- [Airline Passenger's Thoughts] Did my legs shrink?

I can move them.

I mean, I knew Alaska Airlines premium class had extra leg room, but this, this feels different.

Okay, crazy idea, on the count of three, I'm going to try and cross my... Oh boy, (laughs) that's nice!

Woo hoo!

(upbeat music) (gentle music) (soothing music) - [Announcer] And now, the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, featuring journalists, news-makers, and innovators from around the country in conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for "Post Reports Identity Crisis" with Jason Willick and Shadi Hamid, moderated by Elahe Izadi and Martine Powers.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our stage sponsor, Alaska Airlines, and our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

Finally, thank you to our host sponsor, Amazon.

(audience applauds) - Hello, welcome to the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

My name is Martine Powers.

I host the "Washington Post" podcast, "Post Reports" with my wonderful colleague here.

- Hi, I am Elahe Izadi and along with co-hosting "Post Reports," I'm also a media reporter at "The Post," and Martine and I are thrilled to be here because we're going to be diving deep on a conversation that echoes ones that are happening all over the country right now.

- Right, when you think of this moment, a politically tense campaign year when wars are raging, we have campus protests that are spreading and escalating across the country, the undercurrent to a lot of what's happening right now is this concept of identity.

- Yeah, the importance of identity has gained more prominence in our cultural, but also our political discourse.

But Martine and I are curious, what are the ramifications of that?

Are we elevating more voices and creating opportunities for understanding, or are we becoming more fractured as a nation?

- These are questions that come up a lot for Elahe and myself as we are covering the news every day.

So we wanted to turn to two of our colleagues on the opinion side who have been grappling with answers to those questions.

- So our guests today are "Washington Post" opinion columnist, first we have Shadi Hamid.

He is a member of the post editorial board and an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary.

Shadi, we're so happy you're here.

- Thanks so much for having me.

(audience applauds) - And yes, give it up for Shadi.

(audience applauding) And we're also delighted to have Jason Willick.

He writes a regular column for "The Post" opinions on legal issues, political ideas, and foreign affairs.

Hello, Jason.

- Thanks.

(audience applauds) - [Martine] Welcome, we're psyched to be here.

- Yeah, so I wanted to first start by asking you Shadi, because as I understand it, you have shifted your thinking, which is kind of is interesting in and of itself for someone to shift their thinking about something that's very important to them, about the role that identity should or does play in how we respond to these global events as Americans.

And that really shifted for you after October 7th, the Hamas attack on Israel.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

- Yeah, sure.

So before October 7th, I was a critic of identity politics, or what one might call wokeness and scare quotes, so we can debate about that term.

But I was someone who, I didn't always like to have my own identity in the foreground.

I saw myself, not necessarily primarily as an Arab or a Muslim, although I am those things.

I saw myself primarily as a writer or an analyst who happened to be Muslim or happened to be Arab.

And I think that I bristle that the idea that people could define me just based on things that I was born with and didn't really have much control over, an ethnic identity or a racial identity.

And I didn't have a big problem being the only brown person or only Arab person in the room.

I didn't feel like it was super important if there was one of us, or two or three, I was more interested in the people in the room, what are their ideas than what their identity descriptors were.

But I think post-October 7th, I'm finding my own Arab and Muslim identity more in the foreground because so much is revolving around where we sit or where we stand on the Israel Gaza War and everything that comes with it.

And I think this is really one of the most momentous shifts really.

I mean, post-9-11 was a big deal, obviously, and it defined me, that was my generation.

I was a freshman in undergrad when 9-11 happened.

That's why I decided to really go into politics to become a writer.

So I was forged kind of in that crucible, so to speak.

But I think October 7th is another one of those realignment moments that really shifts or changes or shapes how we look at the world.

And I think that I become more sympathetic to some of the identity politics stuff.

The idea that sometimes there is an oppressor and an oppressed.

