Hes also a professor of the practice in International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins university. A contributing editor at the atlantic, a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations, the founder of persuade and the publisher, a publisher of the zeit. Hes the host of a podcast called the good fight and the author of books, including stranger in my own country jewish family in modern germany the age of responsibility, choice and the welfare state, the people versus democracy and the great experiment. Today, he will be talking about a book called the identity trap, which you will hear a lot about. He will be today in conversation with jane coaston, who is a New York Times contributor, also the former host of the podcast. The argument and his work featured in many venues, including abc news and the national review. I will ask you to welcome them here. Stage with us right now. Thank. The last thing ill say before i leave the floor to jane and yashar is that if you want more information about the Moynihan Center and its activities, you can check us out online. Have a wonderful new website at ww dot Moynihan Center, dot ccny dot c u ny dot edu. Again, thank very much and i look forward to our conversations by. Good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for having me and having yasha. Yasha, i promised i wouldnt talk about sports so i will not start this out by talking about travis, kelsey and taylor swift. What are your thoughts . You know, i think this is the first topic ive ever heard about, but i have opinion on, okay, thats thats fair. Thats fair. So i want to start out actually with what might might come across as a more challenging that i intended to be. But please remember im nice that sounds very ominous. So you wrote you wrote your in a context in which there have been actually a surplus of what i would call socalled antiwar books, whether thats from Christopher Caldwell or Christopher Rufo or someone else named christopher. So more so than why did you write this book, why now . So firstly, my my name is not christopher, so thats a good start. Great. Well, you know, to put this in the context of my broader work, ive been worrying for a long time about the state of democracy in the United States and around the world. And so my last two books were, in one way or another, about the rise of far right populism and, the difficulties of sustaining ethnically and religiously diverse. Now, at this point, i think theres been a ton of books about that, right . When i first wrote a book about populism. There really had been very, very public facing books about that subject. And we a severe lack of understanding about that topic at this point i couldnt face writing another book about trump or writing a book about populism. I think theres plenty of those at the same time, i do think that theres been a real transformation in many of the ideas that important spaces in the United States and beyond in the academy, in our broader public life, in important institutions from progressive activists, organizations to nonprofit vets, to think tanks to, corporations, and even some religious communities. And fauvist starting to be a few books about that topic. Most of them pretty polemical. I didnt think that there was a serious attempt to understand where these ideas actually come from, where what the intellectual history these ideas are, what makes attractive to so many people, what is that has allowed them to have this amount of pull over time and finally to assess them in a philosophical way. Now, my ultimate outcome is as skeptical and, critical. I do think that these ideas as the title, the book suggest, are a trap, that they werent allow. The people who have embraced to make the progress they hope for. But i take this ideology, ideology seriously. Im able to chronicle its origins in a way that other on this topic i dont think have. So well get the structure of the book a little bit. And you talk about the identity synthesis you talk about in the book that the identity synthesis you break down came from a time the 1960s and 1970s, in which leftists arguing in favor some sort of liberal universalism and started arguing on behalf of group pride activism. On behalf of group pride, why did that take place . Yeah. So you know in a sense the appeal of left wing movements, including appeal of universalist left wing movements, had always been to overcome forms. Discrimination. Right. My own grandparents were born in shtetls. What is today . Ukraine what was at the time the austrohungarian empire. And they were deeply shaped by the fact that the family had suffered from pogroms and that their in the society was marked by the group to which they belonged. The hope was communist ideals would be able to overcome that, to give importance to the common economic interests of poor people around the world. Went for particular groups. They were born into. Now communism didnt live up to those ideals. And my my parents, my grandparents ended up being thrown out of poland in the 1960s because of a kind of state sponsored, pogrom, organized effectively by the communist party of poland. But i think there had always been a recognition of importance of overcoming that on the. Now, at the same time, it is true that the left had often not taken discrimination seriously enough, not taken discrimination within its own ranks seriously enough. And so one of the things that to happen in the seventies and sixties and probably a little bit early in the fifties as was correct critiques of how these left wing movements were playing out of how sometimes they were paying lip service to universal ideals, but without actually living up them and therefore perpetuating forms of discrimination and within their own ranks. You know, foucault, who is one of the key figures, when i talk about in the book, joined the French Communist Party in 1950 communist party, that pretty blindly listening to moscow, but to great credit, he left the party in 1953 and that had a variety causes. But one of them was the experiences of he made as a homosexual within the party because the communist