Transcript for:
Conversation with Coleman featuring Yasha Mounk

but I think it's a mistake to seek that form of recognition by uh really thinking of yourself in terms of your particular intersection of identities because when we want to feel seen in society it's also as individuals it's as people with idiosyncratic tastes uh the way we make a joke the the the kind of preferences we have the things we value one of the ways to think about that is that your sibling might have very similar intersection of identities when you do but you want to be seen as separate from your sibling because you're not your sibling because what makes you you is also what sets you apart from your sibling and so I think it's not just a political trap actually it's a personal trap as well it it inspires people to seek that recognition that we desperately need in in in in forms of reductive self-descriptions mhm that actually will never quite satisfy [Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman my guest today is Yasha monk Yasha is a german-born political scientist author and lecturer known for his research on the rise of populism and the challenges to Liberal democracy he has authored several influential books including stranger in my own country the people versus democracy and his new book the identity trap a story of ideas and Power in our time a few episodes ago I had Christopher rufo on the podcast to discuss his analysis of why wokeness came to dominate so many institutions Yash is asking the same question in this book but he's coming to a different answer Yasha focuses Less on people like Herbert maruza and more on intellectuals like Michelle Fuko Edward SED Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw we also talk about why there are so many former marxists in the writing world but so few people who convert into Marxism later in life we talk about how fuko's critique of language differs from George Orwell's critique of language and much more I really recommend getting a physical copy of his book Because of its complexity and just sitting down with it it's really one of those books that's important to actually read rather than listen to a conversation in any event without further Ado Yasha monk okay Yasha Monk thanks so much for coming back on my show I'm looking forward to coming okay so we're here to talk about your new book the identity trap I I never do this I never can like well please hold into the camera yeah do it show it proudly because it's a great book um it's broadly about a topic I cover a lot on this podcast which is uh you know the evolution of the the ideology that has become very popular on the left in the past several decades that goes by many different names uh wokeness identity politics Etc but your book has a a really a really deep and I think interesting sort of history of ideas about how we came to be here and I just had Chris rufo on my podcast who has a different story so um my sort of uh my most loyal listeners will have just heard a kind of different version of this story from rufo and we'll get to his account in a bit but before we do that can you kind of uh you know tell my audience why you came to care about this particular uh set of ideas and how it links up with your previous books which were one one of which was about you know kind of right-wing populism and democracy and the other was more about you know how diverse democracies can succeed so how didd you come to this new book yeah so as just saying I'm sort of a democracy crisis hipster I was worried about the crisis of democracy before was cool yeah and before Donald Trump was elected and all of those things um and uh you know so I worry a lot about threats to the basic liberal institutions that I think sustain a country like the United States and make it despite all of its real flaws a great place to live mhm um you know a lot of the threats to that do come from the far right and from ter s like Donald Trump or Narendra Modi in India and RP erogan in turkey and all of those kinds of figures and that's definitely one of the things that continue to be concerned about I just wrote an article a few days ago about uh the upcoming polish elections in the way in which the sort of authoritarian populist government there has uh eroded Democratic institutions and is likely to destroy them if it gets reelected um but I came to worry about some of these developments that you Chronicle so well on this podcast and other writings uh for a number of reasons um one is that uh I care about beating those kind of right populists and I think when mainstream institutions are increasingly captured by an irrational ideology that is deeply unpopular uh when a lot of people lose trust in what people say on TV and what in you know what decisions uh uh government officials make and and and how uh the other political alternatives are going to govern because of the hold that these ideas have over our social life that actually empowers those figures on the right so even though they are quite different in the nature of their ideas one is the yin to the other is Yang MH uh and then I care about these ideas because I think the stakes are significant in themselves now look I'm I'm I'm an academic and a writer I care about the kind of ideas that are governing our public sphere our social life our universities and when there's a new ideology that has been adopted at incredibly rapid Pace without people really interrogating it in a serious way with an amazing dve of serious uh Earnest engagement with those ideas then then then that's concerning in itself and it's particularly concerning when I think it's inspiring all kinds of destructive uh norms and uh uh uh habits uh and Customs um in our schools in our universities in our corporations um you know to give one example many elite private schools in the country now have uh teachers come in in first grade second grade and divide kids up by race say if you're black you go over there if you're Latino you go over there if you're Asian americ you go over there and by the way if you're white you go over there and then we try and teach those people as the name of one uh particularly influential organization uh puts it to embrace race to think of themselves as racial beings to double down for the white kids on their white identity to own the whiteness now the goal of that is to build a more tolerant Society where we're going to fight against Injustice the goal of that is to to to inspire anti-racist I think it's much more likely to lead to zero some conflict in the heart of our society and to uh inspire people to be racist or white supremacist rather than anti-racist so I think that these things have important stakes in their own terms as well I think the difference between the threat from the right and the threat from the left at least among my network and the people I've known in my life is that the threat from the right is generally more obvious to most people and again that's a statement relative to my own situation having grown up up in a blue area having lived in and around New York City my whole life the threat from the right the threat from racism is a wolf in Wolf's clothing the threat from you know separating kids by race with the aim of teaching them to quote unquote Embrace race that is a lot more confusing to people because some people I think some people fall for what you would call the identity trap in your book they fall for the Trap of believing that this is the way to fight racism this is um the way to stand up to to bigotry on the right uh and so that's why I spend more time critiquing it yeah and and that's why I call it a trap by the way I thought really hard about what to name this book and I think the identity trap is the right name because it's about all these new ideas about identity and I'm sure we'll get into detail with them but it's a trap because a trap has something attractive it has a lure mhm right it's saying hey this is the most radical you know the most principled uh the most uncompromising way to fight against things that really are problem Against Racism and homophobia and discrimination and against all of those kinds of things that is what lures people in but part of a trap is also that once you you know see a piece of cheese and you you go towards it you're going to be trapped right um the outcome is going to be bad for you uh and in this case I think it's also going to be bad for society now part of it is this political trap that uh a lot of progressive organizations have torn themselves apart because of their internal meltdowns making it harder for them to sustain their missions that um you know when you encourage people to embrace race you might be trying to build a more tolerant Society but actually you might build a zero some conflict and which precisely historically dominant continue to win out M um you might think that this is the most radical way to oppose Trump but actually you're going to make it easier for him to win again in 2024 um it's also a personal trap in important ways I think um you know I think it's true that most people not everybody perhaps but nearly everybody seeks a form of recognition they want a form of respect in society they want to feel seen in society and of course in a society that says if you're you know a member of this group you're inferior somehow or we have these terrible views about who you are that's going to be hard to do so of course we need to oppose those forms of uh people being deprecated but I think it's a mistake to seek that form of recognition by uh really thinking of yourself in terms of your particular intersection of identities because when we want to feel seen in society it's also as individuals it's as people with idiosyncratic tastes uh the way we make a joke the the kind of preferences we have the things we well value one of the ways to think about that is that your sibling might have very similar intersection of identities than you do but you want to be seen as separate from your sibling because you're not your sibling because what makes you you is also what sets you apart from your sibling and so I think it's not just a political trap actually it's a personal trap as well it it inspires people to seek that recognition that they desperately need in in in in forms of reductive self- descriptions mhm that actually will never quite satisfy me yeah so autobiographically I I graduated high school and entered college right at the time where these kinds of racial separatist you know rituals were going on so I had one at my high school probably around 2013 14 and in my orientation at Columbia University there was another one and and I I remember at by the time of my orientation at Colombia I think I was already you know kind of searching for criticisms of my milu and I didn't really know how to find them necessarily I was I was listening to podcasts and so forth and but I I do recall being asked to go to one side of a classroom the the black corner and of course I'm half black half Hispanic so it's inherently ambiguous which I would choose M but for whatever reason I choose I chose the black corner and I I I I remember I mean the intention of this experience was presumably good but the effect was to make me feel more acutely aware of my race M which I was not going into that class right going into that classroom I I figured it's my first week at college I hope I make friends you know this is an anx an anxiety inducing situation in the sense that you're in a new environment you you want to fit in you want to see you know get a friend group and so forth you were used to the cool kids at Juliet and you had to figure out how to get on with the squares at Colombia so there was no Wrecking I was used to the Mean Streets of juliard no um and you know and and after that I felt well okay this is pigeon pigeon ho holding me as the black student and I wonder if other students are going to now look at me and and see my blackness as a bigger feature of my identity simply as as a result of this exercise