- What is the identity trap?

This Week on "Firing Line."

- [Protesters] Black trans lives matter.

Black trans lives matter.

Black trans lives matter.

- [Margaret] Modern identity politics has been both a rallying cry.

- [Protesters] We are women.

Hear us roar.

- [Margaret] And a source of contention.

- Everything rides on who's the victim and who's the oppressor.

That's the entire equation.

- [Margaret] It is also the subject of a new book by renowned writer and John Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk.

What makes Mounk's concerns stand out is his unique perspective.

He's a German-born Jew whose family was persecuted during the Holocaust.

- I certainly grew up with a deep consciousness of the fact that societies which seem tolerant and stable can go very badly wrong.

- [Margaret] Mounk is politically on the left, and his work has often examined threats to democracy from the right.

As nationalist movements gain traction.

- [Protesters] America first.

- [Margaret] Why is Mounk now focused on a problem he sees on the left?

- The greater threat comes from the political power of the far right.

But I do think if we want to effectively oppose one, it helps to oppose both.

- [Margret] What does writer and scholar Yascha Mounk say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation and Damon Button.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Yascha Mounk, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you so much.

- Your great grandparents were murdered for being Jewish, and the Holocaust claimed the lives of nearly your entire extended family from your grandparents' generation.

Nevertheless, your grandparents stayed in Europe, and you grew up as a German Jew.

How has your family's history shaped your views about the debate over confronting discrimination and injustice in the United States?

- So my family has been in the wrong place at the wrong time for four or five generations.

And I certainly grew up with a deep consciousness of the fact, with a deep awareness of the fact, that societies which seem tolerant and stable can go very badly wrong.

And when they fall apart, the consequences for many people are deadly.

And so when I think about this political moment, I think that one of the key tasks we have is to sustain these ethnically and religiously diverse democracies like the United States, make sure they stay prosperous, they stay tolerant, and that we can overcome the historical injustices that still characterize parts of it.

- You were raised in an intellectual tradition that you characterize as universalist leftism.

Unpack that.

What is universalist leftism?

- So my grandparents were born in shtetls in what's today the Ukraine, what at the time was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And they were marked, even before the Holocaust, by the kind of discrimination they experienced.

They became communists in the hope that this ideology would do away with the kind of discrimination that they'd experienced, that we would prioritize what we have in common, the interests we share as humans over the things that set us apart.

Now, it didn't work out that way.

The communist regimes that they helped to build up in Poland in the 1940 and 1950s turned on them and they and my parents had to flee Poland in 1968 because they were Jewish.

But I do think that this aspiration to recognize injustice based on group, but to build a society that is less structured by the kind of group to which you belong has for a long time characterized a lot of the left, and it's why I still think of myself as being on the left.

- Who are individuals in the Western tradition that most typify or embody the intellectual tradition of universalism?

- Well, I think you can think of this as an intellectual tradition that runs from people like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln through Martin Luther King Jr. And I would say someone like Barack Obama typified it as well.

All of them were perfectly conscious of the injustices, different kinds of injustices, of their time and day.

And all of them wanted to build an America where the group to which you belong comes to be less predictive of your life outcomes, less predictive of your opportunities, less predictive of how we treat each other.

Not because we ignore the ways in which it structures our society, but because we build a society where it comes to matter less because we've overcome some of these, hopefully many of these, injustices.

- You've spent recent years in your career focused on the rise of the illiberal right.

But your latest work of scholarship, "The Identity Trap," examines a shift in the intellectual left from embracing universalism, as you just described it, to now organizing around a separatist ideology that emphasizes distinct identity groups like race and gender and sexual orientation.

Explain how the left or parts of the left have come to reject universalism and take on this new ideology.

- Yeah.

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

I was worried about the crisis of our democratic institutions before it was cool.

And I've spent a lot of the last decade warning about the threat of far-right populists, whether it's Donald Trump in the United States or people like Recep Erdogan in Turkey or Narendra Modi in India.

And I remain very concerned about them.

At the same time, I have also seen how many of my friends and colleagues, big parts of the left, big parts of academia and many mainstream institutions, have, in part as a response, rejected the kind of universalist tradition we've been talking about, adopted a new set of ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation that promises to fight against injustice in the most uncompromising and radical way.

