A Liberal Takedown of Identity Politics
21st January 2024
In The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk, who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins, joins a number of eminent critics of the identitarian movement that has come to dominate both American academia and, increasingly, our political and social life. He differs from most such critics in two respects. First, while he is a professed “philosophical” liberal, who believes in the existence of universally valid “values” that can provide an objective basis for criticizing and remedying “historical oppression and persistent injustice,” he is also a “political” liberal who advocates social-welfare policies that aim to elevate poor people’s condition and combat racism. This outlook until recently would have put Mounk in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. (Mounk reports having derived his welfare-state liberalism from his grandparents, ex-Central European Communists who after witnessing the death of family members in the Holocaust, then coming “to recognize the cruelty of Soviet communism,” turned to “a reformist creed of social democracy that attempted to humanize capitalism” with “a strong welfare state.”)