent intellectual historian who I thought would know this history very well. That historian explicitly told me, look, if you are interested in telling that intellectual history in order to potentially critique these ideas, I like you and I respect you, but I don’t want to be part of that project. I found that to be quite striking. So I went back and did a ton of reading and pieced together the intellectual history myself.
Brooks: Did that historian agree with the ideas contained in the identity synthesis, or was he just intimidated to take it on?
Mounk: Some mix of the two. I don’t think that he fully agrees with those ideas, but I think he had perhaps some instinct of political hygiene. Somehow to be part of a project that beats up on these ideas too much is bad for karma. And maybe there was some fear—which is something that I grappled with in the introduction to the book and talk about in the new afterword to the paperback edition as well—that to critique these ideas is to help the right; that there’s a battle between left-wing identity politics and right-wing populism, and even if one might have one’s private reservations about left-wing identity politics, those are best kept private. Because the moment you make them public, that just helps the other people who are beating up on those ideas—Donald Trump and his cohorts—and so therefore you are opening the gate to them.
The argument I made in the introduction to The Identity Trap, and which I circle back to in the new afterword, is that this is just the completely wrong way of thinking about it. You can see since the beginning of the 2010s that even though these two sets of ideas are politically hostile to each other, in political practice they actually help each other tremendously. It is the hold of left-wing identitarian ideas that strengthens right-wing populism, and the strength of right-wing populism which makes it so hard to argue against these forms of identity politics on the left. In other words, as I put it in that introduction, one is the yin to the other’s yang—they actually condition each other.
I enjoyed doing these readings because all of those thinkers were much more subtle and much more insightful than the kind of simplistic bundle of slogans that this ideology later became. Michel Foucault was very concerned about a dominant set of narratives in the West that he thought was oppressive to a lot of groups. He thought that it is a mistake to believe in universal truth, to think that we can objectively classify things in the world in a way that isn’t misleading. So he was very skeptical, for example, of medical diagnosis of mental illness, and he also thought that there’s not really any such things as universal truths, that we should be very careful about normative judgments about the world, because all of these really just added up to the true source of power and oppression—political discourses.
When you traditionally think about political power, when you ask a smart high schooler, how does political power work? They might say, well, there’s a Congress and a president and they pass laws and those laws bind people and they have an army and police force and they exercise power in accordance with those laws. So power is top down in that kind of way. Foucault said, no, to me, power is always reconstituting itself through the discourse—the way we speak to each other today, the kind of terms we use. That is the true way in which political power exercises itself. And the interesting thing about that is that it had a kind of quiet implication that nearly every system is about as oppressive as every other. The best you can hope for is these brief moments when you fight back against the discourse and open up some space for contestation. But very quickly, a new discourse will emerge and that will be about as oppressive as a previous one. This is why Noam Chomsky, when I had him on the podcast a few years ago, was still shocked—50 years after his famous debate with Michel Foucault—about how apolitical, how amoral, Foucault had seemed to him.
Brooks: Now let’s take two pieces of Foucault’s thought. Let’s start with this one: As Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of critical race theory, put it very pithily, words are action. Would that have been—if you go back through the liberal tradition, back to John Stuart Mill or whoever—would that have been considered a bizarre notion, or would that have been accepted within the liberal tradition?
Mounk: I think that liberals would have been quite skeptical of that. Certainly John Stuart Mill thought that the state should only be able to restrain behaviors of individuals when they harm others: the so-called harm principle. And he would have thought that just words that offend you or that hurt your feelings likely would not qualify under that kind of harm principle. The idea that words are forms of actions actually first appears in analytical linguistics and in linguistic philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. So the idea is that, for example, if I have a special sort of social role as a priest, then the formula, I pronounce you man and wife actually is a kind of action in the world. The moment I pronounce those words, you now have a different legal status as a married couple, which is different from what went before.
But the idea—as Foucault and then importantly Edward Said—used it goes further than that. They really tried to say that words are the ultimate source, not just in special moments like a priest pronouncing those words, of social power. That, for example, according to Said, the way in which the West was able to colonize the East was through these notions of the “Oriental mind.” It’s the way in which the Arab mind was represented in Western media that really formed the backbone for oppression of people in those parts of the world. That then had an implication that Foucault himself did not ever get to, which is that the real sort of forum for political battle is over words, films, texts, cultural representations. And that’s, of course, one of the ways in which the identity synthesis has become very normalized in our politics. The idea that, if you’re a feminist, you don’t just fight for certain legal changes around the right to choose what to do with a pregnancy and so on. You might blog about how sexist an episode of a popular Netflix show is, and that that is a way of trying to affect political change.