party was not very hospitable to gay people at, at, at the time. And so clearly part of the for this was a sense of an orderly left was not taking forms of discrimination seriously. It was actively perpetuating them suddenly the soviet union throughout its history was itself deeply homophobic, deeply antisemitic and deeply discriminatory. Certain other racial groups as well. How do you differentiate . You used the term identity politics and youve probably heard so many times that politics is identity. Politics. In the early 1990s, there was a constant battle about getting the votes of nascar dads or soccer moms that you could differentiate between groups and wield them one another. And we see this happening right now with the Parental Movement that is attempting to wield lgbt people against non lgbt over the issue of how children taught and what theyre taught. So how you separate identity politics, the book from identity politics, the way we do politics. Yeah. So first of all, i would, uh, i would contest the idea of it all. Politics is identity politics, a lot of politics maybe identity politics. But i think one of the things i worry about that when you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And when you assume that every historical situation is mediated through identity of and that is the only thing you recognize in historical situations. So identity has played a role in a vast number of different historical context, very important ways. And thats something we have to take seriously. But i think theres all kinds political conflicts for ideological or religious, so on in nature. And i guess a sufficiently abstract level you can say that thats identity politics in the same way in which economists at a sufficiently abstract level can say that anything is rational. If, you know, you count as a rational choice of personal preference, as normative preferences. But i think it starts do violence to our actual understanding of our situations now obviously. And thats why i avoid the term identity politics myself. Theres a vast range of politics that you might call identity, and some of those forms politics. I agree with and approve of and other forms. Identity politics, i think are much less likely to lead to thriving societies, which people can live peacefully together across different identity. One of the key distinctions that i draw in, in book is between the kind of identity that one of the proudest political traditions in United States engaged in, which i would say runs from people like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to people like Martin Luther king junior and. In certain ways, barack obama, from the critique of movements that has actually inspired the ideology that i cover this book. So somebody like frederick famously, when he was invited, hold a speech, celebrate in the 4th of july, recognize the hypocrisy of what many of us compatriots were doing, recognized but it was hypocritical at the time to celebrate the idea that all man about equal at a time when a lot of americans were enslaved. But he didnt say therefore we should rip up the universal principles of the declaration of independence or our constitution. He said that those who meant the attachment to those ideals then had work to do had to actually fight for abolition, had to fight for making the country more just. Once you get to the founders of critical theory, which is an interesting, serious academic tradition, i read broadly and widely within it and i learned a lot from it. But i ultimately disagree with its tenets and they explicitly reject what derrick bell, perhaps a key figure in the tradition, calls the, quote, what defunct equality ideology of, the Civil Rights Movement. They say, no, these kind of universal values have not helped us make progress. They have always been an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. Weve actually led us away from a kind of society which we want and therefore even landmark rulings like brown versus board of education might in key ways have been a mistake. So those two different kinds of forms of identity politics, i think in some sense what Frederick Douglass engaged in was identity politics in a different kind of sense. What derrick engaged in was identity politics. A long standing debate. Which of those forms is preferable . Think Frederick Douglass gets the right of that debate. You write right wing populism and advocates the identity synthesis are a yin and yang. How so. I think theres key question about doubt whether the things that make what i call the identity synthesis. Will actually come to pass whether the aspiration is that people who feel the allure of this ideology feel will actually be realized. And i think theres a number of reasons to think but they wont. Thats why the book is called the identity trap. Now, when you think about that metaphor, what is what is a trap . A trap has a lure. The lure in this particular case is the promise to be, uh uh, you know, fighting against forms of, uh, racism and, and homophobia and other types of discrimination in the most radical way. And thats very attractive because theres real injustices but persists in our societies. But a lot of people myself included, are motivated to to try and remedy. But a trap means that it ultimately is going to prove counterproductive. That going to make it harder to, actually realize those kind of values. So perhaps i can give a couple of examples to show how that is the case. The first is that weve seen over the last years a lot of progressive that have adopted the norms of popularized form of this ideal just have huge amounts of internal strife and sometimes internal meltdowns, but have made it much harder for these organizations to function effectively and much harder to serve their missions, which many cases are important missions. Um, the second is that it has led to a lot of norms in educational, which i think over time will increase the likelihood of zero some conflict between groups rather than attenuate it. So a couple of schools that are close to here. For example elite private schools but educate are you know a lot of people who