- The important thing is not to build a culture in which we are forced to double down on narrow identities, in which we cease to build the broader identities, like ones as Americans, but allow us to sustain solidarity with people who are very different from us.

[soft music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking all about identity.

From race, to gender, to profession, to nationality, to astrological signs.

Scorpio, right here.

That's right, there are a million ways we define who we are, and identity is an important part of how we see ourselves and find community.

But despite good intentions among some of y'all, a laser focus on identity can make it harder to understand each other and to achieve equality.

Does concentrating on what makes us different from each other hurt more than it helps?

Do opposites attract?

At what point does a healthy appreciation for culture and heritage stifle discourse and deny mutual understanding?

All that stuff.

I'm going to unpack that tension, the tension, today with my guest, Yascha Mounk.

He's not tense.

He's a political scientist, as am I.

Kind of my brother.

It's my favorite identity, in fact, whose new book, "The Identity Trap," explores the origins, consequences, and limitations of the contentious idea of identity politics.

And later, a look at why the art world is losing its marbles over issues of identity and cultural appropriation.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Narrator 1] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "Gzero."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [gentle music] - [Ian] What happened to the war on wokeness?

It used to be all Fox News wanted to talk about.

- Wokeness is a virus.

It's infectious.

It destroys your brain.

- We're seeing a woke ideology spread like a disease.

- The wokeness, I mean, this is every, this is all we should be talking about.

- But lately, the network has been leading with stories that sound a lot more like this.

- The American people are getting wrecked by Joe Biden's economy of inflation.

High interest rates.

- [Ian] A year ago, the culture wars were such a potent issue, three GOP primary candidates made anti-woke their personal brand.

Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a book called "Woke, Inc." Tim Scott compared woke supremacy to white supremacy.

And Ron DeSantis entered the race as the ultimate anti-woke crusader.

- We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.

Our state is where woke goes to die.

- But Scott dropped out in November.

Ramaswamy didn't make the final GOP debate.

And DeSantis' poll numbers have fallen almost 20 points in the last few months.

Does this mean conservative voters no longer care about fighting the so-called woke mob?

Are the culture wars finely abating?

Not exactly.

- I don't like the term "woke," because I hear woke, woke, woke.

You know, it's like just a term they use.

Half the people can't even define it.

They don't know what it is.

- Anti-woke DeSantis was really popular with GOP voters before entering the race, so Trump had every reason to dismiss the term itself as confusing and vague, which kind of worked.

And major Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action and abortion, but protecting gun ownership and religious rights have signaled to voters that the war against major progressive policies has largely been won, and that's borne out by polling data.

The issues motivating Republican voters in 2024?

The economy, immigration, and government spending.

Not transgender athletes or critical race theory.

If you look at international politics, there's a similar pattern playing out.

Argentina's new libertarian firebrand President Javier Milei won his race not by vilifying liberal values, though he's happy to do that on the side, but riding a wave of populist anger over a desperately mismanaged and collapsing economy.

But even though fighting progressive ideals has receded as a ballot box issue doesn't mean it's not still a powerful motivating force on the right.

Just look at what's been happening at U.S. colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, where administrators are struggling mightily to balance free speech with campus safety.

At a December congressional hearing, three presidents of elite universities were asked if calling for genocide of Jewish people violated conduct rules.

- It can be depending on the context.

- I've heard chants, which can be antisemitic depending on the context.

- It is a context dependent decision, Congresswoman.

- Their answers struck conservatives as tone-deaf, overly concerned with political correctness, a perfect encapsulation of the problem with liberal values.

After intense public outcry and weeks of scrutiny, two of the three have resigned from their roles.

So just because the woke wars aren't leading Fox's nightly coverage doesn't mean the position from the right or even from candidates perceived as more moderate, like Nikki Haley, has changed.

It's the conversation around these issues and how they're being framed going into the 2024 U.S. election.

That's what's different.

The GOP did not perform well in the midterms or off-cycle elections and need to hit Biden where he's weakest, the economy, security, immigration.

The right wing may no longer identify as anti-woke, but anti-woke by any other name is still the heart of conservative politics.

My guest this week is author and fellow political scientist Yascha Mounk.

And his latest book, "The Identity Trap," explores the origins and consequences of so-called wokeness.

He argues that obsession with group identity from the progressive left hurts our society more than it helps.

And here's our conversation.

Yascha Mounk, welcome back to "GZERO World."

- Thank you so much.

- So you have a new book out, but I'm gonna ask you first about the talk we had last time, which was democracy in decline.

How would you rate the state of democracy around the world today compared to when you and I last sat down and chatted about it?