It can be simplistic, but I do see the Palestinians and the Palestinian people as being a marginalized community, to use that lingo, but they are being oppressed by the Israeli military in what I would consider to be an unusually brutal war.

And so I think that that kind of framing can be helpful.

Sometimes you gotta be clear about that.

Sometimes people are being oppressed and it doesn't have to be so complicated, although obviously the broader conflict is, but at a very basic level, I think there's something fundamental there about a people that is struggling for statehood, for survival, to be recognized in a very basic way, and to be able to live in their own land.

So I think that has become more present for me.

And I think it's also true that people can sort of guess where I...

So if you're Arab or you're Muslim, chances are you're going to fall in the pro-Palestine camp.

I don't love these descriptors, but it's a reasonable guess.

So someone might say, "Well, Shadi, you're falling back on identity politics.

You're kind of holding onto your predictable, you're sort of filling in a certain kind of tribal identity."

- Or that your identity is dictating where you fall.

- Yeah, that's what a lot of people say to me, like "Oh Shadi, you're letting your Arab-ness or your Muslim-ness get the better of you.

You're just kind of going along with what we would predict."

That's what people who criticize me say.

I say, "Well look, I don't think there's anything distinctly Arab or Muslim about recognizing that the Palestinian people deserve not to be killed.

I mean, there's obviously a lot of non-Arabs and non-Muslims who feel very passionately about the Palestinian cause.

If you look at the campus protests, obviously there's Arabs involved, but you also see a lot of White people, Black people, other people of color.

So I don't love that when people sort of put that on me.

"Oh, Shadi, you're just playing a role," or whatever, or you're just kind of representing your group.

No, I feel very passionately about what's happening to Palestinians.

Obviously I know more about the Palestinian cause because of my Arab background.

It's something that we grew up with- - Like the familiarity of it.

- Yeah, on the dinner table, I guess lunch table, and it's, you know- - (laughs) As it were.

- Yeah, as it were.

- So that makes me more familiar, but I don't think that determines my position.

- Well, Jason, I wanna turn to you here because you have argued in some of your recent columns of "The Post" that some of this rhetoric is reductive and that the role of identity politics in this debate is not always positive.

Here's what you wrote in a recent column, quote, "Dividing groups of people into categories of oppressed and oppressor is a poisonous way to conduct politics in a liberal, multi-ethnic republic."

What to you makes identity politics sometimes poisonous in this context?

- It's fascinating listening to Shadi's evolution 'cause it's more or less the reverse of the evolution that I hear from a lot of liberal Jews who sort of may have been sympathetic.

Shadi was a critic of wokeness, as he put it, and he's become more sympathetic.

I hear a lot of liberal Jews say, "I was sympathetic to wokeness or to identity politics," or, "I was an ally of marginalized groups, and now wait a second, these people who I thought are my allies are protesting against Israel and I'm a Jewish Zionist, and I support Israel, what's going on with that?

Maybe this identity politics coalition that Democrats have built and that I thought I was a part of was not a good idea."

That's not me, but that's what I hear a lot from liberal Jews.

So I think Shadi, that's another example of the way this conflict has cleaved people.

It's changed people's perspective.

In a lot of ways, I think that group affinities are natural in politics.

There's something that's always gonna be around.

I mean, there's never been a political system where people don't divide themselves, to some extent, by groups and different groups see themselves as having different interests, but I think it's something to be managed.

It's a reality of human politics and human relations to be managed.

It's probably not a good thing to lean into or to celebrate because when people can divide themselves, when you have a healthy polity with a strong sense of an American creed, something that all people can believe in, then they may be less likely to divide themselves, to sort themselves into identity groups.

I think when you have, sort of, that glue, the ideological glue of a society start to weaken, the default is identity-based politics.

So I think identity politics can be both a symptom and a cause of political problems, especially in a cradle country like the United States, that is the most diverse country in the world.

- It makes me want to ask both of you this question of do we even have shared American values anymore?

Are those ideas universal anymore?

Is there a common concept of what it means to be an American?