But I fear that in key ways, it turns out to be a trap, that it makes it harder for progressive institutions to pursue their important missions, and that politically it ends up empowering rather than weakening those kind of far-right groups.

- This new ideology has noble intentions, as you recognize.

The intention is to cure persistent racial inequality.

Why is this a trap?

- Perhaps I can start answering this question with a story.

In researching this book, I spoke to a woman called Kila Posey, an African American educator who lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, and she requested that her daughter be able to go to a particular class because she liked the teacher.

And the principal said, "Well, that's not the Black class.

Your daughter can't go to that class."

Now, you might think this is the kind of story about racial segregation that recalls the 1960s and 1970s.

But actually, that principal is a Black woman and she is a progressive.

She has bought into a new pedagogical trend which says that a good education should teach children to think of themselves primarily as racial beings, that even if a seven or eight-year-old child is well integrated in that classroom, has many friends, if there's not a sufficient number of same race students in that classroom, then that is a problem for her development.

So why is this a trap?

Why is this counterproductive?

Well, one of the things I'm worrying about is what will happen to the white kids.

And I don't worry that they're going to be uncomfortable.

It's fine to be uncomfortable in your education sometimes.

I worry that everything I've learned from history and from social science teachers that which group you identify with is really malleable, but once you say, "This is my group and that over there is another group," you're going to treat the members of your group much better, and you'll often treat the members of the other group very badly.

So the hope might be to turn these white kids into great anti-racist activists who declaim their white privilege.

I think, at scale, it's much more likely to produce racists and white supremacists who turn our society into a zero-sum struggle between different ethnic blocs.

- How pervasive is this problem?

- I think it is now very pervasive.

These educational practices are present in many schools.

- How many schools?

Have you quantified this with data?

- No, there's no data exactly on this.

But if you talk to teachers in schools, if you talk to parents in schools, I see this all the time.

This morning, I was interviewed by a journalist who said, "Oh, yes, this is happening in the school that my children go to."

- So how did this become part of the mainstream, as you claim?

- I think it was three things that went on here.

The first is the importance of social media, on Facebook and Twitter, but also on platforms like Tumblr, which encouraged people to experiment with their identity, to define themselves by their identity.

The second element is that by 2010, universities were awash with these ideas.

Academics, but also university administrators were deeply convinced by them.

And so students who went, especially through Ivy League colleges and elite universities, were being taught these ideas in the seminar room, but also in orientations and other kinds of contexts.

And they started to go into the corporate world, into the nonprofit world, into media.

And you see these changes happening fastest where you have a lot of young employees who come from elite universities.

And then the third step, which was crucial, was the election of Donald Trump.

The scholarly literature shows that one key thing for a functioning of groups is that they listen to in-group dissenters.

people within the group who say, "Hey, perhaps we're going the wrong direction here."

And that usually works pretty well until groups have the perception of the external threat.

Well, Donald Trump, for good reason, was perceived as that external threat by people.

And under those conditions, the in-group dissenter isn't listened to anymore, but rather branded as a traitor, somebody who's secretly running interference for the other side.

And so after 2016, it became very difficult for people in mainstream institutions, and especially in progressive spaces, to criticize bad ideas on the left without being portrayed as secretly trying to assist Donald Trump.

- Give me some examples of how this has shown up.

- So one conversation I have had for the last five years repeatedly with people who are in ordinary jobs, with people who are famous figures in media, with people who are politicians, including United States senators, and with CEOs, you know, they might have expressed the kind of view that I've expressed so far in this conversation and then they lean forward a little bit and said, "Of course, I would never say this publicly."

And I worry about that because it's not good for the country when people say one thing in private and another thing in public.

And I think it is fueling part of a crisis of confidence in our institutions because people reasonably surmise that those who are in power, those who are running the important institutions in the country, say one thing in public to them on TV and another thing among friends over lunch.

- We saw the CEO of Netflix apologize to employees after defending politically incorrect comedian Dave Chappelle.

So even though he refused to take down the special episode of Dave Chappelle, he then apologized to employees for how he handled it.

What is the dynamic of the internal activism at these companies that has created a fear from the executives?

- Yeah, well, so it's a combination of internal and external activism in many of those cases.

