Book promo excerpt in The New York Times by Yascha Mounk, "How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary" for his forthcoming The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, aimed apparently at the denizens of the "intellectual dark web" and urging them not to go too far with the anti-"woke" crusade, lest they fall into the "reactionary trap" and "morph into cranks"—which may sound like an odd message to send to Times readers; thanks for the heads up, Yascha, but I'm actually OK with the woke myself. Was it maybe the Times editors you wanted to talk to?
Or perhaps he's got another bit of an agenda, for which this framework is a bit of a disguise, trying to tell us—Times readers and the like, members of the reality-based community—that anti-woke crusaders aren't necessarily assholes. Like Yascha Mounk, for instance: he's so civilized he's nagging the reactionaries himself! Show your humane tolerance and buy a copy of his book!
He's merely got "serious concerns regarding the new ideas and norms about race, gender and sexual orientation that have quickly been adopted by universities and nonprofit organizations, corporations and even some religious communities", and believes "that practices like separating people into different groups according to race are deeply counterproductive." It's the same thing reactionary Republicans are panicked over, but Mounk wants you to know he doesn't think it's evil, exactly, just catastrophically misguided:
Mr. Trump and others on the right deride the new norms as “woke,” a term with strongly pejorative connotations. I prefer a more neutral phrase, which emphasizes that this ideology focuses on the role that groups play in society and draws on a variety of intellectual influences such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory: the “identity synthesis.”
As far as I know the activity that "focuses on the role that groups play in society" is an academic discipline, not an "ideology", and known as sociology, and I'm for it. It would be helpful if he offered some further discussion of the pervasive "practices like separating people into different groups according to race" in universities and nonprofit organizations, corporations, and even some religious communities (I'm pretty sure he's not talking about Sunday morning being, as Malcolm X put it, "the most segregated hour in American life"), but all he's got is one anecdote:
In the spring of 2017, a senior administrator at Evergreen State College in Washington announced that she expected white students and faculty members to stay off campus for a day. The so-called Day of Absence, she explained, was intended to build community “around identity.”
One professor publicly pushed back against this idea. As he wrote to the administrator, “on a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.” He would, he announced, remain on campus.
The superfunny thing about this hoary story is that the "centrists" who love it don't ever seem to be aware that the "Day of Absence" had been held every April at Evergreen (a hippie college founded as an experimental school with the motto "Let it all hang out" in 1967) for many years, starting in the 1970s, when minority members of the community, students and faculty, were allowed (nowhere near everybody participated) to stay away from campus as a way of reminding everyone of the contribution they were making to the institution's life, while white students and teachers remained, some attending lectures and workshops on racism; followed (after 1992) by a "Day of Presence" when everybody was ceremonially reunited.
The innovation in 2017 (the first year of the Trump administration, not coincidentally) was that the minority people's events were held on campus, while white people were invited to absent themselves and attend, if they liked, a special antiracism event at the local Unitarian-Universalist church (much too small to hold the 2800 white people in question). The occasion had always "separated people into different groups according to race", before bringing them back together the next day, but this time white people were explicitly included.
And that's what evolutionary biology professor Bret Weinstein (a "librertarian leftist" later famous as a member of Ben Shapiro's "intellectual dark web" and a COVID vaccine "skeptic" and Ivermectin proponent) objected to, complaining he was being "forced off-campus" for the day on account of his skin color, which he wasn't, obviously; indeed, he chose (like many others) not to absent himself, taught his class but left the classroom voluntarily to argue with some demonstrating students for some minutes, and some days later went on Tucker Carlson's show to complain about the "reverse racism" he had been compelled to endure, though, as the tradition demanded, he had not been compelled to do anything (I wonder if he regarded the normal event with minority students off-campus as "normal racism", and never objected to it for that reason), following which
Weinstein and his wife filed a lawsuit against TESC for $3.8 million, claiming that the university did not provide adequate protection for staff during the student protest; which - again - wasn't about Weinstein who willfully engaged with students protesting police racial bias. Furthermore, campus police were present on that day and they reported that Weinstein himself sent them off after offering their protection to him. Weinstein wasn't in any real danger and the college (to this day) insist of no wrongdoings. Thus, in all likelihood, this lawsuit wouldn't have held up in court. Weinstein opted for a settlement with TESC, receiving $500,000 in cash for agreeing to resign.