Should we be coming to more of a consensus?

Because it does feel like there are some fundamental disagreements about what it means to be an American, and I think that's the undercurrent for even this immediate moment of the war that we're talking about.

So maybe Shadi, do you wanna address that?

I'd love to hear what you have to say too, Jason.

- Yeah, so I think that in this sort of Trump or post-Trump era that we're in, we, as Americans, no longer agree on the fundamental questions.

So the so-called who we are questions, what it means to be American, the role of religion in public life, the nature of America's founding, these are the deepest issues you can sort of contend with.

And I think that we just don't agree on them.

I mean, if you go back to the Obama era, we were still debating policy issues, marginal tax rates, healthcare.

Remember when Obama wore that tan suit?

That was a huge controversy.

- It was a big deal.

- That was, yeah, so back then, those were the kinds of debates we were having.

We weren't yet at the foundational stuff.

It was still kind of superficial.

And I think that is a shift that's gonna stay with us, probably for the rest of our lives, and maybe the Obama years and what came before the sort of triumphalism of the 1990s where it felt that America, there was a sense of optimism and that we as Americans were moving in the same direction.

I think that's gone.

And in some ways, America is becoming what a lot of the rest of the world is like.

- But you use the term debate and discussion, which I think is part of the challenge here, that having those debates and having those discussions, especially across an ideological divide or a difference of identity is challenging and painful.

And I think, frankly, a thing in this moment that a lot of people just don't wanna do or don't see as worthwhile.

- We want to be able to talk to people no matter what their identity is.

And we want to be able to have a debate based on a shared language and reason.

And what identity politics, I think, represents is it represents a view that if somebody has a different identity, they can't understand what I'm saying.

And this goes back to the founding.

I think in the American founding, the Federalists wanted to have an elite class of natural aristocrats who could find the common good and rule in service of the common interest.

And people sort of said, "You don't know what I'm going through.

You live in a different kind of way than me.

You don't understand what someone in my vocation or my religion does," and so, identity politics is at the limits of argument because if you're arguing about your identity, that's not something you can really reason through.

So it's really, I think, that's why I go back to this being a symptom of, I think, political unraveling to some extent.

Because it represents argument reaching its limits, and then we're falling back on our most base affinities.

- It really bothers me that some of my closest friends don't seem to have much sympathy for Palestinians.

They're not moved by it.

They see a lot of Palestinian civilians being killed in the tens of thousands, and it doesn't register for them emotionally.

That's kind of scary to me, right?

- So what do you do?

- But what I do is I say our friendship is more important.

My new policy is this, everyone should be allowed one or two terrible opinions at any given moment.

- Shadi's rules.

- Yeah.

And we give people grace on that.

You know, people are complicated and they might think the same thing about me, like, "Why isn't Shadi more sympathetic to the Jewish state?

Why doesn't he feel that," whatever it might be.

And so I think it goes both ways, but ultimately relationships are important.

And I would like to think that the political isn't always personal and the personal isn't always political, that we're able to cordon things off and say, hey, our friendship has been there, for let's say a decade, and we've built something as friends.

That foundation is there.

We're gonna let a geopolitical moment end our friendship?

That makes me really nervous because then we're gonna have a lot of friendships ending.

- No, I mean that's absolutely right that there has to be limits to politics in a democracy, but also once you start losing the ability to reason altogether, the way differences are settled is violently.

And I mean, democracy means that somebody needs to be arguing over policy to set the policy, and somebody needs to vote and persuade people in enough numbers to come around to their view.

So that's my qualification.

- And for the record, I think this is why we were so excited to be sitting down with the both of you, because you actually are friends- - Yeah.

- Oh yeah, yeah right.

Unless we're on opposite sides, I mean, if I can just put you in a box, Jason, if you'll allow me that- (everyone laughs) - As he's tried to dismantle the box the whole time.

- I mean, look, we haven't talked about it a whole lot, but my basic sense is that you're pro-Israel and you're in a very different position than I am on some of this.

