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The short march through the institutions, with Yascha Mounk
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Sometimes it feels like the tidal wave of ‘wokeness’ (or identity politics) washed over the western world almost overnight. It has captured more or less every societal institution in a remarkably short period of time.
However, the intellectual roots of the movement can be traced back over fifty years. The best analysis on how it has achieved such incredible influence comes from the German-American political scientist, Yascha Mounk. Will and Yascha discuss his latest book, ‘The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time’.
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Transcript
Introduction and Historical Context
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. On 17 May 1954, US Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in Brown v Board of Education.
00:00:28
Speaker
The court found that state-sanctioned segregation of American public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. We've all seen the footage of the nine African-American students attempting to enter Little Rock Central High School, surrounded by screaming protesters and under the protection of the National Guard.
00:00:49
Speaker
Fast forward 66 years to the wealthy neighborhood of Candler Park in Atlanta, Georgia, and racial segregation was once again a feature of American school life. This time it was on the insistence of the principal of Mary Lynn Elementary School who refused the request of a parent for a specific teacher for her seven-year-old daughter on the grounds that it wasn't the black class.
00:01:16
Speaker
different motivations perhaps, but the same outcome of racially segregated classrooms.
Modern Implications of Segregation and Identity Politics
00:01:22
Speaker
This is just one of countless stories that highlight the perverse consequences that identity politics has delivered for the Western world. The universalism espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. has been replaced by a form of progressive separatism that is in vogue with more or less every societal institution.
00:01:43
Speaker
In my opinion, the best analysis on how this transformation has taken place comes from my guest today, Yasha Muck. Yasha is a German-American political scientist and the author of the wonderful book, The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time. Yasha, welcome to Australia. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed going to Australia for the first time last year, so I'm glad to be back in spirit if only via a virtual podcast. What were your reflections on Australia when you went?
00:02:14
Speaker
You know, I sort of have to admit that I imagined Australia as, you know, a more proletarian version of Britain with better weather. And I was struck by how much more than bad it is, by how cool the main cities are, unfortunately didn't have time to go to the outback and so on.
00:02:29
Speaker
but how diverse they are and how beautiful. Unfortunately, Australia is very far away from everybody I know and everything I do, but if Melbourne or Sydney were cities somewhere outside of Europe or somewhere outside of the United States, I'd move there immediately. I really liked it a lot better than I have to admit I expected. A glowing review. Good to hear. I'll go back to my introductory comments. You actually start your book with that anecdote from Mary Lynn Elementary School.
00:02:58
Speaker
Why? Well, because I think, as you alluded to in your introduction, it really points to how badly wrong the new ideology that dominates parts of the left can go. One of the responses to
00:03:14
Speaker
try to avoid the term but to wokeness or to what I call the identity synthesis among many of my friends and colleagues in an academic environment is to say look yes it's true that sometimes people exaggerate a little bit they take these ideas a little bit too far but really it's going in the right direction and in the end it's going to have a positive impact on society. And one reason why I don't believe that is that I don't agree with this not too far-ism.
Universalism vs Identity Synthesis
00:03:37
Speaker
I don't think the problem with 20 year old students is that they're too radical in the pursuit of racial justice, too radical in the pursuit of
00:03:44
Speaker
fighting against the flaws in our societies. I'm very radical in those things too. I want to eradicate racial injustice. I want to make our societies as fair and thriving as they can possibly be. I worry that they're actually taking us in the wrong direction. And I think this example you point to is exactly one case of this. For many decades,
00:04:04
Speaker
The goal of well-intentioned people has been to integrate society more, to emphasize that we can have things in common even though we grew up in very different parts of the world, even though we might have different intersection of identities in the sort of new parlance, even though we might belong to different ethnic, religious, gender groups, even though we might have different sexual orientations and so on and so forth. We can have things in common, we can understand each other,
00:04:32
Speaker
try and build a solidaristic society together and this new ideology is saying no actually that is the wrong way to go we should as dalton school in new york explains when it justifies some somewhat similar pedagogical practices
00:04:48
Speaker
ensure that kids think of themselves as racial beings. That is the goal of a good progressive education. And so therefore, actually, we need to make sure that the black kids are together, because if they don't end up with many black friends, something has gone wrong. If most of their friends are white, then actually they're not developing the right racial kind of self-identification, and this is going to be a problem.
00:05:13
Speaker
That takes us in the wrong direction. That's why I think this story is so telling. We'll get to how that ideology has taken hold in a second. But before we do, the term you used, the identity synthesis, is an interesting one. I've traditionally used the term identity politics to discuss this phenomena. You coined the term identity synthesis. Why did you decide to use that term instead of, say, identity politics?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, so one commonly used term, as I alluded to earlier, is workness, which is fine. The problem with it is that if you go on about work this and work that, you start to sound like an old man shouting at the clouds. I think it's important to have a term in discussing a genuine political ideology, and this is a genuinely new political ideology.
00:06:00
Speaker
That is neutral, that both its supporters and detractors can use, right? So the term socialism, perhaps if you've listened as a socialist, I imagine most listeners to the spectator Australia probably are not socialist, but both of those sets of people can agree to refer to that ideology as socialism. And that's helpful for having a smart conversation about it, right? So Workless doesn't quite serve my purposes for that reason. Identity politics.
00:06:21
Speaker
gets closer, it does feel like a more neutral term. I think the problem with identity politics is that there's just a huge variety of forms of identity politics. So, you know, one of the biggest organizations in the United States is the American Association for Retired People, AARP.
