Political scientist Yascha Mounk begins his fifth book with a story about an elementary school in Atlanta that, in 2020, began segregating classes by race on supposedly progressive grounds. “This story sounds depressingly familiar,” he writes, while in fact it sounds very unfamiliar, and made headlines across the world as a result. It is still a matter of open investigation, so it is impossible to know what exactly was going on. Nonetheless he pulls Mary Lin Elementary into a constellation that includes schools and universities that have healing spaces, affinity and advocacy groups – some of them just sound like workshops – based on race, and concludes: “In place of universalism, parts of the American mainstream are quickly adopting a form of progressive separatism.”
It’s a terrific introduction in the sense that it distils Mounk’s intellectual methodology: accusation slides effortlessly into fact; events are yoked together on the atmospherics, described in shorthand, as if the phrases “safe space” and “white privilege” are all you need to know to understand what went on. And if you don’t, by the end, have a clue what happened, whether a black school principal really did segregate seven-year-olds into black classes and white classes or what her rationale was if so, no matter: you’re just in an identity trap. We all are, because of Michel Foucault, and the author can lead you out.
If we prioritise identity over universalism, we make the world worse both for the dominant and the marginalised, Mounk contends. His argument has four parts: first, how what he calls “identity synthesis” originated; how it spread from abstruse corridors of academe into the mainstream and claimed victory over all institutions; what’s wrong with it; and how to put it all right. By “identity synthesis” he means the “role that identity categories like race, gender and sexual orientation play in the world”. It’s a coinage made necessary by the fact that: “Nowadays, anybody who talks about identity politics or describes an activist as woke is liable to be perceived as an old man yelling at the clouds,” he writes.
Well, hang on a second: as Mounk himself writes 100 pages later, the pejorative use of the term “woke” was coined, by a journalist, to describe how white liberals had got so anti-racist that they were anti-racister than the typical black voter (forgive my paraphrase). The absolutely feverish backlash by the right against the left, via a term that was devised as a critique of the left in the first place, is thus reframed by the author as an unfortunate site of discord because the woke have become so binary and intolerant you’re not even allowed to call them woke any more.
He sticks a lot on postmodernism, fine, we all do: but to get from Jean-François Lyotard and Foucault’s rejection of the meta-narrative to the assertion that their disciples “are forced to reject the most fundamental assumptions that ground our practices and institutions, from the veracity of science to the value of democracy”, seems like a reach. Maybe I’ll run the numbers on the anti-vax, anti-government forums to find the ratio of Trump voters to Foucauldians. Or maybe I won’t, because it is so obvious. “The rejection of stable identity categories, like ‘woman’ and ‘proletarian’,” Mounk presents as the rot setting in, when actually it was quite a useful waypoint in the understanding that not all women and proletarians think the same thing.
Probably the most befuddled element of the entire hypothesis is that Mounk seeks to examine the trap and its escape in isolation, without context. In his telling, it’s just feverish leftists chasing their own misconceptions to logically flawed conclusions, then railing at the common-sense bystander for failing to keep up with the vocab. He puzzles over communism and its collapse only for its impact on the leftwing intelligentsia, not considering or indeed even mentioning what it did to free-market capitalists. The popularisation of race-critical and post-colonial narratives from academia apparently occurred in a bell jar, with accelerating race-based inequality beside the point. He references freedom of speech as a liberal value that we’ve unaccountably lost sight of; it’s as if Elon Musk and Twitter and Donald Trump and the Capitol insurrection had never happened; as if Peter Thiel and Andrew Tate didn’t exist; as if nobody had ever had cause to wonder about the tension between preserving freedom of speech and extinguishing incitement to violence.
Reading Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap is like going round the Hermitage. If you stopped for one minute in front of every contestable statement, you’d be there for 11 years. But I think it would feel like longer.
• The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk is published by Penguin (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