Brooks: How much do you agree with the idea that words are action? On the one hand, I want to say words are not actions, because if words are actions, then you can pretty easily regulate them. On the other hand, when Hillary Clinton says “basket of deplorables,” a lot of people feel like she has disempowered them. And you can think of a million examples of this. So how would we think of just the basic accuracy of that assertion?
Mounk: I think that’s a great question. I think that there obviously are ways in which that’s true. One of the strange paradoxes about postmodernism is that it says we naively think that how institutions work and the standards they use and who they promote and who they give prizes to and what we consider true and what we consider false comes down from the scientific method, and that these are time-honored principles, when really this is all just about political power and about who’s served by this. To some extent, the political success of these movements is self-validating. I certainly have less trust today for what it means to have won a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award or to get an Oscar than I did 20 or 30 years ago, in part because I see how politicized these kinds of institutions have become. We can see in some scientific fields what incredible power ideological pressure groups can actually exercise. And so in a way, it’s hard to argue with that.
Now, I would just distinguish here between a descriptive point and a normative point. Descriptively, it is true that political power and ideology and self-interest often drive the behavior of human beings in deep ways, and the scientific method, institutions like peer review, are a potential way of attenuating those problems—but they are certainly not a perfect solution that’s going to always work. So some of those basic postmodern critiques actually are true. Nevertheless, I think it’s very important to make normative distinctions, to say that when we think about how to organize our society, we absolutely need rules that punish people who physically hurt others. We absolutely need rules that make sure that you cannot, in the pursuit of your ideology, go around planting bombs, beating people up, intimidating people. That way our society is going to collapse into violence and chaos very, very quickly. But we absolutely should allow people to express themselves, because once we start to lock people up for what they say, or even just to be far too quick in firing them and imposing very severe social sanctions on them, we’re going to lose our ability to self-correct, our ability to actually deliberate collectively about important issues. That’s going to have very bad consequences. Words can be actions in certain kinds of ways. I think it’s fair to look at the representation of ideas in groups with a critical eye. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But we do also need to maintain the normative distinction implied in the children’s ditty that sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt you.
Brooks: I never felt that when a girl was dumping me in high school. The words were pretty bad.
How much does this tremendous emphasis on language among these thinkers just reflect the fact that progressivism moved from a proletarian-centered movement to a faculty-centered movement? That if you’re a UAW organizer in an auto plant, you probably don’t think words are actions—but if you’re in the academy and words are all you got, then that’s going to become your main arena of politics?
Mounk: I think that is one of the great transformations of our time. I mean, you look at the result of the 2024 election, which, of course, I could not write about in the main text of The Identity Trap since it was published before that. There’s this famous chart by The Economist which shows that, in socioeconomic terms, Kamala Harris’ electoral coalition most closely resembled that of Bob Dole, the Republican candidate in 1996. And Thomas Piketty has written about this as the Brahmanization of the left.
Today, a good predictor of being on the left is having a college degree or having a grad school degree or being relatively more educated. So it does make sense that this new focus on words takes pride of place in elite politics. In one sense, this is very powerful and influential. You look at the summer of 2020 and you look at the extent to which some of these ideas continue to influence the Democratic Party. It’s really astonishing how much power it has managed to accumulate in the world.
On the other hand, I do think that it can often lead activists into over-indexing on quite marginal political battles that just aren’t capable of bringing about the kind of change that they hope for. If you’re focusing on saying, not homeless people, but people who have experienced homelessness, and you’re investing a lot of political resources in making sure that everybody says that and in berating people who don’t say that, A) you’re going to alienate a bunch of people and push them out of your political coalition; but B) even if you succeed, you haven’t actually fixed the lives of those homeless people. You haven’t actually offered them resources or mental health interventions or whatever it is they need to lead more dignified lives. We’ve just made sure that people at Princeton get hostile stares if they use the wrong piece of vocabulary.