00:06:39
Speaker
Some of what it does is positive, some of what it does might be negative, but I think it's perfectly appropriate form of identity politics for elderly Americans to band together and say, we're going to fight to preserve our interests when it comes to things like social security or access to a workplace or whatever else. But in American history, I actually think some of the figures I most admire engaged in certain ways in identity politics, right? Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. organized not
00:07:06
Speaker
exclusively but primarily African-Americans in order to fight against injustices that affected not exclusively but primarily African-Americans. You can call this a form of identity politics and these are certainly figures I admired, but they fought for inclusion under universal rules and norms.
00:07:24
Speaker
They said the way to build a better society is for a modern society to actually live up to its founding promises. Frederick Douglass, in his most beautiful speech, What to the Negro is the Fourth of July, said, you're going on about all men being born equal and with lovely sentiments in the Declaration of Independence.
00:07:43
Speaker
And yet, African-Americans are enslaved. How can you justify that? He called out the hypocrisy in no uncertain terms. But then he said, if you want to live up to those principles, don't throw them out. Actually realize them, actually treat them in accordance with them. The specific form of identity politics that I oppose, what I call the identity synthesis, goes far beyond that. It says that
00:08:05
Speaker
Universal values and norms have only ever been a way to pull the wool over people's eyes, have only ever been a way to perpetuate racial and other kinds of injustices. And therefore the only way we can possibly help to make progress is to put identity
00:08:21
Speaker
at the very center of how our society works. So I shouldn't treat you as an equal, irrespective of which group you're from. I should treat you always, very consciously, in virtue of the group you're from. And the way I should treat you should depend on which group you're from, even in a social situation, or even in a broadcasting situation like this. And in fact, the way that the state should treat all of us should explicitly depend on the kind of identity groups to which we belong. So that's a different form of identity politics that I worry about.
00:08:49
Speaker
And I argue in the book that it is a synthesis of different intellectual influences from post-modernism to post-colonialism to critical race theory. So identity, because of the role that identity plays in the conception of our future society and the synthesis because of the origin of these ideas.
Influence of Historical and Modern Identity Movements
00:09:07
Speaker
Okay, let's dig down into those influences and the question of how we got here. The casual observer would be forgiven for pondering that question. You know, if they don't engage in the culture wars, if they don't read the spectator every week, they would be aware of Martin Luther King's vision of a colorblind society. They would be, the majority of people would be broadly on board with that way of thinking about race relations, I would have thought.
00:09:33
Speaker
I saw a clip the other day which I've seen in the past of Morgan Freeman talking about his approach to race relations. Whenever he was asked how do we solve the problem of racism, he said in 2005, stop talking about it. If we stop talking about it, it goes away. Stop treating me like a black man. I'll stop treating you like you're a white man. I think that was for some time a pretty widely held view.
00:09:57
Speaker
It is no longer the prevailing orthodoxy now. You spend a quarter of your book answering this very question, but that might be unfair. But how did we go from this universal aspiration to what you call progressive separatism? Well, you know, the very short version of this answer is that, you know, there was always the major tradition of
00:10:24
Speaker
black American political fort, which I do think ran roughly from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama. And then there was always a counter-tradition that was black nationalist, that was separatist, that didn't want to integrate in society and that wanted to reject the basic values of American society. And given American history, it's perfectly understandable why some people ended up with that point of view. But what's sort of happened over the course of 10 or 15 years
00:10:52
Speaker
is that that tradition that runs for people like Malcolm X and to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibranks Candy Today has suddenly been decreed as the obvious mainstream, commonsensical view to hold, not just about race relations in the United States, but in sort of parallel form about
00:11:11
Speaker
gender relations, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, etc., etc. So the rejection of universalism has just been generalized and imposed and adopted by mainstream institutions in Britain, the United States, Australia to some extent, continental Europe, at rapid speed. And that's really a very, very strange thing. Now, the specific form of this ideology takes in this moment
00:11:35
Speaker
comes from the intellectual tradition that really elaborated upon the rejection of these universal aspirations and values. So it starts in Paris with people like Michel Foucault, who tried to argue that there's no such thing as neutral truth, there's no such thing as universal values.
00:11:53
Speaker
that really the way we should think about the world and the exercise of power in it is not as laws being passed and then implemented top-down, it is as political discourses shaping and constraining how we can talk to each other.
00:12:13
Speaker
That set of ideas proved very inspiring to a set of post-colonial thinkers who wanted to fight against the dominance of Western ideas and the ways in which those had historically justified colonial oppression of their countries. And so they're very attracted by its
00:12:31
Speaker
Aspect is a kind of universal solvent, something that allows you to take anything else down. But they also worried that it wasn't sufficiently political, because Foucault ultimately thought that every set of discourses is going to be as oppressive as the next. And so it's very hard to make sort of objective progress. And I said, no, no, no. Let's use this set of tools to politicize it. And the first step of how to do that was in Edward Said's Orientalism.
00:12:53
Speaker
where he says, let's take these Western discourses, let's expose how they were justifying injustices, but let's not just do that. Let's invert them. Let's use this form of discourse critique as a political tool to empower the people who are marginalized, to empower the people who have historically been oppressed. And that helps to explain why fights of a cultural representation take such a central role in activist politics today.
00:13:22
Speaker
The next step in this was another post-colonial thinker called Gayatri Spivak, who again was deeply influenced by post-modernism and post-structuralism. She made her name as the translator and by writing an introduction to Jacques Derrida's On Grammatology. But she was horrified when some of those thinkers were very skeptical of the utility of identity
00:13:47
Speaker
groups. Foucault himself was in our parlance a homosexual, a gay man, a man who had sex with men. We didn't like the term because he thought it was only constraining of a variety of sexual experiences that people might have. And later in a dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, they said, look, the old Marxists, they always wanted to speak for people, right? We are the intellectual avant-garde, we're speaking for the politicians.