which is not something that I wanted I wanted them to get to know me as individuals so you know this this struck me as a very strange exercise and there's a very strange feeling in the room when we're all being asked to do it because I'm not sure anyone wanted to do it of course nobody felt comfortable pushing back against it no one was going to be that contrarian it would be like getting up on a church Pulpit on Sunday morning and saying hey actually guys have you considered God doesn't exist right hail Satan yeah yeah no one wants to be that no one has the Larry Davids quality to just you know do that all the time if only we could always have a pocket Larry David with us um what when what you what you're saying is exactly with two ways in which I think this this is a personal trap one of which is um you may not self Define in that kind of way right you may say hey the most important thing about me is not that I'm a racial being but may it may be a fact that you're seen in a particular way as part of an ethnicity and that has certain forms of social relevance I don't think either of us would deny that um but your your deep self-identification deep down is not my ethnicity that's what really defines who I am and yet in that situation you're required to make that the primary thing about you in a kind of self-affirming way right like you have to walk to that corner and that does violence to to how you think about who you are right I I I don't Define in the first instance as somebody who's white or somebody who's Jewish there a true facts about me I'm aware of that I'm aware of that mediates my social standing in certain ways but but but but but it is not something where I'm like what really defines me is that I'm white no um the the other important Point here is that inevitably a society which always bases its treatment of people on the group to which they belong is going to spell trouble for people whose membership in those groups is somehow ambiguous right so in your case well do I go to the black corner do I go to the Latino Corner MH um and you know one of the examples you know in the book I give a lot of examp examples of what's going on and it's not a cancel culture book it's not people you know it's not the famous stories and so on I try to make each of those stories do philosophical work and really illustrate something um but one of the stories I was really shocked by is of a uh former student of mine um who was an intern at the art museum of an IBD University uh during the pandemic and they asked all of the students all of the interns to recreate an artwork from The Collection because people couldn't go in person to look at the art and so she her mother is is is a Chinese immigrant uh she thinks of herself as Asian-American grew up in the United States and she recreated the self-portrait of this Asian artist and her mother that's kind of comment on beauty standards or something like that and she send that into uh the the museum the director beautiful you've done this beautifully you know it'll go up in the website in a couple of days and the curator of the museum was Asian-American said this is completely impossible uh you've uh uh committed cultural appropriation how dare you do this you've done something very bad and just must be a misunderstanding my mom is Chinese what are you talking about like yeah but your your dad is not your dad is not Chinese and I think he was neither white nor Asian um and so therefore you you had no right to do this so this this this this ique University was applying a racial purity test mhm on whether a student was allowed to uh you know create this artwork she was sufficiently Chinese even though her mother as Chinese and she thought of herself as Chinese American um but she was insufficiently racially pure to be uh uh treated with respect in that situation and there's something about you know when you really make Society uh uh make its treatment of you depend on the group to which you belong there's always going to be the question of okay so how do we Define who's a member of that group and not and for people who have complicated identities but ironically despite all of the emphasis intersectionality is always going to create a problem okay so before we get into the specific story you tell I want to address a concern right off the bat which is this stuff is all marginal it's like it's one girl in college trying to submit an art piece it's um a new story there you know a cherry-picked story here it's not mainstream enough to be worth worrying about or or writing a book about um how do you address that well in two ways first of all uh you know I I teach the stuff at college and my students are great they they want to engage with stuff they're grateful to have a space when they engage with stuff and I don't indoctrinate them in in the classroom I I I assign readings that broadly agree with with with with my point of view I agree I I assign some of your text sometimes actually um but I also assign things that are very much on the other side I assign Derek Bell and kimy creno in fact I would not be able to teach some of my classes at a public university in Florida because there you're not supposed to teach critical race Fury um and identity politics I teach papers that clearly are out of that tradition and defend that I want my students to be able to think critically about these things and make up their own mind I tell them at the beginning of class I want you to change your mind about something I don't care in which direction you're going to change it m but the bottom line assumptions that these smart open-minded students have are deeply steeped in this tradition they haven't heard the counter arguments in their education that is how deeply the most influential people in America uh which they're going to be in 10 or 20 or 30 years and not being shaped as part of that tradition so that's not marginal but there's also really clear cases of this having uh influence on public policies with extremely high stakes for me uh the most important most shocking was the way in which the United States rolled out vaccines mhm uh in 2021 M um the key advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control called acip uh considered you know we have these amazing life saving vaccines there very few of them what are we going to do virtually every country in the world did it by age but they gave some locations to doctors because you needed hospitals to be staffed and when we basically said over 85s over 80s over 75s Etc going down the list um this advisory committee said even for that has huge practical benefits much easier to do uh we're not going to do it that would be unethical because a disproportionate number of older Americans are white mhm and even for according to our own causal models deviating from this model is going to increase the number of deaths by between 0.5 and 6.5% could lead to thousands more people dying that would be the wrong ethical thing to do and so instead they recommended putting essential workers who uh supposedly are more diverse first now a couple of things happened from that one is that uh it's really hard to communicate who's an essential worker and immediately the politican started about being included as essential workers film Crews were essential workers Finance Executives were essential workers I was an essential worker Baristas and bank tellers I think were as well right yeah and and and I was an essential worker as a college professor in Maryland because I was supposedly in the classroom at a time when I was not allowed to teach classes in person right right then what happened is that uh you had way too many people eligible for the vaccine at a time when there was barely any appointments MH so who got the appointments well we were all competing for them refreshing websites but the people who were able to do that for hours a day or uh uh who could write little computer programs to find eligible spot or who were able to drive hours out of town in order to get to some rural Pharmacy but had more capacity for some random reason they were the ones to get it in other words more privileged people who probably wear at slightly less risk to health and most importantly uh I suspect but this policy even killed more nonwhite people because if you give uh a vaccine to two 25-year-old black Uber drivers rather than one 80-year-old black retie more black people are going to die this is how heavily this disease excused towards all the people so here's a policy that is is a life or death question mhm uh is capable of inspiring just the worst kind of Zero Sum racial competition in our politics and can easily be exploited by the political Riot uh to empower people like Donald Trump so is that a trivial example I I don't think it's Tri yeah so um it's worth U just reminding people that thankfully there was last minute outcry about that policy and it didn't actually get implemented right no it did partially get implemented so the the advisory committee wanted to make it just about essential workers if I recall this right at the moment um there was push back against it uh from from from I think M glas and me and a bunch of others MH um and in the end uh it was state by state Most states uh adopted a mix of uh uh essential workers and elderly people so that elderly people were eligible but so were all of these essential workers and since it was really really hard to get actual appointments it did mean that a lot of healthy young people who were not at particular risk from the pandemic ended up getting those vaccines before the elderly whose life would have been saved yeah okay so let's go right to the story that you tell about how it is that identity politics or wokeness uh has come to predominate in culture and and I guess one last thing would just be the language that you choose here identity politics and wokeness these these are both terms that have been um kind of Beat to Death and in some way that's a natural effect of them being so important is that we have to have names for things and when things are on people's minds the names for those things just end up getting uh repeated over and over and when they contested philosophies it becomes especially fraught because you know you know what happens is there there's like an excess of some ideology and then there's a backlash to it and the backlash itself has an excess and the people that subscribe to the philosophy they don't always want to take on all the baggage associated with the word but also the people that criticize it don't want to take all the baggage of the critics and you get this dance of everyone distancing themselves from every kind of word right the woke will distance themselves from the word wokeness uh anti anti-woke will distance themselves from anti- wokeness uh and and it's all understandable uh in terms of the signaling Dynamics at play um but it makes the conversations a bit harder you have this new term identity synthesis that I really like why have you chosen that and what what is this ideology a synthesis of yeah if you one is that um what you're describing certainly happens but it's somewhat unusual right there's lots of very controversial terms or very controversial ideologies for which the term is not controversial socialism yeah Marxism socialism but there's like some people love socialism some people hate socialism but the people who love and hate socialism agree to call the thing we're talking about socialism mostly yeah and so uh uh you know I think Freddy deoa said look just just just tell me what on Earth you want me to call this ideology that is reshaping our soci reality I'll call it whatever you want me to call it I don't really care but we need to have a term that allows us to talk and debate about it in the way that we can talk and debate about socialism by using that term and I think I think there's an article by Dan Hitchens where he just called it the thing oh that's funny yeah the article is just called the thing let's just call it