One of the things that really came to me as a bit of an epiphany when I was doing all of the research for the intellectual history part of The Identity Trap, is that I of course understood and argued that these ideas really are quite antithetical to philosophical liberalism—that they are not the attempt to complete the civil rights movement, but are actually in conflict with the most basic principles of the civil rights movement. But reading the very interesting history of Derrick Bell and very interesting and often subtle writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, you recognize that this was explicitly part of the motivation from the beginning. Derrick Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory, is a lawyer for the NAACP in the 1960s, fighting to desegregate schools and small businesses throughout the American South. He really sours on that approach. His first big academic article says, perhaps our focus on integration and Brown vs the Board of Education was a mistake. Perhaps in some cases it would have been better to have schools that are separate but truly equal—to prioritize equal funding for black schools rather than the integration of schools. He mocks the civil rights movement. “We shall overcome,” he thinks, is a terrible piece of kitschy civil rights law that we really need to reject if we want to recognize what the world is really like.
So there was this idea that political institutions, that neutral legal standards like the ones the civil rights movement fought for, are always going to just be an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes, to distract us from the racist reality of this country. And this explains why America has never changed, why even if it might appear in the 1970s that the country has improved from 1950—or in the 2000s that it’s improved from the 1970s—all of that just hides a more subtle way in which racism has reconfigured itself in the background. And you can see how all of that, even though it’s much more subtle, paves the way for the really simplistic slogan that Ibram X. Kendi proclaims with a lot of attention in 2020, which is that there’s no such thing as not being racist. You’re either racist or you’re an anti-racist—and what it means to be an anti-racist, of course, is to sign up to a very particular set of DEI policies.
Brooks: George Marsden is a historian who once wrote of Martin Luther King, what gave King’s rhetoric such force was his sense that good and evil are written into the natural law of the universe. That segregation is not just sometimes wrong, but it is always wrong, that it is a sin. To go from that, really a belief in natural law, to a belief in the opposite—I’m sort of impressed by the audacity of it. It’s striking to me that there were these very dramatic reversals of what was the prevailing view even on the left. We talk about how much Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party. This was a pretty dramatic change in the intellectual roots of, I don’t want to necessarily say the Democratic Party, but certainly the progressives I knew on the East Coast and the various institutions that I inhabit.
Mounk: I’m more broadly struck by the extent to which the ideas I grew up with in the political mainstream in general, but particularly on the left, have just gone out of the window over the course of the last 25 years. I was 18 in the year 2000. And back then, if you said, there’s no such thing as this race or that race, there’s just the human race, or, I aspire to a society in which what your skin color is, what gender you are, what sexual orientation you have, is going to be way less important than it is today, in which it doesn’t determine your life chances and doesn’t determine much of your identity—those would have been thought of as left-wing political positions. Today, I think they are seen as right-leaning political positions in some quarters, perhaps as offensive political positions. The idea that there’s only such a thing as the human race even made it into some of those very silly lists of microaggressions circulated by American universities. I don’t want to overstate the importance of those lists, but I think it does show you something about how, you know, the things that I took to be fundamental to my left-wing worldview growing up have now become vilified on parts of the left. I know that this is the thing that many people say—but I don’t feel like I’ve left that part of the left; I feel like that part of the left has left me.
Brooks: Now, you opened the book with a bunch of stories which gave me PTSD because I remember life in 2020 and 2021, and they’re stories like somebody trying to get an operation for a patient and the doctors asked what race the person was because they’re apportioning who gets surgery on that basis. I think the first story in the book is kindergartens that are segregating by ethnic categories. A woman wants to get her daughter switched into a different classroom with a different teacher, and the principal tells her, no, your daughter has to go with the black teacher. And the girl is black, the mom is black, the principal is black. But suddenly among these three African Americans, an ethos of segregation has become the norm—not the thing to be objected to. My question is, okay, it’s now 2025. How much of this is over?
Mounk: I think the jury is a little bit out. The craziest ideas have fallen out of favor. And while I took seriously the life of ideas and wrote The Identity Trap in order to make what I thought were the most recent and serious arguments against some of these ideas, the craziest ideas were walked back without anybody ever engaging in or conceding the argument. And to a remarkable extent, there are commentators—some mainstream commentators, I might even say—including perhaps one or two of your colleagues, who proselytized all of these ideas in 2020 and when presented with them now say, oh, that’s crazy. Nobody believed this. You believed this. You wrote that you believe this. I don’t think these people are liars. I think today many of them genuinely don’t remember that five years ago they were preaching from that hymn book. So I think in one sense, the crazy end of these ideas has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. And there’s a general sense of embarrassment that anybody might ever have believed that and perhaps some genuine sense of self-delusion with all of these people pretending that they didn’t believe that.