00:14:09
Speaker
We can't do that, right? The workers should speak for themselves. And Spivak, who grew up in Kolkata, in Bengal, in India, was worried about that. Because she said, look, white guys who are workers in the streets of Paris, they might have enough education, they might have enough material resources to speak for themselves. The Sabaltur, the most oppressed in places like Kolkata, they can't do that. They can't speak for themselves in the same way. And so I have to be able to speak
00:14:35
Speaker
for them. So we have to adopt what she calls a form of strategic essentialism. So even for these essentialist accounts of group identity, as Foucault recognized somewhat problematic from a philosophical point of view, for strategic political purpose, to be able to fight on behalf of these groups, we have to double down on it. Now this seems like attention, and Spivak acknowledges that her search, as she says at the time, is not one for coherence.
00:15:01
Speaker
But it allows and it licenses the strange movement in the story where instead of going away from identity, you go back towards identity. And that inspires some of those pedagogical practices we've been talking about, when many American private schools now
00:15:16
Speaker
have teachers go into third, second, first grade classrooms and separate those kids out and say the black kids go into one classroom, the Latino kids into a second classroom and the Asian-American kids into a third classroom, the white kids into a fourth classroom. This happens at a lot of American private schools. That is an exercise of what Spivak called strategic essentialism.
00:15:34
Speaker
As I listen to that answer, there are some threads that run through those different phases, and they are around power, how we think about power in society, how we think about oppressed and oppressor classes in society. That is partially the reason why some people have labeled this movement as a form of cultural Marxism, because it thinks about power in potentially analogous ways, and it has that same thinking around oppressor-oppressed
00:16:03
Speaker
class groups. Nonetheless, you don't like the term cultural Marxism. Why not? Yeah. So there's two reasons for that. So first of all, look, I agree with that structural similarities between Marxism and what I call the identity synthesis. And they are rooted in the fact that they both are born as ways to reject liberalism. Right. So it's not surprising that sort of the tools you're going to stumble upon and fighting
00:16:31
Speaker
against the same enemy are going to resemble each other to some extent. And nevertheless, I think that there are very important differences between those traditions that we need to become aware of in order to really get what this is about. So the first problem is simply that I think economic categories just stand at the heart of Marxism.
00:16:54
Speaker
But to say that you're going to take economic categories like social class out of Marxism and put cultural categories like race and gender and sexual orientation into those Marxist structures of Ford and assume you have something very meaningful left,
00:17:09
Speaker
is I'm going to try and adapt this metaphor here for my audience in a shameful attempt at pandering. But it's like taking the wickets out of cricket. Does that roughly work? It's not clear that you have much left of the activity. The second point is just if you look at those activist groups today,
00:17:28
Speaker
you look at who they read and you look at who they quote and you look at the language they speak, going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and you know even Antonio Gramsci is just not going to explain to you where this language comes from. But if you've read
00:17:45
Speaker
Foucault, Saeed, Spivak, and then the critical race theorist to whom I haven't come in, so Derek Bell and Kimberley Crenshaw. But it does explain to you how they speak. It explains to you why you go to an activist group and they say, race is, of course, a social construct, but we need to listen to people of color, and BIPOC demand this. Reading, and I did intellectual history as an undergrad, and my grandparents were communists, I've read all the Marxist stuff. It doesn't explain to you what's going on there at all. You're going to be deeply befuddled, right?
00:18:14
Speaker
reading this tradition is going to explain it to you. Another problem is that some of the best critics of this new form of identity politics, this particular form of identity politics, are themselves Marxists.
00:18:29
Speaker
Ben Michaels or Adolf Reed Jr. have very good critiques of the identity synthesis that I draw upon in my book. So one common influential idea within this tradition is equity, what Reed calls race-disparitarianism. But really the goal of politics should be that there's no differences
00:18:49
Speaker
in the average wealth or the average income or the average outcomes of different ethnic groups. Disparities between races is what we really should be fighting. And as Reed points out, that's perfectly conformable with a society in which you have 100 billionaires
00:19:06
Speaker
and everybody else is extremely poor, but if you have roughly 13% of black people in society as you do in the United States, then 13 out of those 100 billionaires have to be black. And as long as that condition is fulfilled, everything else is fine.
Critiques of Identity Politics and Marxism
00:19:19
Speaker
That seems like a crazy view and Marxists have actually, even for I'm not a Marxist, have been helpful in pointing that
00:19:27
Speaker
I spoke to Susan Nyman on the podcast last year who wrote the book Left Is Not Woke, and she would also be a good example of one of those kind of neo-Marxists who would have very valid critiques of wokeism for that reason. Yeah, no, exactly. And then lastly, there's a very interesting structural dissimilarities. Here's the similarities, right?
00:19:45
Speaker
A Marxism can, and it's a very rich, complicated tradition, but if you want to simplify, you can reduce it to three basic points of view. Number one, the key way to understand society, the key way to make sense of how it works is to look at economic categories like social class. That explains
00:20:03
Speaker
who won the last election, that explains what direction history is headed in, it explains the way we interact. That's really set by class dynamics between us. That's the key prison for understanding society. Number two, bourgeois social norms, the constitution, seemingly neutral rules and laws that really justify
00:20:26
Speaker
tool of class dominance. They're just an attempt to fool us into thinking that we have rights and that there's fairness when actually they're just a way of perpetuating class dominance. And so therefore, what we have to do about it is to rebel against it, get rid of it, have Marxist revolution. Bit of a black box, not exactly clear what's happened, but then you have a form of utopia. Then you have a society in which class has been abolished, everybody's a proletarian, proletariat has become the universal class, and we all live in harmony as brethren.