the thing called the thing so I sort of you know for the purposes of This Book and know this book really is trying to be the most levelheaded and comprehend ensive explanation of what this ideology is and obviously as you can tell at this point I'm critical of the ideology but I really this is not a pical book I'm trying to take the ideas seriously and and the intellectual history which I we're getting to contains lots of people who are smart sophisticated thinkers whom I have some fundamental disagreements but but but who are people I enjoyed reading and and and learning from so so you know in order to write that book I wanted to term that at least for these purposes people who are critical of it and people who are supportive of it that could kind of recognize as the thing as the term that references the thing so why the identity synthesis well first of all because these ideas are fundamentally about forms of group identity about race and gender and sexual orientation fundamentally we're saying these are the the most important categories for which to understand and think about the world and they should be what political activism is based on and actually they should be in many ways what our social institutions uh and policies revolve around right so obviously identity is straight for it m and in synthesis because I actually think that in its current form this ideology is a surprising synthesis of three different intellectual traditions postmodernism postcolonialism and critical race Theory and if you actually go through each of those traditions and the main thinkers and their main concerns the sort of six or seven themes that dominate in the United States in 2023 in Progressive circles really emerge mhm uh and so we we've synthesized these different Traditions to crystallize the ideology as it stands now yeah so from what it seems to me your synthesis syn synthesis really includes um basically uh fukko s um and I I don't know how gatri spivac is that how spivac Okay SP Derek Bell and Kimberly crenchaw roughly those five yeah and of course you can always add other figures in that tradition and I I really read very very broadly in order to write this book I'm trained as an intellectual historian originally um but I think these are the ones that that that most meaningfully contributed to this tradition okay let's begin with Fuko um what like strip down to as few ideas as possible ideally one or two what is Fuko all about and what what how does he contribute to this synthesis yeah so you know the start you know there's a little bit of a subtext here which you mentioned and I'm sure we'll we'll go into it more detail of a lot of a right says this is just cultural Marxism right that's what somebody like Chris rufo argues um uh I think that makes it very hard to see um how influential Fuko is this entire tradition mhm and once you realize that you you realize it must be more complicated than cultural Marxism because Fuko himself rejected Marxism and that's really a lot of what founds his philosophy he was a member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953 which is a Marxist political party basically listening to moscow's political directives but he he hated the party he had terrible experiences in it and and to his honor he left it in 1953 in part because the party blamed uh conspiracy theory by by a conspiracy by Jewish doctors uh for for for the death of joose Stalin um and in an intellectual M where everybody's Marxist and it's kind of Politically Incorrect not to be Marxist je Paul S the most influential pris intellectual as a Marxist Fuko rejects what he calls Grand narratives these big attempts to structure our understanding of the world and think that it has some kind of directive purpose that once you really analyze the world in the right kind of way you really get the main driving forces of it and you know you see where it is leading and one of those key Grand narratives was Marxism with its predictions about how the proletariat was going to State a revolution bring about socialism so on so forth MH another key ideology was liberalism right the basic principles of liberal democracy the idea that if we live up to in our context the the Bill of Rights constitution in the French context the uh you know values of a French Revolution that is going to create a better and more Humane World F also rejects that so from the beginning he has a very deep skepticism about any form of Truth claim that claims to be neutral or Universal mhm and about political values that claim to be superior to others so that deep skepticism uh about truth and OB truth is is the first big contribution he makes the second big contribution is that he changes how we think about political power MH now you know you ask a smart high schooler what political power is they'll say something like you know there's laws and there's a state and there's a police force and they exercise power over the society and perhaps in some complicated Way That Power deres from us for people through elections right but it's a pretty top down thing um says no no no that's not the most important form of political power the most important form of political power comes from these discourses from the way we think about and conceptualize the world what's truly important is uh how we have this conversation with podcast and how that constrains the kind of possible moves that people can make in thinking about the world so power is much more diffuse and it's omnipresent in those kinds of ways and that made Fuko quite skep iCal about the possibility to bring about uh improvements because you might fight against one kind of oppressive discourse but then you know that might give you a second of freedom but then the discourse going to reconstitute itself and the new discourse is probably going to be just as oppressive as the one that came before mhm yeah so I mean Fuko is interesting because he his skepticism about moral progress really Cuts directly against the militant activism of of many people that were later inspired by him and well you reason your account is so great is because it explains how you get from a truly skeptical postmodern view wherein every you know every quote unquote meta narrative like Marxism or Classical liberalism Enlightenment humanism even probably intersectionality are are wrong how you get from that to a new meta narrative that claims Fuko as its as one of its forefathers before I get there I you know I had this question inspired by reading your book and you know the fact that Fuko is a former Marxist in my reading of so many different strains of things I've just there's so many people that are former marxists right and I I compiled the list so you have Thomas Soul former Mar Marxist Christopher Hitchens arguably former Marxist Peter Hitchens byard Rustin are arguable in that case but um I would argue uh Eugene genovesi the great historian of slavery apparently toner Tony uh uh Tony Blair which I didn't know eldrid Cleaver um the the Black Panther Salvador Del apparently all of these people former marxists marxists in their you know often their 20s and 30s and then uh they come out of it what you don't see is really the reverse you don't see very many people that were not marxists in their 20s and 30s and then in their 40s and 50s read doopy tal and said oh this this actually this guy's a point um why is that why do you see so many former marxists but you so rarely see the reverse H that's very that's an interesting question um or is that just like an a feature of the particular time in history that all of these that's what I'm wondering about yeah I mean um I I think there's a little bit of bir right so part of it is certainly political context um you know the the unlike the movement of young progressives today the student movement over 1960s really was very deeply Marxist mhm um not everybody was Marxist was debates you know some people were Marist which just argu you know whatever there sort of complicated interesting things um but but the basic uh uh thrust of a lot of the student movement in the United States and certainly in in France and in Germany in the 1960s was Marxist MH and so part of what you're picking up on is that in the biography of many of those people they were young in the 60s when those were just sort of a dominant ideas um and then they you know started to think about the world and saw some of the uh limitations of of of his ideology saw the way in which the Soviet Union was becoming less and less and less attractive like every other communist Society in the Eastern block um and so they they they they finally fell out of it but you know when you read a book like uh the captive mind but chest of Milos mhm he's telling a story of Polish Society in the Years after the Soviet Union occupies it and uses its political might to install the Polish communist power uh uh and put it in charge and there you have a story of grown intellectuals embracing Marxism because that's what it takes to get to a program in that Society um so there's strong political pressure to become a Marxist and then people become Marxist in that kind of context so I there certainly examples of that but I do think that there is perhaps something more fundamental as well what what Marxism gives you and that is a similarity I think to the identi synthesis is uh a way of learning one set of ideas and feeling Superior to everybody else in your Social Circle mhm right um reality is complicated and messy and it's hard to have debates about it it's hard to have real insights into it um but you learn the basic categories of Marxism and you say oh you're talking about this movie in these terms actually it's all about the class relations because this guy is work and this SK or whatever right M mhm oh you're talking about you know what's happened in uh Italy yesterday well really we have to think about the categories of the bisi and the proletarian Etc and then you'll understand the true World historical significance of this particular development and it's very appealing because it gives intellectuals free things it gives you guidance in the world it makes you feel Superior to others right uh it if you have speak for language and others don't you're like I understand what's going on I've lifted Veil from the world and you little idiots still haven't MH and you feel part of this world historical movement right like you're part of fighting for the eventual Revolution and the Advent of this beautiful world and that's very attractive and it's very attractive to intellectuals and it's very attractive to young people in particular perhaps lots of people even stay with that for a lifetime uh but I think if you're a really thoughtful person if you're a critical person you also start to get a little bit bored of that it gives you all the answers but precisely because it gives you all the answers the answers are often wrong and the answers are often boring MH and so perhaps once you've moved through that phase you start to see oh you it doesn't quite seem to add up in this case and perhaps I'll stay a good comrade and continue to talk in these terms in an unthinking way or perhaps I'll start to revise how I see the world yeah yeah I think there's definitely something to the idea that if you were an intellectual in the first half or middle of the 20th century being an intellectual was almost synonymous with being a Marxist in the sense that it was the water in which one swam until one discovered other things maybe um and to that end it you know do you envision a possibility 50 years from now where similar to how there's a Wikipedia page just full of former marxists which I discovered preparing for this podcast will there be a Wikipedia page full of former let's say intersection or identity synthesis uh adherence yeah you know it's funny that you say it's like sort of War swiming that is nearly precisely what John Paul SRA said at some point about Marxism um uh which he believed it right in a good way he said you know that's the only