So there's the Slack channels in which people en masse express their displeasure with something that is happening at Netflix or in one of those companies.

It creates an atmosphere in which there's not just one person being attacked, but anybody who defends that person or defends the importance of platforming these ideas becomes attacked themselves.

And so people who actually are in favor of running this standup special or hosting this talk decide it's better not to speak up.

And then, of course, it's combined with external pressure, so that you plant media stories in mainstream outlets that say, "Well, you know, this organization is platforming this problematic person or this problematic content, and there's this group within the company that's very upset," and so it leads to very bad publicity.

- You talk about a push, especially among elite academic institutions, for white people to take responsibility for their whiteness and for their privilege.

What concerns you about this trend?

- Well, what concerns me about this trend is that we need to build solidarity with each other.

We need to create a society in which we understand more about the struggles and injustices faced by people who are not born into the same kind of group, and in which we're able to sustain a common American identity which recognizes the ways in which we are different, but also says that because we are citizens of the same country, we help each other.

And if some injustice happens to you, I'm not just deferring to your judgment about how to remedy it.

I want to remedy it for my own reasons, because it violates the vision of a kind of country in which I want to live.

And what I worry about, particularly in those educational contexts, like elementary schools, is that we're teaching people to think of themselves first and foremost as a member of their identity groups.

And that inspires all of the mechanisms of preferring the in-group over the out-group that humans seem universally prey to.

So the more that these people are going to be aware that they're white, the more they might self-consciously advocate for the interests of whites.

I think it's going to have the opposite impact of what the original motivation was.

- But do you see evidence of this happening already?

- Well, first of all, there are hundreds and thousands of studies in psychology which show that if you prime people to think of themselves as a member of a particular group, they prioritize its interests over those of others.

I think there's also some empirical evidence of this in the United States.

We actually see a lot of young boys are actually trending towards the Republican Party in interesting ways.

And I think that is motivated in part by that sense that on every kind of identity divide, they are grouped into the set of people who are responsible for historical injustice and who should be ashamed of themselves.

And I think in some of those boys, it has created the instinct to say, "Well, actually, let's be proud of that group and fight and argue in favor of its interests rather than against it."

So, yes, I would say that there is all kinds of empirical evidence, both at a more theoretical level and at a more immediate level, for this contention.

- You reject the claim that there is an impossibility of mutual comprehension.

That's a quote from your book.

This notion that a member of a privileged group will never be able to understand the experience of the member of an oppressed group.

On what basis do you reject this concept?

- Yeah.

So I think that, as with many of these ideas, there's a plausible intuition that gets turned into an upshot which is wrong.

The plausible intuition is that as a white person, I don't know what it feels like for a lot of African American men to walk down the street and worry that a policeman may stop and frisk them and may treat them violently.

And I may never be able to know exactly what it feels like to walk in these shoes.

But now we have a set of ideas and norms called standpoint theory, which I think takes that basic insight too far.

It says that if we stand at different intersections of identity to each other, then we're never going to understand each other.

And rather than trying to empathize with your experience, I should simply defer to your view.

I think what we need is real empathy, that if somebody tells me about an injustice they've experienced, I listen to them with an open mind.

I don't dismiss them.

I don't say, "Well, I've never experienced that so you must be wrong."

I listen to them carefully, and then we build real political solidarity, which is to say, if you've experienced this and you've faced those obstacles and those injustices, that goes against my own vision of the kind of country I want to build and so I'm going to stand in solidarity with you for those important reasons of my own.

- Political correctness was the subject of William F. Buckley Jr.'s debate in 1991.

Of course, he hosted this program for 33 years.

And he debated the danger he believed it posed to freedom of thought in American universities.

Boston University President John Silber summed up the argument neatly.

Take a look.

- What bothers me is how one maintains any function for the university when we reduce the pursuit of truth and the claim of the capacity of the human mind to transcend the individual and to know other minds, that people come up with the thesis that our knowledge is dependent upon our perspective as either a male or a female, as either a member of one race or another race.

It seems to me that denial of transcendence that is implied by all of these pronouncements is inimical to the very life of the mind and the very function of the university.

- How are the 1990s PC debates connected to the identity trap?

- I think there's a real difference in the extent to which they dominate institutions.

