BOOKS
The Conspicuous Absence of White Identity from Yascha Mounk’s “Trap”
In September, after seeing Yascha Mounk on Morning Joe, my 84 year old dad — who has read many drafts of my new book Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation, immediately called me.
“Danna, have you heard of this guy Yascha Mounk? He’s talking about how group identities can be harmful for democratic health, too!”
“Oh shit,” I replied, “Did Yascha Mounk and I write the same book?”
“Well gosh, you better find out!”
Well, my reader friend. It turns out the answer is no. No we did not.
Because in The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Yascha Mounk has managed to write 286 pages about how social identity dominates American political and cultural life, without discussing the history (or lucrative exploitability) of America’s salient conservative white identity.
I find this mind-boggling. I’m not a critical theorist or a scholar of race. I’m a social scientist who has spent the last few years studying the psychology of misinformation, what drives Americans to believe things that are false, and how this harms democracy. And I’ve found that at the heart of these dynamics is the primacy of American political identity.
So, you can imagine my eagerness to read Mounk’s descriptions of the social psychology of groups and what he envisioned as the challenges that group identity can pose to pluralistic liberal democracies.
But while Mounk and I both address the challenges group identity poses to democratic health, the hows and whys — and even the whats — of the phenomena that he and I describe are completely different.
In my new book I discuss how salient group identities shape how we view ourselves and our world. (Mounk does this too). I also highlight how these dynamics are aided and abetted by our media environment in ways that are harmful to democratic health. (Mounk does this too).
But that’s where the similarities end.
Because while Mounk criticizes what he sees as harmful outcomes of social identity considerations on the left, my work highlights the overwhelming influence of identity dynamics on the political right.
The Identity Trap traces the roots of liberal “wokeness,” offering the slightly more diplomatic term “identity synthesis” to describe a liberal ideology that is “centrally concerned with the role that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation play in the world.” (p. 9) While many who embrace this ideology are well intentioned, Mounk concedes, the result of the identity synthesis is to highlight difference over unity, encourage censorship over expression, and to ultimately fuel political sectarianism and ideological backlash.
Mounk dates the origins of his “Identity Synthesis” to postcolonial scholars and their embrace of postmodernism, including theoretical contributions like Derrick Bell’s “Critical Race Theory” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality.” And while he acknowledges that these concepts were intended to help marginalized groups overcome real historical injustices, he contends that they created “a deep pessimism about the possibility of overcoming racism or other forms of bigotry.” Ultimately, he proposes, these ideas fueled an academic, social, and cultural climate that has placed limits on free speech, embraces racial and ethnic separatism, and encourages the creation of public policy based on identity categories.
The empirical evidence Mounk provides in support of his claims is anecdotal and scattershot. But, perhaps the most glaring flaw in Mounk’s account is what it’s missing: That is, references to identity-related dynamics on America’s political and cultural right. Other than Trump’s election in 2016, which Mounk (rightly, I think) points to as an identity threat that increased the salience of various liberal and minority identity categories, Mounk’s version of events essentially ignores the actions of conservative political and media elites that have transformed the vastly overlapping categories of “white, Christian, rural-dwelling, conservative” into a dominant and readily activated monolithic social and cultural identity.
Mounk doesn’t mention the racial realignment of America’s political parties as African Americans migrated North and West, prompting Southern Republican leaders to double down on racially charged “states’ rights” as a pathway to legislative victory. Nor does he mention the strategic merging of the goals of white segregationists and Evangelical Christians in the 1970s, as Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich capitalized on the anger of white parents whose Christian schools had been stripped of their tax-exempt status for violating anti-segregation laws. Absent from Mounk’s account of America’s identity problem is the well-documented process of partisan “social sorting” following the parties’ racial realignment, as Americans from distinct socio-demographic groups came to identify more with one of the two major political parties, leaving us with a Democratic party that is racially and ethnically diverse, suburban and urban, secular and agnostic, and culturally liberal, and a Republican party that is more homogeneously white, Christian, rural, and culturally conservative.
And while the sorting has certainly happened on “both sides” its outcome has been decidedly asymmetrical, resulting in a Republican party whose homogenous identity alignment gives them exceptional “group fit.” And when people “fit” nicely into their social identity category (they look the way most of their team looks, worship the way most of their team worships, live where most of their team lives, and live how most of their team lives), their social identity becomes salient. When an identity is salient, it is easy to leverage, activate, and mobilize through identity threats.
I propose that it is this set of dynamics that accounts for much of the ideological asymmetry that we find in our political information environment. Since we are motivated to believe in falsehoods that help us comprehend, control, and enact community in keeping with our social group, the landscape of misinformation and misperceptions is driven by social identity. And with a better-aligned, more homogeneous set of social identity categories on America’s political right than on the left, we also find greater belief in misinformation and a greater supply of mis and disinformation.
The “intersection” of race, religion, geography, and culture on America’s political right also provides a fertile ground for political and media elites to activate identity threat for power and profit. From Donald Trump to Fox News to Facebook, our political media environment taps into core aspects of the right’s overlapping identities, thus further distilling these political mega-identities into their most caricatured essence: God, Guns, Country, Tradition.
Not only does Mounk not address conservative white identity in his discussion of the identity synthesis, but when he does criticize the salience of whiteness it is to criticize “progressive separatists… encouraging whites to identify with their ethnic origin,” as though it is here — as a project of the left — that whiteness as an “identity” is problematic!
Mounk points to the problem posed by Americans “starting to think of themselves, explicitly and primarily, as whites,” which, he contends, is what “many racially segregated affinity groups and corporate diversity trainings now encourage them to do” (p. 197).
He’s so close, folks. So close.
Sure, white people thinking of themselves primarily as white is destructive and dysfunctional for a thousand reasons, but to attribute the primacy of a racialized white identity primarily to the actions of the left? — to place it all in the lap of diversity trainings “progressive separatism?” Rather than, say, to the decades of policies, rhetoric, and strategies of the right that have created a well-aligned homogenous white identity engine? This seems like a major abdication.
On Morning Joe, The New York Times’ Mara Gay highlighted these issues as she asked Mounk, “… if you are so genuinely and deeply concerned — understandably — about those kinds of divisions that may be in some cases artificial, why not start with dismantling white supremacy, where those divisions began, and where the power lies?”
In his response to such criticisms, Mounk points to his prior work on the dangers of white supremacist authoritarians and populist movements. He highlights how The Identity Trap is his fifth book, and that those critiques of are present in his other books. But, isn’t this exactly the book where we should find a pointed discussion of the harms of a salient white conservative Christian identity? And how its salience is not the fault progressive activism, but rather… of decades of white identity politics that are never called “identity politics” even though they are literally just that?
The fact that Mounk knows the history, understands the ideology of right wing populists, and knows the social psychological underpinnings of a salient white social identity, to me makes their absence from this book even more conspicuous.
Maybe Mounk doesn’t consider whiteness to be a part of the “synthesis” of identity because, unlike the salient racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation/identity categories celebrated on the left, Republicans, despite their overlapping white, Christian, rural, conservative categories don’t necessarily discuss — or perhaps even “see” — their whiteness as their salient social category. Maybe like insurrectionist Jenny Cudd who livestreamed from a hotel lobby after storming the capitol on January 6, 2021, maybe they just see themselves as “f*cking patriots” whose whiteness is merely … implied.
So, dad, thank you for the heads up about Yascha Mounk’s new book. I have read it cover to cover and am pleased to report:
No.
No, Yascha Mounk and I very much did not write the same book.