00:20:55
Speaker
So let's go to the identity synthesis. Very parallel set of claims at first. How do you understand society? How do you understand politics? How do you understand world history? Well, at the very core of it is identity categories, not class categories, but identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation. To understand how we're interacting, it's not that I might have grown up lower middle class, I might have grown up upper middle class. It's that we're both white guys, and that explains everything about our interaction.
00:21:24
Speaker
As Robin DiAngelo says in the most extreme example of this, every time a white person interrupts a black person, they bring the whole apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them, which I think just indicates that DiAngelo doesn't have any black friends, because part of friendship is to interrupt each other sometimes. We've done a couple of times in this podcast, right? But that is the key. Okay, so that's parallel to Marxism. Fine.
00:21:47
Speaker
the ideas in the Constitution with the creation of independence, right, Frederick Douglass was wrong, according to the identity synthesis, right? They're not, they don't serve a useful servant.
00:21:56
Speaker
purpose. We can't improve society by living up to them as Martin Luther King hoped. No, we have to abolish him. We have to get rid of him. You're open by talking about Brown vs. Board of Education. Derrick Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory, starts out working for the NAACP, making that ruling a reality, turning Brown vs. Board of Education into lived practices in the American South. And then he says, that was a mistake. They didn't accomplish what we did. And he becomes a Critical Race Theory when he starts to say, well, perhaps we should have had schools that are separate but truly equal.
00:22:26
Speaker
The idea of realizing these universal rules is a mistake. It's only going to pull the wool over our eyes and make us blind to how society works. Again, that runs in parallel with Marxism. But!
00:22:39
Speaker
The identity synthesis is given up in the universalist promise of Marxism. When Marxism at the end has a promise of universal class and we all get along, the identity synthesis says that is the worst. What provokes them the most is thinkers who, like Karen and Barbara Fields, who are race abolitionists, who think, you know, Morgan Freeman in your example earlier, who think a better society is going to be accomplished when we think about race less because it structures our society less. No, they want a society in which forever the way we treat each other depends on the
00:23:08
Speaker
group into which we're born, in which the state treats us explicitly on the basis of those kinds of characteristics. And so, I know this is a long answer, that is a key dissimilarity between Marxism and the identity synthesis. Because, interestingly, this ideology doesn't even attempt to promise us the utopia that Marxism never delivered, but at least promised.
00:23:29
Speaker
I listened to a conversation between you and Brendan O'Neill the other day, and I initially had some sympathy for the use of the term cultural Marxism to describe this phenomenon, but it was that inside. It was that inside, and the outcome is fundamentally about continued division as opposed to a Marxist view, which is universalist. That's a very, very different end state or end goal. So that makes a huge amount of sense to me. It also bizarrely makes me
00:23:58
Speaker
I think more kindly about Marxism in that respect. I'm most certainly not a Marxist, but the end outcome of a Universalist ideal for me is more agreeable than a constant source of division.
00:24:10
Speaker
I've grappled with that because, as I mentioned, my grandparents were Marxists and they were courageous Marxists in the sense that they sat in prison in the late 20s and 30s for advocating for communism in places where that wasn't popular. I thought a lot about what made them make the political choices that had tragic consequences for themselves in the end. I can understand that if you grow up Jewish and a shtetl and
00:24:36
Speaker
Eastern Europe, where all the conditions of your life are determined by your belonging in a religious ethnic group that is discriminated against. And there's this ideology that says, A, we're going to fight for all the poor people in the world, and B, we're going to treat everybody equally, and C, even the class divisions that now character society are going to go away once we win. You know, that's a very attractive
00:24:59
Speaker
Set of ideas i can see why people might be might find this appealing of course the question is why did people stick with them when it's an intellectual stick with them. Even for decades after it became clear what is meant in reality the soviet union and other parts of eastern europe that's a tough question to answer.
00:25:17
Speaker
And then in the case of my grandparents, my parents, failure of those ideals really ended up determining part of the life course because they were living in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s. My grandparents helped to build up the regime.
00:25:32
Speaker
And then in 1968, the communist government decided to use the tool of anti-Semitism that had always been powerful in Poland to concentrate power in its hands more, to get rid of some potential competitors and to crush some student unrest. And they threw out most of the remaining Jews in the country, including my parents and grandparents. So it's, you know, that promise of Marxism is one that's always failed. But you can see what's attractive about it, whereas
00:25:59
Speaker
This trap, and my books could be identity trap because there is a trap involved, also has a law, right? The law of being very radical and fighting against injustice that is certainly real. But it is a less attractive lure, a lure that I ultimately have a little bit less empathy for because it doesn't have that promise. It's not saying, you know, just trust us and we're going to create a society where we all live in harmony. It's saying just trust us and the society we're going to
00:26:26
Speaker
get is still one where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between different ethnic and religious and sexual groups. There's still going to be these different individuals who are going to be viewing each other with deep skepticism and fear because of the groups they are a part of. And that, I think, shows a poverty of ambition, which doesn't speak well of this ideology.
00:26:52
Speaker
This raises the very interesting question of how, indeed, that ideology, which demonstrates the poverty of ambition, which I think is a very unattractive ideology, particularly in the way that you've just explained it so eloquently, how did this ideology catch on?
Adoption of Identity Ideology in Institutions
00:27:06
Speaker
And now, to what I said earlier, it does hold sway in pretty much every mainstream Western institution from the media to the corporate world to large parts of the political establishment.
00:27:19
Speaker
Again, this is another quarter of your book, but give me the keynotes of how did this ideology go from being a fringe academic concern to a mainstream concern. It's a really striking phenomenon. Kimberly Crenshaw, one of the key figures in Critical Race Theory wrote a paper on the 20th anniversary of CRT, as it's called.