In the early 1990s, as you could see here, the university president confidently spoke out against it.

That would be less likely today.

In the 1990s, when we talked about political correctness, it was reserved to campus and perhaps a couple of activist spaces.

Today it's a topic in corporations and nonprofit organizations, in congressional offices.

So I think the extent of its influence has changed as well.

- Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have made a war on wokeness seminal to their presidential aspirations and campaigns.

How do you distinguish your critiques from the arguments pushed by anti-woke activists on the right?

- Well, first of all, I think that they operate in bad faith and attack things that are important, that are part of a decent society.

And secondly, they embrace remedies that would further undermine our liberties.

They are right that in many universities, there is an insufficiently tolerant culture for heterodox views, for people who disagree.

But what people like Ron DeSantis then do is to try and legislate what can be said and what can't be said in public universities in Florida.

I teach students about some of the themes we've been talking about today.

I have a seminar in which I have a week on cultural appropriation and a week on free speech.

And according to legislation in the state of Florida, that means that my course would be illegal in a public university in that state.

That is, as the founding fathers would have said, a cure worse than the disease.

That's not going to recreate a culture of free speech.

It's simply going to balkanize America into two halves in which in one half you're allowed to say one set of things and the other half you're allowed to say a different set of things.

I want an America in which in all of it you're allowed to speak your mind.

- So what you're saying is Governor DeSantis is actually promoting the same solution that the progressive separatists are promoting as well?

- Yes.

[Margaret speaks indistinctly] He and the people who inspired his policies are, in some cases, explicitly emulating some of those measures, saying, "Well, if you're restricting what can be said with a speech code on this campus, we are going to restrict it in the state of Florida for actual legislation in our legislature."

That is morally and strategically the wrong response.

- You wrote in 2016, quote, "Under Trump, the Republican Party has completed its decades-long transition towards being a vehicle for white identity politics."

Do you still believe the Republican Party is a vehicle for white identity politics in this country?

- I think it is in large parts.

What is interesting, though, is that Donald Trump's brand of politics seems to have succeeded in making the Republican Party more racially diverse.

That actually today, knowing what ethnic group a voter hails from tells you less about who they are going to vote for than it did in 2016.

- Not remarkably, though.

I mean, single-digit percentage points of African Americans.

- African Americans are still voting for Democrats- - Overwhelmingly for Democrats.

- In the great majority.

With Latinos, there has been a remarkable shift.

- You've labeled Trump as a, quote, "existential threat to our political system," and expressed concerns that a Trump second term would be far worse than a Trump first term.

In "The Identity Trap," you pivot to critiquing the modern progressive movement and you call this an urgent topic.

Explain the urgency.

- One of the things that have allowed these ideas to become so dominant is that after Trump won in 2016, it became taboo to criticize these ideas in big parts of the left.

But one of the reasons why Donald Trump is now once again running head to head with Joe Biden in polls for 2024 is that a lot of voters are concerned about the dominance that these ideas have over mainstream institutions.

I don't share this judgment, but more Americans right now think the Democratic Party is too extreme than think that the Republican Party is too extreme.

There was recently an analysis in "The New York Times" which shows that there's a key new voting demographic in the Republican Party, about 10% of its voters, who are predominantly young, predominantly non-white, predominantly quite progressive on all kinds of social issues, but concerned about the hold of what they call woke ideas have over our institutions and businesses and other associations.

That 10% of people who are currently voting for the Republican Party could very well make the difference between the genuinely dangerous Donald Trump winning in 2024 and him failing to recapture the White House.

- You've studied the threats to democracy on the right.

You've shifted your focus to the cultural excesses on the left.

Which is the greater threat, the more urgent threat to our democracy?

- The greater threat comes from the political power of the far right.

But I do think that the cultural influence of the identity trap is making it much more likely that people like Donald Trump will win back political office.

And so it's tempting to say we need to choose between opposing one or the other.

And at a superficial level, these ideologies don't share that much in common.

But in practical and political terms, one is the yin to the other's yang.

If we want to effectively oppose one, it helps to oppose both.

- Yascha Mounk, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you so much.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation and Damon Button.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. [dramatic music] [dramatic music continues] [dramatic music continues] [bright music] [bright music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.