real way to live in our time um uh I think that's possible um and certainly there are people no IU Patel has written I think very movingly about how some of these ideas of the identity synthesis gave him guidance in college allowed him to understand some of the experiences of discrimination that he'd experienced uh growing up in the midwest in the 1980s mhm um and how he became a real fervent believer in it because it uh you know gave him all the answers mhm uh and when he describes how uh he he had this um uh theater studies Professor whom he was doing a independent study and he went to see a play that she' put on she was a black woman um was very Progressive and so on and a TalkBack session afterwards he said you know this play is Colonials and racist because all of the kids have their own rooms you know what about families where every kid doesn't have the own room and this this professor very graciously emailed him and said look thanks for your criticism but you know it's easy to criticize it's hard to build um why don't you try to do something better and IU really that was a changing a moment would change his life he thought wow yeah perhaps I don't want to just be a person tearing stuff down um and he now is a is a real critic of this kind of ideology and so I think perhaps there we see a similar movement right where where these categories of the identity synthesis allowed him to to see the world and revealed some interesting things about him but also oversimplified it and made him you know the only thing he saw in the play was you know the Injustice of not representing children who don't have their own room um and when he realized the limitation of that it allowed him to move beyond that so perhaps there's a sort of similarity there the one thing I will say is that you know in the' 60s you had these Marxist students arguing for some things that were horrendous students at my school in Munich uh went down the main street of Munich shouting ho hoar L uh if we recreated West Germany after the 60s in the image of uh hoimin gavara and lenon that would have been a much much much worse Society MH and they're also fighting for some good things like sexual Liberation and more tolerance for sexual minorities and so on right uh the good stuff wenton out on the whole and the bad stuff lost but that's because there was an establishment that that was speaking up against them and standing against and over time through that Clash the good ideas could win out because more and more people were converted to them but the bad ideas were also stopped by people saying hang on a second this is a terrible idea so I don't think this is an aut matism right we might come out of this moment and some of the good ideas about identity in the last years might in fact make us see certain injustices more acutely but that's only going to happen if we actually have a serious intellectual engagement with them and as people who are self-confident enough to say hey I think these ideas are wrong-headed um go in the wrong direction for these reasons and perhaps you know people can respond perhaps you and I will change our minds about certain things good but can be part of a productive historical process but to say because in the past some good things came out of these revolutionary movements now that's going to be the case as well so let's just let them pass would be very much I know that's not what he's saying but that I've heard some people suggest something like that and I think that would be very much the wrong consequence to the wrong upshot to take okay so you're the student that criticized the the play for you know discriminating against children that didn't have their own rooms that habit of critiquing everything of tearing down without bu in some way that comes straight from Fuko because as you point out fuko's whole ethos is criticize everything criticize every ideology that is a meta narrative do not try to replace it with your own because your own will be just as bad that's sort of the what one gets if one is a a Fuko devote that's a problem because it doesn't actually allow you to organize if you have a an activist bent if you want to change the world Fuko only gives you the the tools with which to critique the world and to continue critiquing the world until you die but not to change it or not to build something of your own so how do we get from Fuko to a a build your own ideology kind of politics and that by the way is why Fuko is simultaneously appealing a little bit repellent he's a little bit repellent because it is quite and istic view of a world in our ability to make progress and I'm ultimately more of an optimist but there's also something uh uh sympathetic about it because I think a lot of the simplistic nostrums of this day he would have rejected precisely for that reason he does actually give you a little bit of skepticism towards certain forms of political [ __ ] um that it's gotten lost mhm um so the question you're asking is precisely the question that a set of post colon IAL thinkers were asking themselves uh in the 1970s um you know they came from countries that were fighting for Independence or had become independent that had to figure out how to rule themselves what kind of ideology to adopt that often were skeptical of the main Western Traditions including liberalism and Marxism because they felt those were external impositions and they had in various ways Justified Colonial oppression of liberalism always point out but John Stuart Mill had a kind of Defense of colonial rule in India KL Marx had a defense of colonial rule in India but actually is very very similar to Mills um and so they were saying all right how do we uh uh you know how do we use those critical tools of postmodernism to dismantle some of the ideas that we think are bad but no way it's more politically fruitful but we can actually use in a concrete political context and so the first step here is at Edward S in orientalism what he says is these ideas about the East about the Orient that people in the west have developed over the course of decades and centuries were a key part of justifying colonial rule and so uncovering these ideas and why it is that the West for of East is immature not yet capable of political self-governance can help us understand how colonialism persisted and S explicitly and repeatedly quotes Fuko positively it's just about the only thinker he quotes positively in in orientalism but he then becomes impatient with a political nature of Fuko and say the point is not just to uncover those kind of discourses and the power that they played it's to invert them it's to actually uh rethink the world in a way that will uh uh give political agency to those people who have lacked it for so long and so so that becomes the model for a politicized form of discourse analysis mhm in which redescribing the world and imposing new categories on it new Concepts on it new identities on it is a key part of how you do political battle so today uh you know what it is to be an anti-racist activist May in part be to pass certain kinds of laws or advocate for certain kinds of policies a lot of it is critiquing how some new Netflix show is inadvertently racist mhm um what is to be a feminist May in part be to stand for abortion rights or something like that but a lot of it is going to be celebrating or perhaps critiquing the new Barbie movie right so those that is a key theme that comes out of out of s uh the other key figure here is gatri spak who is a literary theorist born and raised in Kolkata and India and mongal uh teaches like s at Columbia University um she is is a a a a a a scholar and a translator of key postmodernist and post structuralist figures like Dara and she buys their critique of essentialist categories of identity right along with a skepticism about all kinds of forms of Truth people like Fuko are really skeptical of stable identity categories for he's gay in our vocabulary or homosexual in our vocabulary today he thought the idea of a homosexual of homosexuality was far too constraining a label to capture a variety of sexual experiences and you refuse to think of himself as such and so so so so so SP says look these critiques of essentialist uh ideas of race is right in at a philosophical level there's not one experience that all members of some identity group share MH there's not something objective about it but for political purposes it's it's it's it's really troubling because fuku ends up saying know the proletarians they can speak for themselves and spe says well the sub alurn the most oppressed people in the third world which she calls the subal turn you know the people in in Kolkata who may not have been able to go to school and who have very little political resources and standing they can't speak from himself somebody needs to speak for them and to speak for them we need identity categories so perhaps we for strategic purposes should pretend that those uh essentialist accounts of identity are actually right so she points this and she she she acknowledges that is paradoxical this idea of strategic essentialism again this becomes an incredibly influential theme in Progressive politics today what you know is a typical sentence here race is a social construct something with which I broadly agree but then after sort of paying lip service to that you go on to emphasize and to talk about the world through completely racial terms RAC social construct but Coleman on your first say Columbia you go over in that corner because you're black right right um uh uh you know the things we talked about in terms of our educational system Embrace race kids should think of themselves as racial beings we need to uh encourage them to do that so that they can have those forms of political solidarity while every now and again reminding them that of course raes the social construct that is a very very clear outpouring of strategic essentialism and so I think here you know to answer your question s infuses fuko's thinking on discourses with political agency mhm and spear infuses fuko's skepticism about the world with these uh ultimately very rigid identity categories and that gets you into business yeah so on on language Let let's just stick to S and Fuko for one second before SPAC [Music] um say develops this critique of of language and this imperative that you can change the world by changing language in a way right um and his critique is that the colonists have changed the world by using a set of words to to describe it and we we should change those set of words and in doing so we contribute to changing the world for the better um and and and that directly links up with the tendency nowadays to obsess over language it looks like obsessing from an outsider to the ideology at least if you you know you know you look at the the kind of word salad that has come to be associated with the lgbtq i a plus you know divided by sign Etc like right it it just gets longer and longer and longer longer and from the outside if you're not a part of this particular Proto religion it looks insane from the inside they have they have accepted that to change the world you you must first change language right and and this is you know connects with you know bipo the concept of bip um uh poc in general just people of color in general none of these categories are you know make objective sense and people have people constant critics constantly point this out it doesn't it's not clear how it makes sense to link a gay person with a trans person and put them in the same bucket given that the definitions are just different you know like one relates to gender identity one the other relates to sexual orientation which are just two different things at least from one lens it's it's not clear why they should be in the same bucket not at all clear why people of color should be a category because that cleaves the world into white people on the one hand and everyone else on the other well who who's to say that that's the the proper categorization