- So I think we have to get used to democracy being in a long-term crisis, and events today or tomorrow are not changing the overall assessment in a dramatic way.

So I like to say I'm a democracy crisis hipster.

I started worrying about the crisis of democracy before it was cool.

At the time, colleagues in political science said, "This is silly.

"Democracy in places like France or the United States "is completely safe."

Since then, they've overtaken me on the worry meter and gone from, "There's no reason to worry" to, "We're doomed."

I continue to be concerned about the state of many democracies around the world.

I do think we will see some democratic systems that were once thought to be safe erode and collapse as they did in Hungary.

But clearly we're also seeing that democratic countries can be quite resilient in the face of a populace who took over, as was the case in Brazil, as was the case in the United States, at least in 2020.

So we will see what happens.

- [Ian] We'll see-- - [Yascha] In 2024 and 2028.

- So let's move to what you've been talking about over the last few months, your new book, "The Identity Trap."

And of course, anyone in the United States has been hearing far too much about the culture wars.

Explain to me a little bit what you mean when you call identity a "trap."

- Yeah, look, we all have identities, and that's a great thing.

We're recording this in the middle of New York City.

One of the things that I love about this place is that there's people from all over the world, but many of those people have strong connections to the cultures, the languages, the cuisines of the places that they're from.

And there's always been forms of identity politics.

I think people like Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King were, in some sense, engaged in identity politics.

What I worry about is a novel ideology about race and gender and sexual orientation, sometimes called woke, though I try to avoid that term, that has gained tremendous power over our mainstream institutions.

And that is different in a number of ways.

Number one, it really tries to encourage people to double down on their identities in new ways.

A lot of elite private schools in the city we're recording this in now think that the mission of a progressive education is to get children to think of themselves as racial beings.

And they come into classrooms, sometimes in the third grade, the second grade, the first grade, and split kids up by race in order to make them double down on their identities in that kind of way.

That, I think, is a mistake.

And the second key thing here is that the form of demands that are made have changed significantly from what we're used to.

Rather than asking for true inclusion in shared institutions, rather than, as Frederick Douglass did in his famous speech about the Fourth of July, saying, by what virtue are you excluding me from the values you're celebrating today, from the idea that all men are created equal, they often reject that universalist heritage and want to make how we treat each other and how the state treat all of us explicitly depend on the kind of identity groups of which we're a part.

Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory, for example, argued that we should reject, I quote, "The defunct racial equality ideology "of the civil rights movement."

That, I think, is a big mistake.

- Now, I guess a bunch of ways we can go with this.

One is, I wonder, I understand that you do not want universities to become crucibles for snowflakes who are incapable of handling and dealing with diversity, incapable of dealing with a true multiplicity of ideas that actually deserve full airing, irrespective of whether they're politically correct.

On the other hand, there continue to be very real structural inequalities.

For example, on issues like race and availability of economic well-being.

And affirmative action, for example, facilitated that transition.

So what do you think, because clearly on the other side of the spectrum, you have people saying, "We're not gonna support any affirmative action anymore, "because this issue's been resolved.

"And now we're just going to treat everyone "on the basis of merit."

I mean, where do you come down on that?

- Well, I think this is a much broader conversation than affirmative action.

I'm happy to get back to affirmative action.

I think it's important to put that in context, right?

One of the things that the United States did over the course of a COVID pandemic was, when we finally got these lifesaving vaccines, we had to figure out who to distribute them to first because they were scarce.

Most countries around the world started distributing them first to the elderly, because they were most at risk of serious adverse consequences.

The key advisory committee to the Centers of Disease Control in the United States, ACIP, rejected that possibility because it said that elderly Americans were disproportionately white, and therefore it suggested prioritizing essential workers.

Everybody was eligible, but there was no spots.

So, who got those spots?

People were counted as essential workers who were finance workers in New York, movie producers in LA.

I was counted as an essential worker as a college professor in the state of Maryland.

So this had really bad consequences.

And it had bad consequences for non-white Americans, by the way, because if you end up giving two shots of a vaccine to 25-year-old Latino Uber drivers rather than to one 80-year-old Latino retiree, more Latinos are likely to die.

- What you are saying, and I completely agree, is that you wanna focus on the people that are most in need.

And for vaccines, the Americans completely failed.

And I'm asking, like, wouldn't you want to apply that kind of sensibility to all of your policies?

- But, sure, but the problem is it raises a very, very bad metric for that in virtually all circumstances, right?

So let's take the example of child poverty.

We had a very good child poverty policy for years, so after the Inflation Reduction Act, which helped all children in America who were in need to have dinner on their plate.

And that's morally right because every child in America should know that they're gonna be able to get dinner irrespective of their race.