Now, I think under the surface of that, there do still seem to be a lot of ideas that are quite influential, especially in younger generations, that persist. Worries about cultural appropriation, for example, the idea that somehow when you engage with the cultures and the contributions and the traditions of our fellow citizens who make up these wonderfully cosmopolitan cities like New York, you’re not celebrating one of the most remarkable achievements of 21st century America, but rather you’re somehow perpetuating some very hard-to-name harm that you should be very careful about. That idea, for example, still persists.
Of course I worry that Donald Trump was elected in good part because of the influence of ideas and has made the battle against those ideas central to his administration. But rather than trying to counteract forms of genuine ideological coercion, which persisted in universities, for example, he has decided to either just weaken those institutions as much as he can or to try and impose his own orthodoxy on those institutions to try not to go towards a genuinely philosophically liberal state of affairs in which people are free to have academic inquiry. But to say, we’ll now tell you which ideas are verboten in those institutions and which ideas should be embraced. This is going to push a lot of the left back into the identity trap in the way that happened during the first Trump administration. I can see moment by moment how this is playing out, how criticizing any part of the left is once again starting to be perceived as besmirching your own nest, as fouling your own nest, as just helping the right. How the most strident voices, the most unthinking voices are once again gaining attention because at least they’re doing something to stand up to Donald Trump. And I worry that just as the vibe shift went quite fast from 2023 to 2025, the pendulum can swing back.
One way of thinking about this whole moment is that we need a new dispensation. We need a new equilibrium that actually returns to some of the most fundamental insights of the philosophically liberal tradition in a way that works for the 21st century. Instead what we got with Trump’s election is another even bigger swing of the pendulum. And what we may get in the next few years is another even bigger swing back of that same pendulum. That’s certainly what even some mainstream voices in the Democratic Party are saying. Tim Walz a few months ago said, the problem is not that we had the wrong conception of DEI or that we were too woke. The problem is that we didn’t defend wokeness and DEI sufficiently stridently. So we may get a choice in 2028 between a hardened MAGA movement and an attempt at a renaissance of those ideas.
Brooks: “Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you” was sort of the epitome of, my god, we really did help get this guy reelected again. But the one thing where I think I would agree with you, I think the presence of these ideas has retarded the Democratic Party or progressivism’s attempt to find a new narrative, because a lot of these ideas are based on the oppressor/oppressed narrative. And it’s been hard to get out of that narrative and to come up with something new.
Mounk: I think that’s really interesting. I’ve been thinking about Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of the Scientific Revolution. Kuhn tries to understand in his work—which proved to be phenomenally influential—why it is that it often took way longer than it should have done for obsolete scientific paradigms to give away. Why even when it became clear that they had thrown up a lot of anomalies, that they couldn’t explain important parts of experiments and important parts of the empirical world, especially a lot of older scientists just kept sticking to them. Part of his explanation is biographical, that if all of your career and all of your achievements are invested in one paradigm, it’s very hard to fully give up on it. But part of it is that it’s not enough to realize that there’s anomalies. It’s not enough to see, actually Newton’s laws of motion don’t fully explain everything and something seems to be off here. Unless you have a different language to speak, unless you have some other way of explaining at what speed an apple is going to fall from a tree, you’re going to go to one that kind of works in 98% of cases, because you have to have something to say. So what you need for those paradigms to die is a new paradigm that actually can explain the old and can make sense of anomalies. I think perhaps you’re right that the situation in which the Democratic Party finds itself is that it has become a little bit embarrassed by some of the woke talking points, that congressmen and senators are sending out emails containing words like Latinx with a much smaller frequency than they did five years ago. But they don’t know how to talk about politics without the basically identitarian framework. They haven’t yet developed this new paradigm. And until they do, they’re kind of dumbstruck. They just don’t really know how to speak to the country. That’s a smaller problem than actively leaning into discourse that is hugely unpopular, but it’s still a very big political problem.
Brooks: Yeah, I agree. Ruth DeFries applied Kuhnian paradigm shifts to political science and political history. She had a theory she called the “ratchet-hatchet-pivot-ratchet theory,” which is that culture solves a problem, you ratchet up, you make some progress, but the narrative you’re telling stops working. And so you hatchet it, you have to chop it all up, and then you pivot because somebody finds a new narrative to tell, and then you ratchet up again. Jonathan Rauch wrote an essay in Persuasion that argued that postmodernism says truth is not objective, truth is a social construct. And Donald Trump takes that idea and he just drives a truck through it. You want no truth? I’ll give you no truth. It’s often said that Trump practiced identity politics for white people. That was also an idea that started on the left. Then the story is that all of society is a series of power conflicts between oppressor and oppressed groups. Trump tells that story too.