you might as well say let's have Chinese people in one category and lump all other people into another category since since uh they're more populous you know all of these are arbitrarily correct but we've chosen some of them in the past and and the identity synthesis chooses others that it thinks that it feels really are um the the way to change the world for the better so I'm curious just like this this critique of language Fuko the Fuko s critique of language is one critique of language there's also an orwellian critique of language which is uh in similar in the sense that it believes language can change the world euphemism can change the world total totalitarian States use euphemisms to change the world and that you can't really think clearly unless you call a spade a spade right it's the kind of critique of language that would detest the phrase inhanced interrogation as opposed to torture um can you sort compare and contrast those two critiques of language yeah a couple of thoughts here I mean uh so first of all just on Fuko and and and and and this form of uh thinking about language um you know this is where uh so the success of this form of politics which I has had a lot of impact on our world um is nearly self validating right I don't think it self validates but actually truth is uh subjective and so on but clearly um you know one of the core postmodern critiques that a lot of the time what we think of is truth just depends on who's in which social positions and uh who exercises power uh actually ironically I've become more convinced of for the last 10 or 20 years because we've all started to believe a lot of [ __ ] M um and the same way you know there there's this kind of ambivalence where Fuko inspired this attempt to reshape our social Reality by uh insisting on these terms uh and and some of that is sort of fruitless some of this makes people engage in word salad that might work in activist spaces but it's completely irrelevant to everybody else but some of it is actually very powerful I think the idea that America is a effectively divided between whites and people of color and that's how to understand our elections that's how to understand our basic social conflicts and so on has real impacts on how the Democratic party runs its campaigns for example and at some level self- sustaining I think the category of the Asian-American which is a completely nonsensical category if you think about the vast cultural and historical differences between India and China has in a weird way created a reality of asian-americans who think of themselves as standing and SOA with each other and having Comm ities even if uh historically they come from very very different groups M um and at the same time some like Fuko would give you the tools to criticize that right the idea that uh you know America is fundamentally uh to be understood as a clash between whites and people of color uh and everything that comes with that in our kind political narrative that is something that Fuko would have immediately recognized and criticized as a grand narrative all of the pitfalls of narratives right now you ask a really aute question about George O I was teaching a class about George O recently and I was really struck by the parallel between some of their insides um and in fact one of my students wrote a very good paper on precisely the question you asked me about the parallels between uh o and and Fuko and O of course got to many of these ideas a few decades before Fuko and put them in more straightforward language for Fuko is really in himself he's not an easy read but but he certainly is is is is is in some ways a good stylist and someone who's enjoyable to read um uh and I wonder what huko read o there must be an answer to this and O was a big enough figure that probably he did but there may have been influenced from o to Fuko I'm speculating about this but it would be interesting to know um here's some of the core similarities the the real fear and skepticism that the way we talk about things might obscure the true nature m is uh shared by o and fuk and actually the core fear about social control is shared by them if you read 1984 um the telescreen uh is always on it can watch you you never know when you're being watched MH and so people are punished in the society M dystopian Society but o uh describes it at at at regularity but but most of the time what makes them obey is the fear that they might be being watched because they never know whether they are or not MH well what is one of the core fears that Michel Fuko has in crime and in discipline and punish his work on the criminal justice system the panopticon it is the panopticon and what is the panopticon it is uh sort of solution uh uh suggested designed by James Mill in which a prison guard stands in in a watchtower in the middle of a space and the cells are arranged uh in a hemisphere around him and so if you're a prisoner you never know if you're being watched right now or not and so yes you might be punished for infractions but most of the time you self displine and anticipatory Obedience of possible punishment of possible observation um so again real similarity there between what oil and what Fuko fear and by the way I would argue that today this is part of what would make both o and Fuko are uh critics of for lack of a better term cancel culture critics of the kind of way in which on uh uh you know platforms like Twitter um uh we we punish each other for for transgressions we never know where the line is that might get you punished even the like of a tweet might be crossing the line and so you're continually worried about you're continually s second guessing yourself what might get you in trouble and so better stay very far away from the line in an act of anticipatory obedience I think both all you know or would think of that as a strange form of a telescreen fuku would think of that as a strange form of digital panopticon but they both I think within their own language would would end up being worried about the same thing so is it fair to say that maybe a core difference between them is that Orwell believed in the possibility of real moral progress and Fuko was skeptical of that yes um I in other words like Orwell thought that when you Stripped Away the euphemism the totalitarian euphemism and called a spade a spade and you had a chance of actually improving Society um and that that was an important thing to do and Fuko was just waiting for the new kind of Oppression at the end of that process right I think that's right I think the the critique of totalitarian accesses in a society was in certain respects shared MH and fuk by the way who made many wrong political calls in his life and some really disgusting political calls in his life was one of the few french leftists who actually supported solidos for Polish Trade union movement but challenged the Communist Regime um uh but Fuko did not really believe in an affirmative project of building a more just Society that's what fundamentally put him apart for example from no chumsky whom he had a famous debate in the early 1970s and that's what made Chomsky tell me on my podcast that Fuko was one of the most immoral not immoral but one of the most immoral people he'd ever met he still 50 years later seemed shocked by Fuko MH well o in that respect is much more on the side of of chsky or of you and me I think um strange list of people to mention one ref um but but of people who say look look we need to be really careful about how attempts to build a perfect world can actually build a terrible and dystopian world but the right response to that is not to give up on historical progress it is to be skeptical and independent minded but to fight for actually living up to our principles more fully and that certainly is where all ended up and that's where I stand that's I believe where you stand for sure yeah so let's talk about the the social construct Paradox this is something that I talk about in my upcoming book and um I I I wish I had read your download of uh strategic essentialism before IID written my book but it's it's always struck me and and I think uh Thomas Chatterton Williams and others as a strange Paradox which is that you get uh usually the Hallmark of believing something is a social construct is that you take the norm surrounding that construct less seriously so for for instance if you believe gender is a social construct the Hallmark of that belief is you're you're going to be very loose about things like only women should wear dresses you're going to laugh at that well why can't men wear dresses only only girls should like pink what are you talking about you know like like whatever you want into Miami yeah exactly um it would be very strange to encounter a person that you know had genders of social cont on their t-shirt and then proceeded to police the rules of gender with the Zeal of a convert and you know it would be it would even be weird if such a person were policing a a a strange set of rules around gender right it wouldn't even have to be the traditional rules of a woman in the kitchen and and the man uh brings home the bacon really any set of rules of the form men should be like this this women should be like that would cut against this person's claim to believe gender is a social construct what you have in the case of race is precisely the people most likely to say race is a social construct are the same people that tend to police the rules of race with with the Zeal of a convert they're precisely the people that will say oh well you're not Mexican so you can't open a Mexican restaurant or there's there's no context in which uh you know white people can even quote the n-word right that that is a very strict racial rule uh you should not try to imitate people of other races you you know so you get the precise the precisely the reverse of the expectation and that's always kind of puzzled me until I read your book and realized that there was a you know there's a An Origin to the idea that you can you can solve that Paradox in a way um so I guess well you know you mentioned strategic essentialism but in your book you also mentioned that that uh spivac herself ended up sort of souring on how strategic essentialism played out so maybe you can describe that a little bit Yeah so I think just to make explicit what I think the solution to that Paradox is which had always puzzled me as well until I read spak it's that that in the worst forms of it and again I don't think SP herself is guilty of this uh it's just a form of lip service right like it's basically falling into a tribalist instinct to essentialize people MH to say if you're black and I'm white we're really different kinds of creatures and let's live a social World in accordance with that but because you recognize that uh a that's exactly what people on the far right believe and how they maneuver in the world and be there these compelling philosophical criticisms of whether for example there a biological basis to raise mhm um you know you need something that gives you a pretext for being able to basically operate in that way mhm and that is the slip service we pay to race of course it's a social construct and just by sort of invoking that these of course I'm not an idiot I'm not unsophisticated I'm aware of all these critiques then you have sort of the green light to to go and indulge that instinct mhm um and when spok started to recognize that this is uh how her ideas were being used she grew to be quite skeptical of them um so she uh you know saw the the hinduist movement in you know hindutva in in India gain political power uh people like Narendra Modi indulging in those essentialist forms of identity and that is one of the things that made her say I sort of don't want to use the term strategic essentialism anymore because uh uh she says something like you know often let become the union ticket uh to basically just making essentialist claims mhm right she says my term has become this kind of card blanch that