are the children influential americans who are likely to go on to be influential americans themselves have come in in the second or first grade and divide kids by their race saying black kids go over than latino kids go over there and Asian Americans could go over than white go over into the the the fourth corner. And this is not were not talking here about 16 or 17 year olds in high school who can make those choices and who join some kind of Cultural Club on a voluntary basis. You know, these are effectively, uh, mandatory even if it might sometimes be formally voluntary and i worry about how that as some of the most fashionable pedagogues in the country now say, to make children think of themselves as racial beings, to make them embrace racial identity, including making white children embrace their european identity is going to backfire because one thing i have learned from history and social science is how people identify has varied hugely across society. But once you tell somebody this, your group, this is the group that you belong to, they tend to treat the members of those groups much better with with, with, with great preference over those who are members of outgroups. So i worry about whats going to happen to those white kids, not because we might be uncomfortable. I think its fine to be uncomfortable in education sometimes good education will make you uncomfortable. Sometimes but because telling them that they should lean into the white identities is not going to set our society up for having more anti activists. Its going to create more, more racists. And then i could talk about examples of Public Policy because perhaps we can come to that later. Theres been some striking examples in the of the pandemic. For example, that have really encouraged that kind of zero sum conflict between different identity groups. But i think its ultimately also a political trap. So we have, for example, a recent analysis, the New York Times, that shows theres a new voting group in the republican party. About 10 of Republican Voters now who are disproportionately disproportionately young, a disproportionately pretty progressive on a lot of cultural issues, but who are really worried about the hold that a lot of these norms now have in society. And i think thats one of the explanations for why donald trump running neck to neck with joe biden in election polls 2024. So as somebody does worry about the threat of far right populism, that does make me think that one of these phenomena ends up being begin to be obvious young one of the reasons why somebody on the left have come to be so in progressive spaces after 2016 is that people where genuinely worried about donald trump and so any internal criticism came to be seen as being a traitor, as running interference. Trump. But one of the reasons why trump has a good chance of coming back and winning the white house in 2024 is that these norms have won so much influence over. Mainstream institutions pushing a crucial segment of voters into the arms, the far right. So i want to talk about the the people that are in this book and you begin your book by talking about fuko and i was interested because one of the things he talked about and wrote a lot about was the idea of a rejection of universal truths. And i think part of that, that he had been a committed marxist and yet after the fall, you know, after stalins death, i think that him and for a lot of stalinist maya i had one grandfather who was a stalinist because i dont know he loved groups the war a lot happened but you a sense of like how could this be possible this person who we had been told so long was so was so good and was so inherently good, did much evil. And you see fuko so rejecting that and also just kind of rejecting all centers of which to me i get it. But im interested in how thats about the perfectibility of the modern world, about the standards, whether thats what sexuality is or even what is, how did that come to impact . How you define the identity synthesis . Yeah, thats a thats a great question. The first thing to say is that the few attempts of the have been to explain the intellectual history of novel ideology about race and, gender and Sexual Orientation tend to call and perhaps youve heard this phrase cultural marxism. Right thats sort of the the the claim that a lot of people on the american right have coalesced around in trying to explain the origins and the nature of this ideology. Now, i extracted a promise from jane not to me talk about sports, but im going to use one sporting metaphor, which is that saying that you take economic categories like class out of marxism, substitute them with those identity categories like race or gender or Sexual Orientation is a little bit like saying youre going to take the bats of baseball, but its just not much left of your ideology once. You have done that. And so i dont think it makes sense. And in fact, when you go the thinkers who i think stand at the beginning of this ideology, michel foucault, you see that explicitly reject political liberalism and a lot of the sort of institutions that we share with the france of the postwar era, but also very explicitly marxism. And so to think of this as a form of cultural is just unhelpful and and historically and wrong and as a matter of understanding, the ideology is to really understand the themes our contemporary politics. You have follow a very different lineage. And so as youre saying, during the beginning of this is with deep skepticism, grand narratives in, postmodernist thinkers like foucault who rejects general ideas of objective truth, who reject the idea that his society had made progress in how we treat people like the mentally ill or like criminals, or like people have different sexual predilections. He even rejected a lot of basic identity categories in our terms. Michel foucault was was gay, homosexual. He was a man who had sex with but he didnt like that label thinking it constrained the variety, human Sexual Experiences too much people sound similar each other who are not and obscuring similarities others by adopting this artificial label. And he would be experience