Coleman Hughes interviews Yascha Mounk about how to make the case against the new ideas on race, gender and sexual orientation that have become so influential over the past decade.
Here's a thought I had. How much did the historic role of guilt in liberalism contribute to the way that so many people who do believe in liberal universalism have been so submissive to the identity synthesis? (Granted, it's not as bad as it was in 2020.) I'd be interested to know what Yascha thinks.
I really like the concept of ‘trap,’ especially when the ‘trapper’ plays on the empathy of the believer. Once succumbed, the believer becomes addicted to favoring ‘identity’ as the single cause of social problems. No more juggling with complexities; no need to reconstruct the history of the past 50 years. Once in the trap, the believer has no need to remember the (amazing) achievements against racial and sexual discrimination, the past successes of the liberal approach. Only ‘the enemy’ takes center stage.
Creating a political philosophy of governance that seeks to separate the American people into privileged categories of personal identity, always leaves out the most manifest identity each of us has. We are all “Americans” simply by our affirmation that we choose to live in the United States rather than anywhere else. Over a century Presidents T. Roosevelt and Wilson both deplored and opposed the addition of the identity hyphen in denominating all Americans as “ethnic-Americans to stipulate their genomic origin.
Affirming and advantaging other personal identities such as ethnicity race, class, gender, sexual preference, political party, home state, region or the intersectionality of any of these, only becomes consequential when the most oppressed minority identity obtains unique identity privileges, and its success precipitates a demand for special rights for all those other Americans who claim self validated group identities but which have little modern claim to oppression.
If American law and culture or even a Constitutional amendment were to truly mandate and enforce “all humans regardless of their group identity claims” are created equal had have equal inalienable rights that both the government and the people are bound to respect, would we not reduce the salience of the idea that insists certain privileged group identities are worthy of unique special rights and protections?
Good discussion and summary of your book. Only one question: You say that dividing child children into racial categories in kindergarten is likely to make white children become racist. If this is so, what does it do to the non-white children?
Here's a thought I had. How much did the historic role of guilt in liberalism contribute to the way that so many people who do believe in liberal universalism have been so submissive to the identity synthesis? (Granted, it's not as bad as it was in 2020.) I'd be interested to know what Yascha thinks.
I really like the concept of ‘trap,’ especially when the ‘trapper’ plays on the empathy of the believer. Once succumbed, the believer becomes addicted to favoring ‘identity’ as the single cause of social problems. No more juggling with complexities; no need to reconstruct the history of the past 50 years. Once in the trap, the believer has no need to remember the (amazing) achievements against racial and sexual discrimination, the past successes of the liberal approach. Only ‘the enemy’ takes center stage.
Creating a political philosophy of governance that seeks to separate the American people into privileged categories of personal identity, always leaves out the most manifest identity each of us has. We are all “Americans” simply by our affirmation that we choose to live in the United States rather than anywhere else. Over a century Presidents T. Roosevelt and Wilson both deplored and opposed the addition of the identity hyphen in denominating all Americans as “ethnic-Americans to stipulate their genomic origin.
Affirming and advantaging other personal identities such as ethnicity race, class, gender, sexual preference, political party, home state, region or the intersectionality of any of these, only becomes consequential when the most oppressed minority identity obtains unique identity privileges, and its success precipitates a demand for special rights for all those other Americans who claim self validated group identities but which have little modern claim to oppression.
If American law and culture or even a Constitutional amendment were to truly mandate and enforce “all humans regardless of their group identity claims” are created equal had have equal inalienable rights that both the government and the people are bound to respect, would we not reduce the salience of the idea that insists certain privileged group identities are worthy of unique special rights and protections?
Good discussion and summary of your book. Only one question: You say that dividing child children into racial categories in kindergarten is likely to make white children become racist. If this is so, what does it do to the non-white children?