Mounk: I think that that’s partially true and that there’s also something slightly deeper going on. Let me say first of all that we were very proud to publish that essay by Jonathan Rauch—everything he publishes is amazing. If you haven’t read it, go back and read it. I’ve come to think of a lot of politics as being a form of civilizational exercise. In our evolutionary history, we’ve evolved to favor the in-group and disfavor the out-group. To be capable of great altruism and great courage in dealing with our family and friends and sometimes our tribe or our broader group. But we’re also capable of great indifference and sometimes cruelty and violence in dealing with the out-group. I think a lot of how to make sense of modern liberalism or of other theories about how to have a successful, peaceful, thriving society is that we need to harness those instincts and to limit the destructive potential.
Now, I think that right-wing ethno-nationalism and left-wing identity politics are both attempts to justify the base evolutionary instinct in response to that civilizing mission. On the ethno-nationalist right, it is to say, these idiots want to tell you to be weak and decadent and to care about every human being equally and to be welcoming and all of those things. What really matters is your group. What really matters is people who are white or who are German or who are Japanese. And everything else doesn’t matter. It is actually noble to just double down on your identity group, to say that the majority has a right to do whatever it wants and nothing else matters. I think the identity synthesis has in many ways been an attempt to justify those evolutionary mechanisms from the left. To say, actually, your true identity, your true definition is given by the particular intersection of your skin color, your culture, your religion, your sexual orientation. And the most natural form of politics, perhaps the most noble form of politics, is just to fight for the interests of that group. And we’re to dress that up in various ways in emancipatory language. But really what we’re allowing you to do is to lean into those evolutionary instincts.
Now, I think that the way that this plays out has some structural similarities. I also think there are some people on the right who are quite self-consciously appropriating the most useful elements of the identity synthesis in their own service and that deep skepticism towards truth is one of them. But I also still think that in many important ways, these are historically different traditions that remain quite separate. I think right ethno-nationalist populism is an old tradition which predates the identity synthesis and even though it’s taken on some loanwords from the language of campus activists, what explains it is different. And that’s why The Identity Trap is fundamentally a book about the left, not because I’m not worried about those forms of right-wing populism. I’ve written about them in The People vs. Democracy and The Great Experiment, and I write about them often in other writing, but because I think it is ultimately a separate political movement that’s related.
If you want to attack liberalism, you’re going to make some claims that are similar. Marxists had the primary enemy as liberalism rather than fascism, and the woke left has historically had liberalism as the primary enemy, not the far right. So you’re going to be claiming that universal values like those defended by liberals are really just fake, that nobody really means them. You’re going to be claiming that liberalism has been incapable of making any progress, and Marxists and the woke left have that in common. They also have important differences, which is that Marxists think about class, whereas the woke think about identity categories, and that Marxists, very importantly, had a kind of utopian promise at the end of the story. We’re going to build a classless society in which the children of bourgeoisie and the children of a proletariat have all become part of one universal socialist subject and they can all be friends. Whereas, of course, what’s striking about the identity synthesis is the absence of that utopia at the end of the struggle. To say: I want to build an America in one hundred and two hundred and five hundred years in which, finally, whether you’re black or white or gay or straight, it’s not going to matter. It doesn’t ring right to the woke left. It rings like a provocation.
Brooks: Marxism was more Christian than it is in its instances. It ends with an eschatology, a vision of the land of milk and honey, that the lion will die down with the lamb, which this does not have. Now I’m going to ask you a completely unfair question, which I failed at about two hours ago, but you’re Mr. Liberalism, so I feel I can ask you this. So I’m having lunch with a Democratic member of the House, and we’re talking, as one does, about what Democrats should say in order to recapture the House, and my argument to him was, that’s really not your job. That when there’s a historical shift, which I think we’re in the middle of, the shift takes place sort of like what you describe in this book. You get some intellectuals, they have some very daring ideas, those ideas go mainstream, and then they eventually get picked up by the politicians. And this was true, obviously, of the identity synthesis. I’d say it’s even true of MAGA. Now we know a whole series of thinkers who produced what later became MAGA. And so I said, politicians who are busy going to committee hearings and raising money, it’s unfair to ask them to do this. We shouldn’t expect Chuck Schumer to come up with a new social vision. He’s busy being Chuck Schumer. But so he, of course, turned to me and said, hey, Mr. Writer, MAGA is a form of identity, who you are. MAGA is a form of what a good man looks like, what a good woman looks like. MAGA gives you a sense of righteous participation. MAGA gives you a sense of belonging. And Democrats are just not gonna counter that with some tax credits, and that it’s gotta be a much bigger vision, which I do think the identity synthesis folks did come up with, a bigger vision. And so you’re in liberal circles, maybe one of the leading liberals in our country right now. Do you have a way to make liberalism seem sexy and compelling to a country that has managed to avoid finding it sexy and compelling for the last couple years?