00:27:42
Speaker
And she says, look, we've come to have lots of influence in American law schools and parts of academia, and we should be proud of ourselves. But unfortunately, it's just we don't have any sway in society as a whole. This guy Barack Obama was just elected, and he stands for the opposite of what we stand for. He's fundamentally at odds with key tenets of critical race theory.
00:28:02
Speaker
And as a result, there's these hopes for post-racial society, and we've lost. I mean, 10 years later, this is around 2010, when 10 years later, these ideas had come to be absolutely mainstream in society, dominate the bestseller list in the year of 2020, and implemented in many institutions up to and including the fact that the Centers for Disease Control decides that unlike in Australia, I believe, and most other countries in the world, it can't give vaccines against COVID,
00:28:30
Speaker
to the elderly first, because the elderly in the United States happen to be disproportionately white. So how does that happen?
00:28:36
Speaker
there's a few things that explain that. One is what I call the short march for the institutions, the fact that this ideology becomes the dominant set of ideas on campus in part because of the vast influence of administrators over campus life. And a new generation of students from elite universities enter organizations that skew very young and have tremendous power over the course of that decade when you think of
00:29:02
Speaker
nonprofit foundations with huge amounts of wealth when you think of media organizations like the New York Times but also when you think about tech companies like Google and Apple and so on. Secondly, what happens is that social media vastly increases the importance of identity.
00:29:22
Speaker
and the acceptable array or the feasible array of different identities. So, you know, when I grew up, I'm just old enough that the internet wasn't playing a huge role in school when I was young. I had access to the internet, but it just wasn't, there wasn't social media in the same way. It wasn't a central place in the same way. And so my identity formation had to take place in the analog world.
00:29:47
Speaker
And when you think about it, to have an identity, you need to be in contact with a minimum number of people, let's say five people, who share your identity. And when you go to a school with 100 people in a grade or something like that, that really limits the number of different kind of identity groups you have. And so you end up with a 90s high school movie where there's the jocks and the theater kids and the nerds and so on. Because that's kind of as many groups as that ecosystem will sustain.
00:30:15
Speaker
Well, suddenly you have platforms on the Internet, only one being Tumblr, for example, where you can self-tag according to some kind of term. And then you can find anybody in the world
00:30:27
Speaker
stumbles across the same term who says, oh, that seems to describe me in a certain kind of way. And so you suddenly have these identity tribes on the social media platforms. This is where a lot of the new gender terms, for example, a lot of the new sexual orientations like demisexual originate. I haven't heard that one. Yeah. So far as I can tell, demisexual just seems to mean that you want to have some form of romantic connection with somebody before you have sex with them, which, you know,
00:30:53
Speaker
I do find it interesting how there are a lot of these terms just to explain common everyday beliefs that we used to hold but now they need to have some sort of pseudo scientific explainer behind them.
00:31:07
Speaker
Yes, I think demisexual is a particularly striking example in that regard. But that is where those terms bubbled up, and that is where people really started to organize themselves in terms of these kind of identities. And then you needed an ideology to hold together these different identitarian tribes, because suddenly people were saying, I'm offended by what you're saying, and you're being unfortunate to me.
00:31:28
Speaker
these ideas that i can understand you come from a different identity group and in order for us to live peacefully together i have to refer to you and everything that you're talking about certain kind of application of the idea of intersection alty. That really starts to bubble up on those kinds of sites and takes written form.
00:31:47
Speaker
in Ford catalog and an amazing website called everyday feminism.com. That is the first time that I really saw these kind of abstruse ideas packaged in these viral forms, you know, six things to say to your yoga teacher who thinks that cultural appropriation is fun, the kind of BuzzFeed stylistic version of the identity synthesis that starts to go viral in the mid 2010s.
00:32:08
Speaker
And that happens to be the time in which mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging money, are desperate for clicks, and they're seeing that some of the stuff is going viral. And so from Vox to The Washington Post to The New York Times, they hire those young writers who are putting forward those ideas and mainstreaming them in their pages. And so even before Donald Trump gets elected, you see a multiple rise in the use of terms like structural racism,
00:32:38
Speaker
white supremacy and so on in those mainstream newspapers in the United States. And then when Trump does get elected, that seems to confirm the worst fears of critical race theory and so on. That seems to confirm that America is just defined by its racism and so on. And it makes it very hard to disagree with any of those ideas on the left on mainstream institutions, because the moment you disagree with them, people say, well, you're secretly running interference with Donald Trump. You're secretly
00:33:04
Speaker
on that side. And that's when these ideas really become enforced in those kind of social institutions. So it's a complicated process with both political, technological and sociological underpinnings, but it takes place in this remarkably short span of time.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yes, I love that term, the short march through the institutions. I thought it was quite clever. It is easy enough to understand how younger demographic groups mixed with technology that can spread ideas more quickly would mean that these ideas take hold in, say, the media very quickly, how they take hold on academic campuses very quickly, how they take hold in, say, technology companies very quickly because of those demographics that you mentioned.
00:33:44
Speaker
I think some people struggle with how it takes hold across other parts of the corporate world and particularly say traditional older legacy companies like a merchant bank for example because they are still motivated by the they still have the profit motive that sits behind them.