And embarked with this stake on new careers as wingnut welfare beneficiaries.
That's Mounk's example of a sad outcome, when an otherwise decent person, disturbed by the "new ideas and norms about race, gender and sexual orientation that have quickly been adopted by universities and nonprofit organizations, corporations and even some religious communities" falls into "the reactionary trap" of "turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories".
It's funny Mounk should think of this as a tragedy for Weinstein, who seems to be much better off today, economically and socially, than he could have been as a mediocre biology professor; he had a pop science self-help book out in 2021 (A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, which "cut[s] through the politically fraught discourse surrounding issues like sex, gender, diet, parenting, sleep, education, and more to outline a science-based worldview that will empower you to live a better, wiser life", he has his own Dark Horse Podcast and Patreon, and scads of other people's podcasts, op-eds in respectable venues, and public appearances. Looks like there's serious money in turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories! Of course he’s socially unacceptable in some circles, and Mounk seems to worry about that.
Mounk's real hostility to the anti-woke crusaders seems to be that their efforts have left liberals not taking the horrible menace of critical race theory seriously:
In recent years, parts of the right have started to denounce any concern about racism as being “woke” or an example of “critical race theory.” This right-wing hyperbole has, in turn, persuaded many reasonable people that critical race theory amounts to little more than a commendable determination to teach children about the history of slavery or to recognize that contemporary America still suffers from serious forms of discrimination. Critical race theory, they think, is simply a commitment to think critically about the terrible role that race continues to play in our society.
This soft-pedaled depiction of their ideas would come as a shock to the founders of critical race theory. Derrick Bell, widely seen as the father of the tradition, cut his teeth as a civil rights lawyer who helped to desegregate hundreds of schools. But when many integrated schools failed to provide Black students with a better education, he came to think of his previous efforts as a dead end. Arguing that American racism would never subside, he rejected the “defunct racial equality ideology” of the civil rights movement...
But I think he’s failed to read Bell, and taken people seriously (Christopher Rufo?) that he shouldn’t have read at all, and accepted a rightwing fantasy of what the thing is. The 1992 essay by Bell cited there, "Racial Realism", isn’t some kind of primer of critical race theory, and does something much more interesting than what Mounk suggests; he doesn't "reject" the racial equality ideology, for one thing, he just observes that it's dead, and he dives back into the American past to find a replacement for it, in the judicial realism associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Benjamin Cardozo, in opposition to the previously dominant judicial formalism, a reliance on pure deductive logic in the interpretation of the law. The realists of the early 20th century instead advocated a pragmatic approach, informed by social science and influenced by ideas of fairness, public policy, prejudices, and experience.
The best examples of judicial formalism in civil rights law are all those cases going back to Bakke alleging "reverse racism" or discrimination against whites, as if there were some concealed community in which white people were unable to choose where they wanted to live or where they wanted to go to school or what fountain they wanted to drink out of—when the only actual cases were those of restorative justice which had incidental minor effects on some white person's life (Allan Bakke himself was a victim of ageism when he was turned down in his early 30s by the medical school at UC Davis, though the case became a landmark of the fight against affirmative action for Blacks), and this is the source of Bell's perspective in "Racial Realism"—civil rights laws ought to protect the victims, people whose civil rights are actually threatened, a thing that can be investigated through empirical means. And Bell's idea doesn't have the hopelessness that Mounk suggests, to my way of thinking:
There's a strain of American liberalism, in the "love me I'm a liberal" sense, that's kind of unattractively undemocratic, in that it portrays the promise of equity as a gift handed down to the suffering orders from on high, like the gentle rain from heaven. I associate it with the writer David Brooks, and compromise with the conservatives warning, "Don't give them too much equity, please, it’ll give them a tummy-ache." So that the promise is never fully delivered, but that isn't the problem, either: the problem is that the recipients aren't really participants in the polity. In a democracy, the oppressed ought to be demanding equity and taking it, perhaps in exchange for something else they can bring to the table, perhaps on the basis of an argument that their thriving is good for everybody (in the way that, for example, homelessness is bad for the community as a whole and therefore housing everybody is good for everybody including those already housed), or perhaps just for the sake of basic fairness, and I think that’s what Bell is talking about.