people use in order to be able to basically indulge in all the kind of vgar essentialism that I was always worried about and she has some great critiques for academic life in the United States as well you know a tea Waller in India is somebody who sells tea on the on the street and she mocks the humorlessness of what she calls the identity wallers in American [Music] universities Okay so uh how might Fuko critique intersectionality if he were alive today well uh so perhaps let's let let's let's let's get out on the page sort of what intersectionality is first of all um and there's different ways of thinking about intersectionality so sort of next step after thinkers we we've talked about really is the rise of critical race Theory uh so we start in Paris in 1950s and we go to um various countries for for many of them based in New York and post Colonial movement in 1970s and now we're really in firmly in the United States uh the founder of critical race theory is uh really interesting africanamerican lawyer called Derek Bell who uh does heroic work for the nwacp helping to desegregate schools and businesses and other institutions in the mark and South and Beyond in the 1960s um but comes to believe that that was effectively a mistake mhm um he observes uh in some understandable ways he observes that um uh he has some understandable criticisms um uh he observes that many of the clients he he he he argues for you know want to attend a better high school but by the time that they win those cases they've already graduated right so we're not going to get anything from that lawsuit some of the schools that are integrated uh get very poor resources and some of the black students end up being discriminated against and so uh that doesn't provide for Quality education but black parents obviously sought for their children um but but bin goes so far as to explicitly in his first seminal academic article agree with segregationist conservative Southern Senators who say you know these lawyers like B they weren't really arguing for the interest of of their clients those just a pretext to impose this ideology of desegregation and B himself says you know perhaps in some context Brown versus Board of Education was a mistake perhaps we should have actually fought effectively for for schools that are separate but truly and it's worth reminding people that when Brown was uh when the that decision was handed down zor Neil HST wrote a scathing oped in the Orlando Sentinel criticizing its logic um saying essentially that she and many other people were very proud of their all black schools um not all of them performed poorly and some were the Locust of their communities and there were uh in fact my grandmother went to um um M Street School uh later called Dunbar High School which famously ins segregated DC sometimes outperformed and outscored some of the white high schools in its uh in the same city yeah and so Bell is in some ways basing himself in in that tradition and he's using those arguments to really reject rout and Branch for civil rights movement right so he ends up saying um he mocks we shall overcome M the Civil Rights era song he says we must finally reject the quote defunct Racial equality ideology of the Civil Rights Movement um uh and uh you know today we have these debates about critical race Theory and they're kind of dumb because on the right A lot of the time people call anything C including you know thinking critically about the race the role that race plays in our society mhm um uh in some context including teaching kids about slavery in school and so on but then as a result when you listen to MSNBC or something they think well all that critical race theory is is wanting to teach kids about the existence of slavery in schools and not embracing the Lost Cause myth and and and and and not claiming there's no racism in our society today no no no no no the the key theorists of critical race theur Derek Bell and l k creno would be offended by that or should be offended by that characterization of C B explicitly said his mission was to puncture and to oppose the pities of the Civil Rights Movement kimbery creno ends up saying in an article celebrating the 20th anniversary of CIT that CIT the core principles of CIT are fundamentally at ODS with the political philosophy of Barack Obama MH right um all right so so so so here we get some more of the themes that end up being really relevant today um the rejection of Universalist Solutions the idea that to make progress you have to uh treat people separately that you have to fund black schools better than were in the segregation but that perhaps black schools are a better solution when integrated schools mhm uh the idea of the permanence of racism but America never really makes any progress but Brown ver border was really just in the interest of whites and that's the only reason why it happened and then you get hints of Fuko in that as well with the yes lack of skepticism of progress and the possibility of progress and institutionally just for the people who are sort of following the implicit debate about whether it's cultural Marxism or it's rooted in postmodernism all of critical race Theory uh starts in American law schools within the subfield of critical legal studies which is explicitly the application of postmodern ideas to American law mhm uh you know actually judges don't rule uh on the basis of uh Doctrine and precedent they just are trying to put their interests in place and so all of those grand opinions we should just reject as as as hogwash mhm quickly race viewers come and say that's basically the right way of thinking about this except you critical legal studies got mostly white guys you don't think about race enough so we want to use those tools and apply them to race and that's what critical race Theory becomes mhm um and so again very far from Fuko but deeply in conversation with postmodernism and derived from it um creno comes in and she has this idea of intersectionality which in its original formulation is relatively straightforward and sensible it's basically what social scientists today would call an interaction effect if you go outside um and you're not uh uh wearing an umbrella uh but it doesn't rain you don't get wet if it rains and you're wearing an umbrella you don't get wet if it rains and you don't wear an umbrella the combination of those two factors means you might get drenched MH right what crenchaw is saying is that in a factory of General Motors in Michigan for example um know they they didn't hire white women for a long time and we started hiring them we didn't hire black men for a long time and we started hiring them and then years after that we finally started to hire some black women as well when there was a recession and it was first in first out all the black women got fired mhm and the right said hey we're only getting fired because of historic discrimination we couldn't have had this job longer than we did mhm a judge says well civil rights legislation says a protector category is women you're not women pro caty is black people uh sorry sorry let me say this again a proat says women but other women aren't being discriminated against objective categ says black people but black guys AR being discriminated against so you don't have a la to stand on mhm and crch WR says well hang on a second but discrimination suffered in this context by black women is not just the arithmetic sum of the Discrimination suffered by women or black people it goes beyond that in a kind of interaction effect kind of way and that is intersectionality right um that then gets reinterpreted in much broader ways um creno herself says you know sometimes when I see uh intersectionality today I think oh I wonder whose intersectionality that is and I see that quoting me I'm like that's not my intersectionality that's not what I meant by intersectionality M and that tends to be two ideas one that you know you stand at a different intersection of identities to me and so therefore I'm not going to be able to understand but if we stand at different sections of identity it's impossible for us to really truly understand each other and so we have to defer moral judgment to each other and perhaps delegate political decisions to the more oppressed group so that's one key idea here and then the other key idea is that because all forms of Oppression are Interlink you are have to fight against all of them at the same time in order to be an activist in good standing mhm and so if you want to be a feminist arguing for equal pay you also have to agree with activist groups on their view of Israel Palestine you also have to agree with uh the trans movement on samex basis you also have to agree with whatever else um and so very brief ly I think now you really have the core themes right the rejection of Truth in uh Fuko the politicized discourse analysis in s the Embrace of strategic essentialism in spak um the rejection of universalism and this proud pessimism that uh there's never any progress in Bell um the uh interpretations of intersectionality as meaning we can't understand each other if we stand at different intersections of identity and any good activist has to oppose everything at the same time really raising the entry ticket into Progressive uh organizations those are the main themes of of the identity synthesis okay so now that we've assembled all the stones of Thanos um what would uh yeah so back to my question what how do you think Fuko would critique intersectionality as a as a meta narrative what would he identify as wrong with it in your view that's kind of an impossible question to answer but no I think it's a good question I think he would say two things um uh at least when we're talking about intersectionality not in the sense that cruncho originally defined it but in the sense that is really influential today yes um I think to the first he would say there's a sort of poor metaphysics at play here which says you know how you know who I F as a homosexual and who you coma is a heterosexual MH and so these categories are stable and make sense and all homosexuals are going to have similar experiences and all heterosexuals are going to have similar experiences and so therefore I cannot understand you truly and you cannot understand me truly and he would say but I I don't self-identify as a homosexual I think that these categories are much more complicated um and perhaps two one one particular homosexual one particular heterosexual might have more in common with each other than I them has with other people that are part of their identity groups because the boundaries of these groups are somewhat arbitrary and socially constructed and so uh you know to think that I the homosexuals should naturally understand each other uh because they're all part of the same group or that members of one group can't understand members of the other group because that's members of the completely different groups that is buying into a naive idea of of of who we are and what defines us in so on mhm um and then in terms of the uh second interpretation of intersectionality that all these forms of pression go together and so on I think it' be sympathetic to sum of that but he might say that um know the idea that we know how to make progress on when any one of those things is Dub and the idea that we know exactly the grand Narrative of um you know how to build the just World across all of those domains and we should uncritically accept the claims that other people make for that without thinking uh through it ourselves is the opposite of a kind of critical uh spirit that we should affect and in that ways I think it is interesting that even though the identity synthesis originates in a rejection and in a concern about Grand narratives it becomes one of the most dominant Grant narrators of our time and puko certainly would have recognized that so you traced the kind of history of the modern left through these mainly through these five figures years would it be