00:34:03
Speaker
Most, for example, woke marketing campaigns seem to backfire. Bud Light is a good example. Disney is discovering that, quote unquote, woke movies don't sell at the box office. The short, short message here is that woke marketing, woke capitalism doesn't seem to be effective, and yet it still is such a driving force behind corporate America. And I would say that the corporate world in Australia now took me through specifically how that's happened in that domain.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I do think in general that in any market where there's an immediate feedback mechanism, there's more hope than in industries that are more insulated. Part of the problem with academia is that it's completely self-sustaining as a world. So what it takes
00:34:54
Speaker
to get an A in your class in college is for the professor who likes you. What it takes to get into a PhD program is for an admissions committee to like your research project. What it gets to be published, to be hired as an academic is to publish in journals that are run by fellow academics. And so it's very easy.
00:35:12
Speaker
for those kind of worlds to drift apart. Now, in the long run, that might have bad consequences for universities. I think in America now it's quite possible that tax-exempt status of the giant endowments of places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale are going to be taxed when Republicans are next in power. But that's a very delayed and indirect feedback mechanism
00:35:31
Speaker
And so it's very hard for those places to course correct when they've really gone off course in a serious way. I do think that even left in publications are a little bit better. I still think that we, you know, open page of New York Times publish some stuff that I don't think they highly of.
00:35:48
Speaker
But they have a much broader range of views than they did two or three years ago, in part because when you look at readers' comments, even at the left-leaning New York Times that has a mostly left-leaning subscriber base, these are consistently to the center, or if you want to write, of what the content of the articles are. When you have really low content, the media New York Times reader says, what on earth is this? This is just a little bit silly. What are you all talking about?
00:36:15
Speaker
about. And I think that has created a course correcting mechanism where now people like John McWhirter, who's written a great book about workness that I disagree with in parts, but that I think is a really important contribution, is now one of the opinion writers. So why is it that in a corporation like Coca-Cola,
00:36:33
Speaker
which literally needs to sell its product to virtually everybody on earth to continue to be as successful as it is, you end up with a corporate training that employees have to take called ways to be less white. Ways to be less white, for example, to be less punctual, less committed to the written word, all things that are racist, not against white people, against non-white people. The idea that non-white people somehow are less prone to being punctual or less interested in the written word is not a form of reverse racism, it's just a form of straight up racism.
00:37:03
Speaker
How does that happen what is it there's a few things here one is that this ideology is not. Some people would like to claim the organic voice of people of color of the marginalized right the demand for these ideas is not coming from.
00:37:21
Speaker
the poorest blocs of Harlem or the south side of Chicago, it is, as sociological studies have shown, the ideology of political tribe of progressive activists that is disproportionately white, highly educated, and affluent.
00:37:38
Speaker
And who runs the middle management ranks of big American corporations? People are white, highly educated and very affluent. So actually, it shouldn't be such a surprise that those places are more likely to implement these ideas. And I pause you there because that insight that it is the middle management of these companies that are driving this ideology is a very important one. I spoke to Peter Klein on the podcast last year, Peter.
00:38:04
Speaker
wrote an interesting academic paper titled Why Companies Go Woke, and his argument was precisely that. He said that a lot of the time, say, a DEI policy is not being driven by the frontline call center staff who are demanding equitable hiring policies. And similarly, it's not being driven by the CEO of the board who are more concerned with keeping their job and making sure that shareholders getting return on investment.
00:38:30
Speaker
It is the 25-year-old HR manager who has just come out of a liberal arts degree. And because, say, the CEO, who is a 55-year-old white guy, doesn't actually have a deep understanding of these issues, but doesn't want to be called a racist, and because the bottom layout just wants to go in nine to five and doesn't want to rock the boat, it is that middle management layer that has a lot of power. It's a very, very interesting insight.
00:38:56
Speaker
And that seems exactly right. And that intersects with what we're talking about earlier with the capture of a medium, right? I spoke to one CEO who told me about a case in which somebody was making a claim for some kind of form of discrimination in the workplace. I forget what was based on race or gender, perhaps both. And first thing he did was to go to the lawyers and say, look, did we do something wrong here? Are we going to win this? And the lawyers said, oh, 99.9% we win this. There's absolutely no merit to this. It's clearly spurious.
00:39:26
Speaker
So great, so we'll take it to court, probably. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You do not take this to court. That's a disastrous idea. Why not? Well, because the moment this lawsuit is filed, there's a big story in the New York Times. And the moment you win the lawsuit three years later, perhaps there'll be three lines somewhere in the back pages, but the reputational damage is done. So that's an important element of this. I would add another insight from game theory. So when you think about international relations,
00:39:54
Speaker
you think broadly speaking about the actions of different states and what rational incentives they have and how to deal with each other in the absence of some kind of common levi from common sovereign that can bind them. But in a later stage, scholars started to say, well, but it's a two level game, right? Because it's not just about the interests of different states. It's also Vladimir Putin is president of Russia. He started this war in Ukraine. If he, you know, perhaps it's in the interest of Russia to accept some kind of peace deal. But if he does,
00:40:23
Speaker
people can be very mad why did you have a lot of our own people killed or injured.
00:40:30
Speaker
in this war if we didn't get anything out of it. And so he might suddenly be out of a job. So there's a two level incentive, right? His incentive is different. The same is true of companies, right? Was it in Budweiser's interest to run the ad to reference? Certainly in retrospect, we know the answer is no. Probably most people involved knew beforehand that this had the potential to backfire and that at the very least it was wasted money because it wasn't going to really mobilize their core customer base.
00:40:58
Speaker
But do you want to be the person in the meeting saying that? Right? Like you are not just thinking of the interest of a company, you're thinking of your own career. And you have a choice here between saying, well, this is probably going to cost my company a little bit of money, but otherwise it's not going to go bankrupt over this. Right. So I still have my job. Well, if I'm the one speaking up in the meeting, will I still have a job in a week or a month?