It's also politically much more winning because it's much easier to sustain a policy that is directed at all children in need.

There's much broader support for it.

And finally, it actually helps to move us towards, quote unquote, equity, because a policy that is directed at...

If African-Americans, Latinos are disproportionately likely to have children who are in need, a universal policy that helps all children who are in need is actually disproportionately going to help African-Americans and Latinos.

And so again, I think using race as this simplistic metric is a mistake.

That was true in the case of affirmative action as well.

I think the strongest rationale for affirmative action is as a form of reparations for the terrible, unjust treatment that African African Americans have received in this country for many centuries, which continues to set back the educational opportunities and so on.

50% of the students who are Black at Ivy League universities, wonderful students, many of whom I've taught, are the children of engineers and doctors and so on, recent immigrants from countries like Nigeria or Kenya, right?

The fact that they are Black here is a very bad metric for whether they are actually in need of that kind of historical regress.

And some African-American activist groups, like a group called American Descendants of Slavery, recognize this and say, "Hang on a second, "you're claiming you're doing something for us, "but you're not."

This is the wrong metric.

- So another thing that I find interesting and also hard to square is, we have these debates about people, and young people in particular, not wanting to have society define what box they're in.

They want to be able to identify themselves.

Most people do.

Now, on the one hand, I have to say, as someone who is a little older, I don't quite get all of the pronouns.

It's hard for me to address someone as "They," right?

But I also get that young people don't like the idea that historic determination of identity by fixed gender identity is who you are.

How do you deal with that?

Because it feels legitimate to me that young people want to rebel against what they sense as society telling them, "This is how you need to be."

- Well, let's say two things.

So first is that everybody should be free to be who they are, to act as they wish, to present as the gender role that they prefer.

And we need to have a society in which we respect everybody equally, respective of a race they're from or respective of a national origin or respective of a biological sex, respective of the gender role they choose.

- Well, sure, but we don't do that.

- Well, yes, and we need to keep fighting to do that more closely.

But that is different from saying that we should create a society where how we treat each other is deeply shaped all of the time by the group of which we're from.

I'll give you an example.

Robin DiAngelo, the white diversity trainer who wrote bestselling books, she says that every time a white person interrupts a Black person, they're bringing the entire apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them.

That makes me afraid that she doesn't have any Black friends because part of being friends, we're friends, I hope, even after this conversation.

- Ish, yeah.

- Even though we interrupt each other, right?

That's part of-- - That's what we do.

- Makes us equals.

So I think having a society where we have these forms of deference to each other on the basis of our identities is not, in fact, a way to build towards social equality.

And the other thing I want to say, is that many of the norms and practices that have now been adopted in these institutions actually box people in to defining by their identity even when we don't want to.

- I get this, and I think sensible people generally agree with what you are presently saying.

I worry that in society today, we're sort of lionizing and spending too much attention focusing on people whose actual, the things they are saying are largely performative.

They are meant to drive eyeballs.

They are algorithmically expanded, but normal people don't actually believe or accept that.

- Well, so, look, I agree and I disagree.

I agree that most Americans strongly disagree with these ideas.

According to the best research on this, by more uncommon, the sort of tribe of what they call progressive activists, it's about 8% of U.S. population.

They happen to be predominantly white, predominantly highly educated, and predominantly rich.

At the same time, they have outsized influence over our institutions.

Most elite private schools in this country now engage in those kinds of affinity groups.

And I'm not talking about 16-year-olds choosing to spend time with people who have similar origins.

I'm talking about teachers coming into a classroom and splitting up the kids into different kinds of groups.

The CDC was deeply influenced by this ideology of equity, even though its own models suggested that this would lead to about 0.5 to 6.5% more deaths in the COVID pandemic.

And it is also a political trap-- - But is this really happening in most universities?

Like, you go to UMich.

I mean, the temple is football.

You got 110,000 people out there every weekend.

Like, that's what they're all turning up for.

Middle of the country.

I mean, America's a diverse place.

Universities, I mean, I get that you have a few of these Ivy League schools that are driving this, but is this really the experience of most American university students?

Is it really?

- Well, I'll tell you two things.

The first is that the students I teach are very open to thinking seriously about these topics and to changing their mind.

But everything they've been taught at this point in their education is that they should define themselves by the particular intersection of identities at which they stand, that they should be skeptical of free speech or they should put under general pool of suspicion all forms of what's come to be called cultural appropriation.

But there's a deep way in which we're not going to be able to understand each other if we stand at different intersections of identity.

So that is a deep, pervasive part of the university culture.

But the other thing I want to say is, I was struck when I started to research this book, how little good writing there had been on this.