possible to do the same with with the right could a story be told of the modern right that would have an analogous story in terms of like a synthesis of thinkers from the past 80 to 100 years or is the modern right just something else entirely is it sort of bereft of new ideas um bereft of of uh sort of intellectual forefathers and and for mothers in the same way great question um let me be a little bit more specific I think what I'm telling is the is the origin of one political tradition on the left yes frankly there's other political traditions on the left as well so I don't think it's possible to tell a coherent story about the origins of all of the left right uh it's possible to tell own story about the about the origins of this particular tradition within the left M and think then I would say something similar about the right MH uh that there's some traditions on the right that have a certain amount of internal coherence and that by the way it's one of my arent these ideas are worth taken seriously because they come from serious thinkers and they do have a coherence right some people reject them as just completely unserious or we don't have a core or there there's no way in which they hang together you know all political Traditions are somewhat arbitrarily mapped onto each other right there's never just they could always have coales in slightly different ways mhm um but I think this is no less serious a political tradition than many many others right and and again I think that's true when you think of uh certainly sort of a more traditional conservative ideology on the right you can tell a story about its Origins that runs through whatever you know Burke through hyek through whichever other figures you'd want to pick out for that um I think that there is uh a post liberal tradition on the right uh uh especially the Catholic integralists but probably uh you know you can construct some kind of coherent intellectual history for I haven't done that work so you know I might be off when people I I mention that that probably would run through um some of the sort of more right leing German idealists through deest through you know whatever other Catholic figures of the 20th century um I think it might not be possible for popular popism because I think populism at its heart is a form of politics MH uh that basically says I alone represent the people and the enemy who disagrees with me is illegitimate is an enemy and that can be filled with very different kinds of content which is what explains why people like Trump and Modi and erogan who have very different ideological beliefs and come from different uh traditions in that kind of way yet end up having real similarity in terms of their political style and then effect on politics so I wouldn't say is true of all Traditions but but yeah I think broadly speaking you could do you know a Libertarian one as well yeah yeah but it strikes me that the I mean the the identity synthesis one is the only one that begins recently and has major thinkers within say your lifetime at the very least in my lifetime right uh I think libertarianism is probably relatively recent as well I mean there is less a fair economic thinkers in the 19th century but as a self-conscious ideological movement uh libertarianism really coalesces you know after Robert noek publishes Anarchy state in Utopia mhm um so I think of these different Traditions that may be one of the more recent ones right but yes I agree with you that there is this is look I mean one of the one of the answers to the question why did I write this book and there's many answers but one of them is uh you know i' I there's only so many damn articles I can write about populism and Donald Trump and only so many Dam books I can write about it a lot of people have not written good work on that this is a genuinely new ideology that is coales that is going to be a major competitor for how to think about the world and nobody has done the damn work to actually understand it in a serious way to understand where it comes from but then also to critique many of its applications and that was an interesting intellectual task and one of the important criteria not the only Criterion but one of the important criteria for me in what kind of work to do is where am I going to learn something what's actually intellectually interesting and precisely for this reason because I think it is a major new ideological tradition that's actually quite recent and where people haven't put in the work to understand it this was a fascinating book for me to write so what is wrong with Christopher ruo's account and to remind people they can go back and listen to that episode if they want but his account um heavily Waits Herbert maruza and uh critical theory heavily Waits the more violent political activism of the 1970s the Black Panthers and the weather underground and the uh the so-called Long March through the institution whereby the terrorists essentially the terrorists and and violent activists decided to stop using violence and you know become computer programmers and um bureaucrats and play the long game and we're now seeing the the fruits of the long game born out so there certain elements of that uh where we have overlap um you know in my chapter so by the way we've basically just talked about one quarter of a book so far and and that maybe all we have time for which is fine but I just want to sort of flag that there's all these other parts of book that that are in similar depth so so the first part of the book is saying you know where do we ideas what we talking about actually come from the second ask okay how do they go from being pretty influential in universities in about 2010 to really dominant in a lot of our social and cultural institutions by about 2020 how did that happen the third part uh uh which I think would be of of great interest to your listeners as well is uh a critique of a main application of these ideas to various Fields um how have these ideas started to influence um how we think about our ability to understand each other the general poll of Suspicion We Now cast about anything we call cultural appropriation why is that a mistake why should we actually believe in our ability to to to uh influence each other culturally and that being a positive Hallmark of a vibrant Society why do we need to defend laws for free speech and a culture of free speech and why are IAL Arguments for free speech not the right ones why should we emphasize not the positive things that flow from Free Speech but at least as much the negative things that flow from not having free speech how should we think about Progressive separatism and education and why are many of the race sensitive and identity sensitive public policies but are now are just becoming stunned parts of a policy tool uh wrongheaded and finally perhaps that will get to you know what what is the core of this ideology and what is this sensible humanist liberal Universalist response to those core claims so just to just to put that sort of as as as a as as a pin um so in the chapter on free speech for example I discuss uh how makuza uh distinctions between uh uh sort of repressive tolerance and free tolerance um paves the way for many of the critiques of free speech where he says you know um uh uh when you allow Free Speech then that argues for oppressive societies that's not real free speech the only free speech the only real free speech is uh uh things that argue for Freer Society uh and that Freer Society uh has been modeled by the way uh in uh Cuba and uh China recently so so I agree for example there that our thinking on free speech is influenced by somebody like like Hab maruza I also agree with uh Chris ru that uh this idea of a March through the institutions is relevant I think he makes it more purposive people you know lay down arms and uh uh in a very purposive way go into these institutions subvert them I think of it as a more organic process where people steeped in the ideas we've been talking about at Elite American universities decide well I love these ideas and that was fun but I don't want to be a professor I want to go and make some money at Google or perhaps I want to be you know an activist at ACLU or something like that um uh uh you know go into those workplaces and then uh really manage to to to change their cultures um uh so we have some amount of overlap there uh but the difference fundamentally is about how to understand the nature of the ideology and where its claims come from um the tradition of critical theory is critical of liberalism as is the identity synthesis but other than that there's really few similar ities first of all it has always been based primarily on economics when you look at the people who actually stand in the tradition of critical theory who are the students or the students of people like haimer and adoro and yes maruza today they are really upset about the marketization of society about the lack of public space and uh public institutions and many of them just sociologically hate identity politics are really foulmouthed about it when get a beer with them um there's a fundamental difference in the promise of the Marxist tradition and the promise or the lack of Promise in the identity synthesis marxists say uh we want to build a society in which the proletariat becomes the universal class wins the final Victory and therefore there's no longer any class distinctions the key prism for understanding the world World dissolves in the Utopia we're going to build in such a way that the workers of the world have united we all brever mhm as you know very well Coleman the thing that most provokes members of the tradition that I talk about people who fall and pre to the identity trap is to say well the America we should build is one in which it becomes less important less Salient that you are black and I'm white right what we want to build is a society in which we've overcome this in such a way that those things become irrelevant no uh this tradition has given up on that uh key impetus in key ways so there's a really important structural difference in the kind of society that they want to argue for and then you know just as a matter of intellectual history I think I can go through the story we've told in the first half of this conversation and you see at each point emerging one of these themes and you take those seven themes together and you get a lot of what you do today you read critical theory whether it's uh you know the main thinkers of a Frankfurt School or whether it is critical theorists working with tradition today you don't see The Echoes of uh uh the kind of politics we're talking about it simply isn't there you can't map one onto the other you're looking in the wrong place mhm okay so let's talk about um your your sort of different defenses of free speech than then usually get reiterated in these kinds of conversations what do you feel you have to add and free speech is a something I've talked about a lot on this podcast so I think my listeners will be familiar with some of the standard arguments you know one that I often make is that uh you know Free Speech was one of the only principles um um defending all of the activists that the identity synthesis would have would have uh identified within the past for instance id id to be well is the most I think unambiguously the most important anti- lynching activist in American history her newspaper was named the Memphis free speech um and and so so what do you feel you're adding here to the sort of free speech defense conversation yeah um so look I I don't want to say it be arguments I'm making I'm making for the first time I think they're they're in line with what you're saying um but a lot of the time in the public space when we talk about Free Speech uh we base it on John Stewart Mill who's one of my favorite thinkers um who in on Liberty talks predominantly about the good things that flow from Free Speech MH right if you have free speech then uh you can preserve uh the truth