00:41:22
Speaker
Probably, but not certainly. So let me just duck away and let it happen. I think that's a very important dynamic within companies as well. That goes to the chilling effect that the identity synthesis has on free speech. It's one of the main critiques that you have of the identity synthesis.
Impact on Free Speech and Societal Norms
00:41:42
Speaker
Help me understand how this impacts free speech, but also.
00:41:49
Speaker
What is the appropriate response to argue for free speech in response to the identity synthesis? Yeah. So it does chill free speech. I mean, from John Stuart Mill on down, people defending free speech have always recognized that we don't just need protection from the power of the state. We absolutely need that. But we also need protection from the oppressive power of society. And Mill was in many ways more worried
00:42:17
Speaker
about the censorious nature of Victorian society than he was about state sponsorship or being thrown in jail for things that people might say. And today with the tools of social media, the power of those forms of imposed silence has just continued to grow. And so I think we should distinguish between a healthy critical culture and a worrisome cancel culture. Jonathan Roush has made this point very well.
00:42:47
Speaker
should be allowed to criticize people on social media. That's part of free speech, right? We can't say you're not allowed to dogpile on people because it's my right to say I find this horrendous. The next person's right to say I find this horrendous. That's part of what free speech allows. But we should always be
00:43:01
Speaker
wary of moments when people are being portrayed as monsters for something they say that may have been taken out of context or that may not really be so bad. We should be very worried when this calls for boycott, when you're saying, you know, if this institution platforms them, then we're not going to engage with it in any kind of way.
00:43:23
Speaker
you have a right not to invite somebody for dinner you don't like, but you're starting to go very far when you're saying, you know, this person is so terrible and toxic, you know, not only am I not gonna invite him for dinner, if you will invite him for dinner, but I'm not gonna speak to you anymore. Those are ways of secondary boycotts that we start to run people toxic. We should be very worried about all of those kinds of forms of behavior that go beyond a healthy critical culture to a worrying some form of cancel culture. More broadly, I think the argument for free speech
00:43:53
Speaker
should not focus, as Mills did, which I love and much that I agree with, on the positive things that come from having free speech. They should come from the negative consequences that follow when we don't have free speech. And the most obvious one of these is that we're empowering the powerful.
00:44:15
Speaker
that the left has naively fought in the context of college campuses, for example, that because it has control of them, because the people running them tend to be sympathetic to their goals, it is always going to gain an advantage from having these very elaborate speech codes and so on and so forth.
00:44:32
Speaker
But it's very naive to think that college presidents or legislators in the national parliament or executives at Silicon Valley companies are always systematically going to be on the side of the vulnerable and the marginalized.
00:44:47
Speaker
By definition, the people making decisions about what is allowed and what is not allowed are going to be powerful people. Why should we trust them to always have the interest of the general public or the interest of those who are marginalized at hand? There's something ironic in the last months about the left suddenly saying, now our free speech is being suppressed in certain places on the topic of Palestine. In certain instances, they have legitimate concerns about people being disinvited and so on.
00:45:13
Speaker
And I'm on the side of robust free speech, even for positions that I might disagree with. But the lesson of that needs to be not this speech should be allowed, but other speech shouldn't have been allowed. It is that we need to have a consistent defense of all forms of free speech because otherwise we're always going to be dependent on the whim of those who happen to be in positions of power.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yes, I agree. It's something which I struggle with in society today that a lot of people can't make the distinction in their head that something can be morally abhorrent, but should still be legally allowed to be said because on balance, it is still better for people to be legally allowed to say something than the alternative that
00:45:56
Speaker
That is one problem or critique of the identity synthesis. The other or another that you bring up is the challenges surrounding cultural appropriation, which you mentioned earlier. We are talking on the International Day of Trans visibility. And I find it as an aside is also Easter, which has raised some kind of interesting debates on social media. I find this a tricky one because we live in a society where if you go to a party in blackface, that is social suicide.
00:46:26
Speaker
and career suicide. If, say, someone like Dylan Mulvaney plays out what I would argue are some pretty tired tropes of girlhood in, say, a music video, that is something which should be celebrated. And I think people, again, casual observers may struggle to understand why, say, the appropriation of gender is something which can be tolerated inside, even celebrated. And the appropriation of, say, a cultural or racial group is unacceptable. Help me understand that at face value, logical inconsistency.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, I know that I'm the best to help you understand that because I'm not sure that I, you know, embrace that set of distinctions. Look, I would say the following, right? I mean, first on culture, I argue against the concept of cultural appropriation, precisely because it
00:47:14
Speaker
requires the enforcement of these very arbitrary lines between cultures. To have a current cultural appropriation, you have to have a concept of who owns this cultural product. And so suddenly, the Sombrero, which is some complicated cultural product developed by specific people in the communities across both the West, actually, and Latin America, is owned by all Latinos, even by people who originate from countries that are thousands of miles away from Mexico, where that has historically been a big part of the culture.
00:47:43
Speaker
And then you have to say that they somehow collectively exercise some form of intellectual ownership over this, which stops other people from being able to do anything that might somehow look similar. That whole thing to me is incoherent. And as I argue, sometimes the term of cultural appropriation is applied to cases where there's genuine injustices, like with the Black musicians in America in the 1950s, 1960s, who couldn't have big careers because they're discriminated against. But in those cases, there's much more straightforward ways of expressing what was unjust. What was unjust was
00:48:12
Speaker
that they were not allowed to perform in many concert venues, to travel freely across the American South, to sleep in many hotels, to be played in certain radio stations. And to make progress, we don't have to fight against cultural appropriation. We shouldn't have stopped white saxophonists from playing certain kinds of music in the 50s and 60s. We have to fight against the underlying injustices, in this case, the forms of discrimination that those Black musicians suffered. So I think that cultural appropriation is a very positive thing.