In the book, I source the intellectual origins of these ideas, and there isn't an academic who has actually written about this other than me.

I try to make a reasonable case against these ideas.

One that recognizes that we have genuine injustices in the United States today, that some form of identity will always play a part of our politics, but that also champions the political tradition in which I think people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King stood.

One that's saying the goal is not to rip up the values of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but rather to live up to it.

And by the way, people who claim we haven't been able to make any progress on racism, any progress on homophobia, any progress on these forms of prejudices are wrong.

Our society is deeply imperfect.

We have to fight to do better, but we can do better on the basis of these principles.

And that's how, from the gay rights movement to the fight to abolish slavery, we've been able to make the greatest political progress in the past.

I think the important thing is not to build a culture in which we are forced to double down on narrow identities, in which we think that we can't communicate with each other if we have different identities, in which we cease to build the broader identities, like ones as Americans, but allow us to sustain solidarity with people who are very different from us.

- Yascha Mounk, great to see you again on "GZERO World."

- Great to see you.

[soft music] - Now a look at how these identity issues are playing out in a very different arena, the world of fine art.

"GZERO"'s Alex Kliment brings us this report on why museums around the world are losing their marbles over conversations about cultural appropriation and repatriation.

- This behind me is a 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk.

But as you can probably tell, this isn't Egypt.

It's Central Park in New York City, where what's known as Cleopatra's Needle has stood for almost 150 years since the Egyptian government gave it to the U.S. as a gift to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal.

And while the Egyptians have occasionally raised the issue of whether it's being cared for properly, there's never been a serious dispute about who owns it or where it should properly stand.

But for thousands of other objects from the ancient and non-Western world, the situation could not be more different.

Museums across Europe and the United States are crammed with thousands of works from classical antiquity, pre-Colombian Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that were pillaged, stolen, or taken under otherwise suspect circumstances.

And today, many governments in those regions want those artworks back.

One of the most famous cases is the dispute over the Parthenon Marbles, sometimes called the Elgin Marbles, at the British Museum.

- A diplomatic row has broken out tonight between the British and Greek governments over the Elgin Marbles.

- [Alex] In November, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canceled a planned meeting with his Greek counterpart after Kyriakos Mitsotakis publicly lobbied for the Marbles' return on the BBC.

- This isn't a reunification argument.

It's as if I told you that you would cut the Mona Lisa in half.

- [Alex] Here's the backstory.

In 1801, when the Ottomans ruled Greece, British ambassador Thomas Bruce, known as Lord Elgin, got local permission to take back to London a series of the sculptures from the Parthenon, which, at the time, lay largely in ruins.

But in 1835, after the Greeks won independence, they demanded the marbles be sent back to Athens.

London refused, and the battle has raged for nearly 200 years since.

There are legal questions, but the debate is really about something more than that.

- This case is really a moral or ethical case.

I think it's gone beyond the legal boundaries of this dispute.

It really is about, who is the better owner?

- [Alex] Art repatriation expert Leila Amineddoleh says this question of who owns art has become more political in recent years.

And now elite institutions are undergoing a reckoning over their Indiana Jones style acquisition tactics of the past.

- Should museums hold onto objects that were taken under, either violent circumstances or were taken during a time of looting and theft, or a time when a country was colonized and perhaps didn't have control over the artifacts within its borders?

- [Alex] Critics of sending the works back say it's important to have museums where everyone can come see art from all over the world, and some worry about a slippery slope towards depleting the collections of major institutions entirely.

But advocates of repatriation argue that, for European and American institutions to keep these artifacts, is a form of imperialism and appropriation that denies rightful ownership to the cultures that created them in the first place.

- I think these marbles are a symbol of Greece, but I think they're more than that.

I think the Parthenon Marbles have become a symbol of this cultural heritage debate about ownership.

- In recent years, several major museums have agreed to voluntarily repatriate artworks.

The Smithsonian, for example, reached an agreement with Nigeria to return 29 bronze sculptures that had been looted during a 19th century British raid.

But who those rightful owners are isn't always obvious.

The US-based Restitution Study Group, for example, sued to block the Smithsonian deal, arguing that those sculptures are the cultural heritage of African-American descendants of the slaves brought from what is today Nigeria, rather than the property of the Nigerian government itself.

In the end, these fights over art and artifacts are really struggles over a deeper question, a question of identity, of who we are, and where we're from, especially when we're far from home.

In today's world, nothing is more political than that.

For "GZERO World," I'm Alex Kliment.

[soft music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see, or even if you don't, if you feel like culturally appropriating someone, we know how to help.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat tune] - [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [upbeat tune]