Yascha Mounk’s 2023 book “The Identity Trap” traces the development and spread of woke identity politics from about fifteen or twenty years ago until today. By “identity politics” he means the progressive left’s demand that “society…be profoundly defined by its division into distinct identity groups.” Among these groupings the more notable are by ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation, and religious identity.
Mounk, a young professor at Johns Hopkins, argues that this ideology may have been inspired by the purist of motives—to bring about equality in America—but that it has had the opposite effect. The “good intentions” argument is that groups such as Blacks or Gays, both of which “have suffered serious disadvantages,” should “identify with [their respective] marginalized groups, and fight for their collective liberation.”
This message resonates with the story we tell ourselves about America’s founding and specialness in world history. But instead of achieving equality, identity politics has led to the siloing of different groups, the result of which is our current deeply polarized politics. In the case of race, for instance, “even situations that seemingly have nothing to do” with race, like a run-of-the-mill hiring decision in a company, “need to be analyzed through the lens” of racial ideology. This situation leads the left to “insist that we need [new] social norms and public policies,” i.e. laws, that “explicitly make how the state treats its citizens…depend on the identity group to which they belong.” Hence, we get affirmative action and racial quotas and preferences for minority groups that reflect the left’s obsession with “treating members of marginalized groups with special consideration.”
The problem with this approach, beyond its obvious immorality, is that it doesn’t work. “A society that encourages all of us to see the world through the ever-present prism of identity will make it especially hard for people” who don’t identify with the preferred ethnic or cultural group “to develop a sense of belonging.” People outside the preferred groups “are likely to feel alienated” when government showers preferences on certain groups, to the exclusion of others. What follows is inevitable: “an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition.”
Mounk writes with an unusually sensitive analysis of the issues. His book’s title, “The Identity Trap,” refers precisely to the outcome of identity-based politics: the progressives’ motives may be positive, but the outcome of their ideology and practices—the trap--has deeply divided and wounded the population, with White people increasingly resentful of leftist governments (mainly in blue cities) that cite racial identity as their number-one issue. Whites in such areas, including Oakland, inevitably find themselves at the bottom of the totem pole. Such politics “are likely to make the world a worse place” for everyone, exactly as we’ve seen happen in Oakland.
This polarization is what led directly to Trump’s election, and the domination of the Congress and Supreme Court by White Christian conservatives. Some Americans may be happy with that. I am profoundly not. But I do understand the dynamics of how and why it occurred. The left has been pummeling and insulting White people, and transferring their wealth to people of color, for a long time. It should surprise no one that White people have decided to fight back—in the very same ways that Black people and Gays chose to fight back. The astonishing thing, to me, is that the left has learned precisely nothing from their failures. Instead of admitting their mistakes, they’re doubling down, and are insisting more than ever that race is the single lens through which we must perceive everything in America. It’s not. That is an insane perspective, and an insult to our intelligence.
The far left has been beaten down in much of the nation, thankfully, but not here in Oakland, where it may well be too late to rescue our beleaguered city from the ravages of progressivism and the crime, resentment and tension it causes.
Steve Heimoff