Mounk: Let me give you three points that hopefully build to a real answer. The first is what is the job of a Democratic congressman? What is the job most importantly of whoever is going to represent the Democratic Party in the 2028 presidential elections? I think that is to speak a new political language which shows that there’s a way forward, which is neither left-wing identity politics, nor the MAGA movement, nor some weird halfway house between them that is 50% of one and 50% of another. I think that it’s not too hard to see what that looks like because there is a silent majority of Americans, which is unlike the silent majority that Nixon talked about in the 1970s, that is inclusive, that is tolerant, that I think you can appeal to in the service of a decent country. Americans believe in capitalism, believe in markets, believe in the spirit of enterprise to make the country richer and more affluent. They also hate chronic capitalism. They also think it’s deeply unfair if big corporations and hedge fund managers don’t pay their fair share of tax. And you can build a decent politics on the recognition of both of those things.
On culture, I think most Americans recognize the great contributions that immigrants have made. I think they want to be very tolerant towards sexual minorities. They certainly believe in gay marriage and they believe that if you have gender dysphoria and you want to go around your life in some ways presenting as a gender that’s different from your biological sex, then it’s a free country and you’re entitled to do what you want. At the same time, they have deep concerns when they feel like the country doesn’t have control over its borders, and some politicians seem to nearly be inviting people to come to the country. And they have concerns when people who have gone through male puberty get to compete in female sports or when 13 year olds are very quickly rushed to untested hormonal treatments or, sometimes a few years later, operative interventions that might make them infertile for the rest of their lives. And so I think it’s possible to fight for a tolerant country that recognizes those things.
In straightforward political terms, I think the first political party that actually firmly and consistently manages to get into that space might dominate a new era of American politics. I see the role of Persuasion and of my podcast and of my writing—and of many liberals in the space, including mostly conservative liberals like yourself—is to build the intellectual framework for those politicians. That’s not for the candidate to invent in 2028, but we need to make sure that there’s the intellectual infrastructure for that candidate so that they know what language to speak, what policies to draw on and what ideas to have. It’s really important that we continue to build that out over the next few years.
The second point is, what is the broader argument for philosophical liberalism? And that is to say that our country has many challenges and many injustices, including, by the way, the ones that the left points to, that of course there’s still real inequality of opportunities and the legacy of past oppression and the way in which slavery has shaped many aspects of American society and all of that is real. But let’s be proud of ourselves. Let’s recognize how enormously far we have come. Let’s recognize that this is still one of the best societies in the history of humanity in which to live, that the extent to which most human beings today in the United States and in Germany and France and Japan and other places around the world that are effectively philosophically liberal, can lead dignified, self-determined, affluent, entrepreneurial, thriving lives is unrivaled in history. And that this is not in spite of liberal principles, but because of them. That we’ve made progress because the universal creed of liberalism that you should not be held back by your identity, that should not define you, hasn’t always been lived up to, but that has been the lodestar that has allowed us to critique when we fall short of it and to slowly, asymptomatically move closer towards that goal.
But the third point is that liberalism, of course, has always been an aspirational ideal. Liberals never said, this is a liberal society, we’re just trying to defend it. And the problem, both with us achieving some of the goals of the tradition, and failing to live up on other parts of that goal or seeing other cracks in our societies and feeling a sense of ownership over it, feeling a sense that many things would be worse than the status quo, as we see in countries in which authoritarian populists have really won power, is that can make us too defensive. They can make us too quick to say, we mistrust the people, let’s insulate the elites from real popular participation. We mistrust the people and so let’s pretend that everything is great because the moment we acknowledge some problems, perhaps they’re going to use that as arguments against us. And philosophical liberalism does go through periodic crises. It went through a crisis in the 19th century after the failure of the 1848 liberal revolutions, for example. It went through a massive crisis in the first half of the 20th century between the 1910s and 1950 with the rise of communism and fascism.
