The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

In this poorly argued polemic, political scientist Mounk (The Great Experiment) offers an intellectual history of “identity synthesis”­—a term of his own devising, which is hard to distinguish from the more familiar “identity politics”—and warns of its dangers. After tracing the intellectual legacy of several 20th-century theorists—with a focus on Michel Foucault and postmodernism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and postcolonialism, and Derrick Bell and critical race theory—Mounk explains that these thinkers’ ideas were synthesized into an antiliberal, censorious, segregationist dogma on college campuses and online in the early 2000s. This “ideology” went mainstream in the mid-2010s, especially in medicine and education, where institutions began to adopt theoretical frameworks under which it was believed the best way to achieve equity for students and patients was not to treat everyone equally, but to offer “preferential treatment” and exclusionary experiences (like Black affinity groups in educational settings) to members of marginalized groups. Mounk cautions against this mindset (citing antiwhite workplace sensitivity trainings and unjustified cancelings over “cultural appropriation,” among other things), and recommends that the political left-of-center return to a liberalism characterized by freedom of expression and equal treatment of all. Throughout, though, evidence and examples are not thoroughly explained; instead, Mounk crafts bulleted lists of “key takeaways” that sidestep complication and essentially render his central argument as one being waged against a gargantuan straw man. Readers will not be convinced. (Sept.)