um he hasn't he's not naive about this people say oh there's no free Marketplace of ideas this is silly he said no the point is that that argument might not win out in that moment but some people can hear it and those are ideas most insights can persevere through the generations and perhaps at a later point they can win out mil says that uh it would be bad to ban even bad ideas because uh if nobody ever disagreed with us we'd have to have Devil's Advocates um because that's what we need in order to hold truths uh as living truths rather than as that dogmas M uh and if we become that dogmas by the way and it's dangerous because tomorrow or in a month or in a year somebody might disagree with us we're not going to have resources to argue against them mhm I think all of that is right it's important uh but I can see why some people say you know what when there's people arguing for really terrible things in social media and being really nasty and just hateful right and racist and homophobic and all those things my mistakes of politics are really high have these good things important enough but that's really what it's about I disagree with that point but I think there's a more robust answer we can give to it m that is precisely in moments when the stakes of politics are really high precisely in moments when our societ is particularly divided free speeches what we need and the first part of this is basically what you said which is by definition the people who are going to be making decisions in society are the people who are powerful who is going to be a member of the federal government censorship Bureau who's going to be a member of the you know Silicon Valley speech facilitation committee or whatever they would call it it's not going to be the most marginalized it's going to be people who are powerful by definition that is the reason why it's called the the the Memphis free speech uh publication that's the reason why um Frederick Douglas said that free speech is is is is the dread of tyrants right is the thing that abolitionists most needed in order to be able to to to make that case and here there's a really weird sociological confusion that I think a lot of leftists have because a lot of these debates originated on college campuses where it's plausible to think that you know the college speech code at Smith college or at Harvard is going to uh protect Progressive beliefs and make taboo non-progressive beliefs somehow with at the scale of a whole society we would Implement uh censorship that's also going to favor those ideas that's a great point I I think that's really naive right and we're seeing that by way in Florida and lots of other ways as well we certainly would see it if uh uh you know some like R erogan who's completely squashed with space for free speech in Turkey not a very Progressive politician um the second point is uh goes perhaps a little bit further about the stakes of Elections right the fundamental political institution at the heart of democracy not the only necessary one but the fun fundamental one is that when we have a disagreement about who should Rule and what we should do elections determine uh that disagreement at least for the time being right that's how we settle that dispute mhm but that means that the people who are in power need to be willing to go home and we've seen recently that we're not always willing to go home and that is a huge danger to our Democratic institutions MH now one of the reasons why we might historically be willing to go home is that they feel like hey I might be out of office for 4 years but I'm still going to be able to argue my case mhm we might win again in 4 years mhm and so even for it's painful to lose an election it's painful to see these people we just like rule for 4 years we have a chance to come back but once you give a powerful institutions and particularly government institutions the right to censor certain points of view people might think you know the cost of going home is just too high so I'm going to stay fight to stay in power by any means possible and then the third point is that free speech is a kind of safety valve against Bad policy right mistakes are hard in any policy area if we fail to uh uh uh Greenlight the right drug right farmaceutical drug it might stop lots of people from having a life-saving treatment MH right and yet we say you know we need some regulation of drugs and perhaps sometimes you know the FDA is not going to improve something right so so why is speech special even though it too has these high sticks well it's because free speech is what we need to be self-correcting all these other policy areas mhm but if your drug is turned down from the FDA you should at least be able to raise a stink on it if you think that is a mistake you should at least be able to talk about how important it is to reverse that policy decision so so in other areas if something goes wrong Free Speech provides us a way of continuing the conversation about it if you lose Free Speech we also lose the tool to self-correct in these other areas of public policy right okay so finally what do you uh what do you feel is the best strategy to use to push back against the creep some which has been completed in certain institutions um of the identity synthesis into into society is is the is the right strategy to you know pass anti-crt laws like like um rufo rufo has been involved in um is the right strategy to sort of make try to create classically liberal institutions and assert those values uh what do you see as the path forward yeah let me say a few things on that I mean the first is that we need to really understand the core of this ideology and how to argue against it at the highest level and I think we've done a lot of that work in this conversation um but I I I just want to do a little bit more of it an abstract level um we've talked about the origin of these ideas we've talked about some of the applications of it to Aras like free speech we could have talked about cultural appropriation and standpoint epistemology and Progressive separatism and all of those things uh but you can also do a rational reconstruction what philosophers call right really boiling down theology to its core principles and I think there's three core principles that Advocates of the identity synthesis want us to believe number one that the key prism for understanding Society is to look at it through race gender and sexual orientation but that is the fundamental way to understand our interaction today or to understand a historical event like a revolution or uh anything else mhm the second claim is that as some like B would say the grand ideals of the United States Constitution of the Bill of Riots of the 14th Amendment those are just attempts to pull the wool over our eyes the real social function is not to limit or fight against but to put perpetuate forms of racial and sexual discrimination by making us blind to their reality and so therefore the third claim what do we do we have to rip up those Universal values and neutral principles they are the real enemy and make how we treat each other and how the state treats all of us more explicitly dependent on uh the particular identity groups into which we're born and I think that there's a very straightforward and coherent response that philosophical lials to that which is number one of course we have to be attuned to race and gender and sexual orientation in the way of that sometimes perhaps often structures uh discrimination and social disadvantage in our society but that is not the only prism to understand Society in other context we might want to look at class in other context we might want to look at religion or how people behave or people's aspirations or the values we share or all kinds of of other things as Jonathan ha would say it's a mistake to be monomaniacal in our prism of a world that's LED particular situations guide us towards what prism to use rather than March in with a prism that supposedly explains everything the way that marxists used to do with class and the today Advocates of the identity synthesis do with identity categories secondly actually we activate who insisted that they gain the recognition that they be included in the Universal principles that have been part of America since our founding are who allowed us to make the greatest progress Fredick Douglas was not naive about the hypocrisy of his compatriots who celebrated the Fourth of July was while slavery was on the book he was very aware of it and he called him out on it he didn't say so go stuff your Constitution he said by what right are you excluding us from them if you actually want to celebrate those values fight for abolition mhm right uh Martin Luther King did not say uh let's rip up the fraudulent check that the bank of Justice wrote us he said let's make sure that the bank of Justice finally honors it right and that is what has allowed us to make tremendous progress over the last centuries that is why America today for all of its flaws is a more just place a less basis place than it was in 1850 or 1950 mhm and so finally therefore what should we do well we should stand with those luminaries in American history to demand but we live up more fully to our values rather than getting rid of them and ripping them so the first point I would say is this is the language we need to speak these are the principles we need to embrace in order to argue against those ideas and this is ultimately a battle for hearts and Minds it is a fight over the kind of ideology that going to be embraced at the highest ellence of our society we need the best Arguments for that mhm the second thing I will say is that um we do need to fight against ways in which the ideology we've been talking about has become enshrined in unfair ways uh the fact that so many people are afraid to speak up against those ideas in many contexts uh the ways in which uh uh sometimes uh institutions use coci of force to get people to uh payp service to them and so opposing those liberal laws and customs is perfectly appropriate mhm but where Ronda STIs has gone in Florida for example genuinely when you look at those pieces of legislation is going well beyond that rather than opposing the imposition of one set of the liberal Norms it is substituting them with a different set of liable Norms that it in turn is trying to impose on those bases public universities in Florida are no longer allowed to teach anything that's considered critical race Theory or identity politics so the course that I teach on subjects in which as I was saying I I I assign people who deeply disagree with those ideas you're you your writings sometimes my writings other people's writings right but I also assign Bell and creno and so on because that's part of what it is to have a genine debate would likely be illegal under current law in Florida mhm and so uh you must not throw the baby out with a bath water that to me is the reactionary trap where rather than being Guided by your own values you start to be guided by opposing anything but the people you don't like do and just just emulating the methods and and and and and saying the opposite of whatever they're saying no we need to be uh uh we need to reclaim the moral High Ground we need to say hey um we shouldn't be ashamed of the things we're arguing for we shouldn't be afraid to argue for them we should take the fight into all of these institutions but we doing that while proudly representing ing our most profound values insisting that this is how we build a better world I think that's a great note to end on so the book is the identity trap there's a lot in there we didn't get to and I really encourage people to buy it I think you'll enjoy it it's really the best intellectual history and and path forward um on this on this topic so thank you so much Yasha and um uh it's been it's been a pleasure thank you Coleman this is amazing that's it for this episode of conversation with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next time