I think it’s going through a serious crisis today. So the most fundamental thing we need to do is to reimagine what a liberal philosophy looks like for the 21st century. And that will take adjustments. It will take recognition that that worldview that I held as an 18 year old in the year 2000 no longer works, that many fundamental aspects of it have been proven wrong by historical developments since. And to build a new liberalism that is based on a worldview which feels adept to 2025 and 2050 in a way that our old language no longer does. I worry that we liberals are not doing enough work on that. This is a very hard exercise. I think which liberal thinkers and writers are going to be remembered from this political moment turns on who is going to make the biggest contribution in getting us there. But that, beyond the 2028 election, is the way to get out of this crisis.
Brooks: Scruton argued that liberalism is a system based on choice, but in order to have a secure foundation from which to make choices, you have to be embedded in a series of institutions that precede choice. And that the central conservative truth is that these covenantal relationships of family, neighborhood, community, nationalism are the foundation of liberalism. And that liberalism in its most extreme and hyper-individualistic form began eating away at these foundational institutions, these covenantal institutions.
Mounk: I think there’s a lot of bad post-liberal arguments at the moment. I think a lot of post-liberal arguments take the form of looking at all the good things in our society today and ignoring them. And then looking at all the bad things in our society, many of which are things that existed in every society on the surface of the earth, and then ascribing them to liberalism, and saying, you see how bad liberalism is? It’s because of liberalism that we have prostitution and immorality and this and that. And it’s like, in Catholic France throughout the early modern period in the Middle Ages, you had as much prostitution as you had today. To say that this is somehow a result of liberalism is, I think, absurd. The strongest post-liberal argument is the one you’re getting at. It is to say that freedom is a great human good and is very attractive. And telling individuals that they can do whatever they want can lead to some amount of autonomy and satisfaction into thriving societies. But only as long as there is an invisible background stratum of social order. And that has to come from stable families, from public order, from moral assumptions about the importance of treating each other with kindness, of feeling obligation for the children that you might put into the world. None of that comes from within the liberal tradition. And what we’re seeing now is that the early success of liberal societies was actually parasitical on those pre-existing non-liberal values and ideals, and the longer that liberal experiment has been running, the more we’ve eaten up that capital of the background stratum. And now that we’re about to finish the meal, we suddenly see how dysfunctional and aimless and perhaps chaotic and violent a liberal society that can’t cannibalize this pre-existing non-liberal order actually looks like. So perhaps liberalism is time-bound. Perhaps it only works for the 20 or 50 or 100 years in which it can be parasitical in the pre-existing order in that kind of way.
I think that’s a very serious challenge. I think it’s a challenge that is made worse by the fact that a lot of liberals have been, certainly in deeds, if not always in words, perfectionist liberals rather than political liberals, which is to say that they have not only wanted our political institutions to be neutral between different conceptions of the good so that you, each of the listeners of this podcast, can make up their own minds about what’s truly valuable, it’s that they really did try to impose a vision of society where they said, if you’re deeply religious, we’ll tolerate that, but perhaps you’re a little bit weird and we’ll madly discriminate against you in the workplace. If you hold mostly conservative views on questions of sexual morality, we’re going to shame you for that and you better shut up about that or you’re really going to lose a lot of friends at college. And that, I think, was a philosophical mistake because it is not living up to the actual moral ambitions of liberalism. And it was a political mistake because it alienated a lot of people.
Now, part of the solution to that is to return to a genuine political liberalism in which we say that what our tradition is, at heart, is the recognition that we live in deeply diverse societies, which by the way even the societies of early modern Europe were, because they had very different religious conceptions and that was enough to send them to war against each other for centuries. But we realize we’re never going to be able to fight out which moral conception is right, such that this is the moral conception that the state aims to institute in society. We’re never going to have consensus around that. All that can lead to is deep social strife and probably civil war.
So what we want to do is to put the conditions in place so that each person can pursue their own conceptions of what is worthwhile. But I think that is conformable with a public culture in which we’re much more comfortable accepting the importance of some of those small c conservative virtues. The idea that hard work and discipline is something that is very likely conducive to the idea that we should value people who, for whatever secular or religious justification in their own minds, are devoting a lot of their time to helping others, to raising a family, to devoting themselves to community. That having self-discipline and discipline over how communities can be cohesive is something that we should prioritize as a virtue, which will help make everybody in our society thrive. And so, you know, as somebody who does not come from a conservative milieu and who does not come from a religious milieu, I have come to recognize how much small-c conservatives and how much religious people can offer us in that respect.