- Yeah, I will say, I mean, when I described how I think Shadi's evolution since the Israel war began is the opposite from the evolution of many liberal Jews that I know, I'm not religiously, but I'm a Jewish person who's a political conservative, and to me, I have not been surprised by the response to October 7th.

I don't see the anti-Israel movement as a betrayal of progressive politics.

I see it as part of progressive politics.

I agree with the progressive's protesting on that extent.

They're consistent.

So I find that a lot of the Jews and Zionists who are most anguished by this, are people who thought, "Wait, I thought that liberal politics meant supporting Israel," especially Jews who grew up in the 20th century in the era of labor Zionism after World War II and shortly after Israel's creation.

I'm pro-Israel, but I'm not surprised or confused by the ideological trends that make people anti-Israel.

- And that makes me like progressives more because they are more critical of Israel.

I like that, and it was interesting that just last summer, I was becoming more and more critical of progressives on some of the social and moral issues of our time that I tend to be, I guess, to put my own self in a box, I- - Might as well you put him- - Yeah, I mean, I'm vaguely left of center, but I am more socially and religiously conservative than say the median democratic voter.

I think it's good for religion to play a role in public life.

I see religion as a force for good.

It bothers me that the democratic party has become less hospitable to people and communities of faith.

I think it's become a much more secularized party.

So there's a lot of things that I was moving in that direction on.

I'm like, "Oh, progressives have views," you know, when it came to things like LGBT themed, the whole debate that, not to get into this too much, but on things like gender equality and debates over race and whether LGBTQ themed lessons should be in public school at a very young age.

You know, I had maybe a little bit of a different view than a lot of progressives, but now I'm like, "Oh, progressives really get the Palestine thing.

Hmm, maybe I have to reassess my position-" - 'Cause it's interesting because, from where I'm sitting, it sounds like, and forgive me if this is a reduction of you, that once it hit close to home on something for you, that it caused you to rethink these issues that weren't maybe, I don't know, hitting close to home for you, but they were for other people, - Here's what I'm struggling with.

I was aligned with some of the, quote unquote, anti-woke people a year ago.

But now I'm wondering if most of my formerly anti woke allies are really hardcore pro-Israel and don't seem to have much sympathy for Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians to kind of paint with a broad brush, is there something about anti wokeness that makes people a little bit more callous, a little bit less sympathetic to people who are suffering?

Like maybe- (everyone laughs) - The audience in Seattle says, "Yes."

- I wanna push a little bit further in that direction and maybe zoom a little bit out from just talking about Israel and Palestine, but that I think a lot of people listening to this will think we're talking about identity politics, like it is a choice one is making in how you communicate and how you think about ideas, when identity politics is often just a reflection of people's experiences in the world.

And when you think about these big moments of justice and of truth in the past five or 10 years, whether it's the aftermath of George Floyd's killing and the protest, the Me Too Movement, that those are often held up as examples of identity politics at work.

But I think a lot of people would argue is just a way of getting people to understand essential truth and a way of advocating for justice.

And so I guess my question is, isn't identity politics just a reflection of society and how identity is already at play, whether or not we're giving it a name?

- Sure, I mean, like I said, I think there's no society where people's identities aren't relevant and that they don't organize around them, and that they don't see themselves through that lens.

But like I said, I think it's something to be managed, not something to be pushed to the fore.

Identity politics, it begets identity politics, and I think with Trump, we've seen the rise of more explicit White identity politics for the last 10 years than we saw in previous decades.

And I think you'd be foolish to not see (chuckles) the ways in which that that's a response to identity politics on the left to some extent.

But I think it's, like I said, it's something that needs to be managed because if we're only dividing ourselves based on our identities, we're not arguing about ideas.

Or if we're telling people that, you know, as a X, or as a White person, I say this, you're sort of saying that there's a fundamental difference in the ability to participate democratically and represent one another depending on our identities.