00:48:38
Speaker
we should be able to be inspired by the cultures of others.
Gender and Cultural Identity Challenges
00:48:43
Speaker
That is one of the things I loved when I came to Australia and saw that places like Melbourne, Sydney are full of cultural appropriation as a New York and London and Berlin and so many other parts of the world. When it comes to gender, I think that we need to be able to hold two fourths in our mind at the same time. The first is that there clearly are some people who experience deep gender dysphoria, who for whatever reason that I think is not yet
00:49:07
Speaker
well understood either socially or scientifically, you know, have a very deep desire to live in accordance with the gender norms of a different biological sex. And by and large, as a philosophical liberal, I believe that they should be allowed to do that and that we should respect the choice and that we shouldn't bully them and we shouldn't mistreat them and we should treat them respectfully. And I think we've actually made significant progress towards that. The problem comes when
00:49:36
Speaker
The demand goes beyond inclusion in those kind of universal values and institutions, beyond the demand that just because
00:49:46
Speaker
I may be biologically male, but I wear a dress and I want to present as a woman. You should certainly not beat me up, certainly not inflict physical violence on me, but also hopefully be respectful to me, hopefully not discriminate against me in the workplace and so on and so forth. All of that is natural and as a demand and positive. The problem comes when the demands go beyond that.
00:50:12
Speaker
That comes in the context of participation by people who've gone through male puberty in competitive female sports, in which they have a significant biological advantage, which then does create real challenges, especially at the level of high performance sports. It comes when it
00:50:35
Speaker
We talk about certain single sex spaces, like women's prisons. And I do agree that there's a strange element to some of the culture around this that doesn't try to loosen gender norms when they're oppressive, but rather re-inscribes them. And there certainly are some organizations like Mermaids UK that have gone into schools and told young children, you know, if you're a girl and you don't like playing with dolls, but rather you enjoy playing football with the boys,
00:51:04
Speaker
then perhaps you're actually a man, perhaps you're actually a boy. And that is re-inscribing the most simplistic and constraining gender norms into the heart of society that feminists for good reason have fought against in the last decades.
00:51:19
Speaker
I find that deeply ironic about the gender discussion, but that may be for another episode. My final question, Yasha, you mentioned in that last answer that you are a philosophical liberal. I would call myself a philosophical liberal. In fact, I think in the book, one thing which is very appealing about how you might talk about this is that philosophical liberalism should be a philosophy that cuts across the traditional left and right and across, say, the political spectrum, which was a very appealing way of framing it in my mind.
00:51:49
Speaker
How can we make the argument for philosophical liberalism in response to the identity synthesis better in society today?
00:51:58
Speaker
I think part of it is that we need to have a courage of our convictions. One thing I'm struck by is that a lot of liberals are very reluctant to talk about progress, as people like Stephen Pinker have pointed out. And I get why, because there are genuine problems and injustices in our societies. And when you talk about progress, people often perceive that as saying, there's no problems at all. You're trying to deny the problems in order to be able to sustain things as they are.
00:52:26
Speaker
Liberalism has always been a progressive creed. It's always been trying to realize very noble, very ambitious ideals that we'll probably never fully realize. But as a result, we've made tremendous progress. I mean, for all of the important debates we're having about trans issues and for all the concerns that I have, for example, about the way in which puberty blockers are given to people in some places without proper medical evaluation and so on.
00:52:52
Speaker
We've made progress on the trans issue. I think our society is more just on that count than it was 25 years ago in part because we actually have a lot more respect and tolerance for trans adults. We've made huge progress in how we treat gays and lesbians. And when I was in high school in a pretty left-leaning environment in Germany in the late 1990s, there wasn't a single out gay or lesbian student in my school. I think that would be very different today. The amount of social acceptance we have for gays and lesbians is vastly higher.
00:53:20
Speaker
The extent to which societies from Germany where I grew up to Britain, to the United States, to Australia have become multi-ethnic, multi-religious, have accommodated people from different parts of the world and allowed them to thrive and succeed is vastly higher than it was 25 or 50 years ago.
Strength of Liberal Democracies
00:53:39
Speaker
And the amount of progress we've made on people of any ethnicity being able to succeed in the United States is also tremendous. And so when you look at the societies in the history of the world that are the most tolerant and the most affluent, when you look at the societies where, according to the UN Human Development Index, people have the most ability to get an education, to thrive, to pursue the goals they have in life. When you look at the societies that people would love to immigrate to,
00:54:08
Speaker
They say they would love to live in. A vast majority of those are liberal democracies. And so I think that we can be overly attuned to the flaws in our own societies and insufficiently proud of our accomplishments. And I think when we realize that, it should make us much more sanguine.
00:54:31
Speaker
about continuing to make that progress. We should recognize that we've been able to make that progress because we've tried imperfectly to actually live up to and apply our principles, and we're going to be able to make further progress by continuing to do so. It's really well said. As an aside, it's interesting that you mentioned that liberalism has always been a progressive ideal. I heard
00:54:54
Speaker
The conservative, Jonah Goldberg, say something quite clever the other day. He said that a form of conservatism that doesn't conserve classical liberalism is not worth conserving. So in that way, I think actually it is a way of thinking which can bring together what at the moment is quite a polarized society. And you make that argument wonderfully in the final chapter of your book, which I would say Yasha is the single best analysis of the strange and disorienting times that we live in.
00:55:21
Speaker
I can't recommend it more highly to anyone who wants to understand this stuff better. I just thought it was wonderful. Thank you very much for writing it and thank you for coming on Australiana. Thank you. This was a really fun conversation, Will. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.