Now, I think that that doesn’t require giving up the principles of philosophical liberalism. I think that in a society that actually lives up to the true precepts of political liberalism, there are naturally going to be enough people who cultivate and pass on those values and those virtues from one generation to the next that liberalism turns out not to be parasitical on a pre-existing order in the way that the post-liberals fear. And for all of the social dysfunction that does exist in countries like the United States today, it’s not at all clear to me that that social dysfunction is higher than it was in the past. In fact, in some ways, America today is much more, perhaps sometimes worryingly so, much more in accordance with what they wanted than before. The rate of teen pregnancy is much lower. The rate at which young people have sex is much lower. The rate of crime has gone down over the last 30 years.
The era in which there was a ton of serial killers was the 1970s. Not today. Somehow serial killers have mostly disappeared. I think if you actually take the slightly larger lens view, it doesn’t seem to me to be the case that 50 years ago we were a wonderfully well-ordered society and now everything is chaos and bedlam and Sodom and Gomorrah. But I do take that conservative objection and that post-liberal objection seriously. I think that is the strongest argument to which liberals need to formulate a response.
Brooks: I’m going to end by mentioning something that Ivan Krastev, one of your previous guests, said, which I actually quoted in a column. Because I just think it’s good to end on a point of imagining how much history could be about to change.
Mounk: Ivan Krastev is full of mind-opening observations. I think he’s one of the most important thinkers of this moment and of his age, and he’s criminally under-known in the United States. The Democratic Party is in a deep crisis, not just of slogans, not just of policy platforms, but of a basic model of understanding its own country. I think that the average Democratic politician with which I also occasionally have the pleasure or the honor of having lunch just has trouble speaking even in descriptive terms about the country in ways that actually make sense.
It does go back to this idea that I’m playing around with, perhaps because I might write my next book on it, of this basic worldview that I grew into and that was so pervasive and dominant until quite recently. The idea that nationalism is the ideology of the 20th century and it really won’t play much of a role in the 21st century. The idea that the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, that we can use the basic frame of the civil rights movement and apply it to the next movement, the next movement, the next movement, and that’s going to be the basic triumphalist theme of the next 50 years of politics. The idea that there may have been a brief pause in the amount of social mobility we had in part because the failings of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but we’re to go back to a society in which it feels like there’s a lot of upward social movement and the way to achieve that is to send everybody to college and everybody is going to turn into nice, educated urbanites and that’s what the country is going to look like. The idea that the only people who are not on board with that are the old white rural losers who are the basket of deplorables that Hillary Clinton famously talked about, who somehow wish back a past which, ha ha, of course, has gone forever. I think that the revolution which has transformed the Republican Party and which is still in full swing, which is going to devour a lot of its authors as revolutions always do, as Ivan pointed out, is going to come to the Democratic Party as well.
But if the Democratic Party wants to be able to take the fight of the Republicans, it needs to have a bonfire of certainties. It needs to recognize that a lot of the basic elements of its worldview, of the basic ways in which it describes the world, can no longer be rescued. They have to be thrown on the ash heap of history, not because we should give up on the values, but undergird many of those views. I don’t think my values have changed very much since I was 18 years old. But as long as we sound like we’re trying to make yesterday’s melody work, we’re just going to sound delusional and that’s true of a Democratic Party, but it’s true much more broadly of philosophical liberals that don’t want the extremes of the right or, for that matter, the extremes of the left to win in that political moment. Revolutions are weird historical moments in which an old, settled, established order is falling apart. But the ones who are able to impose their will in those historical moments recognize that the old order is obsolete and have some coherent plan for what to put in its place. I think a lot of the people who I most identify with, who most want to defend the values that I care about, have not yet recognized that we are in the middle of a revolution. And even among the ones who have recognized that, and perhaps I can treat myself under that, I don’t think we have a plan for how to use this political moment to rescue what is valuable in our political order and to make the 21st century live up more closely to our most cherished ideals rather than to horribly undermine and ignore them as the world did for the first half of the 20th century.
Brooks: I’ll just underline that by pointing out it’s not possible to be too radical in one’s thinking at a time like this. I would say not necessarily radical, but widening one’s imagination. Go back to when I was a kid, I was a Reaganite, I worked in National Review. But Hayek, I think he founded the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 at a time when everybody assumed centralization of state power was the future. And he writes his book, no, you’re wrong, you’re all wrong. And he turned out to be more right than they were.
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