And I think that that is something that we see in Bosnia or in Yugoslavia, or Shadi said in some Middle Eastern countries, when that gets to an extreme, where that goes, and it's the end of debate.

So it's obvious, I'm not under any illusions, but it's a balance that has to be struck.

- Yeah, and I think Jason's making...

This is where I do agree with Jason that there are real risks here.

I mean, we are on the big idea stage, so if there- - Let's throw 'em out.

- Yeah, I mean, so we have to be able to talk about the bigger questions in a way that is not reductive.

So I get really nervous when people start a sentence and they say, "As a person of color," "as a Brown person," if you start a sentence like that, then you're claiming a certain kind of authority that pushes, let's say I'm talking to a White person, then that White person isn't gonna be able to engage because I'm claiming that the most important thing is that I'm a person of color, I'm Brown, and because he's not that, he doesn't have a place on the table to engage in the conversation.

That is the danger when everything gets reduced to who we are.

We have to be able to say that there is something more.

We have complex identities, we have hyphenated identities, we are all, I think, or most of us, if we are American citizens, we are American.

And I think there is a danger in losing sight of something that is foundational, that there is a founding that I think for all of it's, not to get in a big debate about the founding, but I believe that we, as Americans, should be proud of our founding at some basic level, that the ideals that America stands for are something worth fighting for.

I mean, that's one of the reasons that my parents came here for a reason.

And I'm really thankful that I don't live in an authoritarian country, like Egypt, and that I live here, and we're lucky to live here.

So I think there has to be some basic recognition of Americanness if we want to be able to move forward in a society without things turning darker, overly violent, and so forth.

- Like Shadi said, an American creed is, at least in theory, open to everyone.

And it's based on the Constitution, it's based on certain ideas, it's based on certain ways of living our lives, and that has made our country amazing.

I mean, there's very few countries that have that kind of ethnic pluralism and that are constitutional republics.

And so I think that, like I said, identity is gonna be an engine for social change and people are going to organize, but we can't abandon the American creed in exchange for more narrow identities.

- What is one of the more fascinating developments or the thing that you are going to be watching when it comes to this realignment and rethinking of identity?

What's the thing that's gonna be on your radar that you're tracking?

Jason, do you wanna start?

- What I mentioned before about the political realignment that we're seeing to some extent around race and ethnicity that I think both campaigns are very aware of.

I think that Trump increased his share of the Latino vote significantly between 2016 and 2020.

If he increased it again at that same rate, New Mexico, Nevada- - Arizona.

- Arizona, he'd probably win.

And I'm gonna watch to what extent we can keep arguing with each other through ideas and not not have violence as we did at the end of the last election.

- I do think that part of the reason that Jason and I do what we do, I mean we're writers, is because we do believe in big ideas.

They might not happen, but that doesn't mean we can't advocate and write about the things that we believe in.

And I think that what makes America great, (chuckles) "Makes America great," is that we actually can express our convictions and our beliefs, whether it's religious beliefs or political beliefs to the full extent, largely without fear of persecution.

And we can do that openly in forums like this, and that's a pretty great thing.

But I do hope that going forward, I do hope that the Israel Gaza war sort of subsides a little bit because I don't actually love where I'm at politically now.

It would be sort of weird and kind of a frightening thought that a terrorist organization, like Hamas, through their atrocities on October 7th, would've indirectly changed the outcome of an election.

If so many people decide to vote in a different way because of the Israel Gaza War and Democrats lose, I don't want that to happen, but there is a chance Biden might lose because Arab Americans, Muslim Americans and young progressives decide to stay home because they're angry.

And that's just a crazy idea to think about, and it's unfortunate, but it is a real risk going into November.

- And I think we're all gonna be watching for that.

We're officially out of time, but I just wanted to thank you guys both so much on behalf of Elahe and myself for this very honest conversation.

I think it's a model for how people should be talking with each other going forward.

So Shadi and Jason, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for being here, and please continue to follow us.

(audience applauds) (gentle twinkling music)