I don’t know for sure what Mounk is talking about, because it doesn’t make a lot of obvious sense or have any empirical support I can cling to, just the usual panicky perception that nobody’s going to have any personalities or tastes or personal histories any more, just an intersection of group identities in some pure undifferentiated state—
Critical race theory is far more than a determination to think critically about race; similarly, the identity synthesis as a whole goes well beyond the recognition that many people will, for good reason, take pride in their identity. It claims that categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society, from major historical events to trivial personal interactions. And it encourages us to see one another — and ourselves — as being defined, above anything else, by the identities into which we are born.
—but I think I know what it is he is really, probably (unlike Bret Weinstein) unconsciously, afraid of: identity politics meaning exactly what it sounds like, the idea of identity groups exercising political power as groups, as Americans always have done (don’t forget that labor unions, jazz musicians, atheists, and organic farmers are identities too), but in a way that increasingly threatens the group that has seen itself as “on high”, with an unquestioned monopoly on power. The group Weinstein couldn’t bear to have singled out and shunted into the Unitarian church, that is his own.
It couldn’t be questioned because it couldn’t be named. My mom—an Anglo with ancestors from colonial Massachusetts married to the child of immigrants from beyond the Pale in Bessarabia—used to answer the identity question with “we’re just regular”, before she got woke herself, because she really didn't have a better answer. I can’t fully understand where Mounk is coming from (he’s an immigrant from Germany, half-Jewish on his mother’s side, who a few years ago left the German Social Democratic Party, partly in sympathy with the Syrian refugees of 2015, because he thought it was too nationalist and now complains that the US Democrats aren’t nationalist enough), and it may be that he’s just a sloppy thinker, as a review of his previous book suggested,
The Great Experiment promises to show us “how to make diverse democracies work”, but contains very few actual policy proposals. For the most part it’s a mishmash of general principles, political truisms and syrupy platitudes, delivered in a register somewhere between a TED talk and an undergraduate dissertation. Mounk draws on social psychology to tell us what we already know: that, on the one hand, human beings have “a tendency to form in-groups, and discriminate against those who do not belong to them”; on the other, the “intergroup contact hypothesis” suggests people from different backgrounds are more likely to get along if they spend time with one another. The ideal diverse society should be neither “unduly homogenising” nor so fragmentary as to give rise to “cultural separatism”.
but whatever he’s doing here, he’s doing it wrong. And—spoiler alert—he turns into a reactionary himself.
It is a good thing, because everyone has an identity. Lots of them, really. Some deeply personal, some forced on them by society, some aspirational, some grounded in who I am and what I believe. Rufo's whole propaganda war is based on a simple assertion, that institutions are (somehow) forcing views and opinions on individuals. Recommendations and suggestions are requirements and orders. Its snake oil and nothing more. Mounk is working the same field, with a Brooksian veneer. Look at his claim that CRT claims categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are "the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society". All the propaganda is full of this mind-reading list of absolutes that don't line up with real-world practice. It's all hysteria, over something that's not that big a deal. But the hysteria is a crucial component, deflecting argument or even engagement through hyperventilation. You don't have a rational argument with someone in hysterics, and that's the goal.
Telling people that race and gender are social constructions is just never going to work. I have trouble with it and I'm as liberal/progressive as it gets (or, close enough — I'm sure I could be outflanked; anyone could).