The west has become an uncomfortable place for old-fashioned liberals. Much of the challenge has arrived from the populist right, which has cast itself as the champion of the majority against the self-interested “liberal elite”. But on liberalism’s other flank, new forces have also grown, impatient with what they see as the lack of radicalism and decolonising urgency of those in the centre.
This frustration has helped give rise to two sometimes related phenomena — what has come to be called cancel culture, and the assertion that human beings should primarily be understood in terms of our group identities such as race, gender and sexual orientation.
After writing two books dealing with threats to liberal democracy from the new right, it’s to these “progressive” forces and their intellectual champions that Yascha Mounk, a politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, now turns in The Identity Trap. What is this new ideology, he asks — and why are so many on the left abandoning the tenets of liberal democracy in its name?
That this is exactly what’s happening is uncontroversial. Mounk illustrates the change by citing the evolution of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1977, he reminds us, the ACLU defended the right of a group of Chicago-based Nazis to march through Skokie, a suburb of Chicago with a large Jewish population — a steadfast commitment to principle that now seems surprising. Yet by November 2020 a leading ACLU staff member could be found on Twitter calling for a book analysing the recent trend for young women to present as having gender dysphoria to be banned. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” the staffer wrote. He didn’t die and is — regrettably — still employed by ACLU. If even employees of the organisation that has most militantly defended free speech are now advocating banning books with which it disagrees, then surely illiberalism is winning.
These themes also fascinate Greg Lukianoff, head of the advocacy organisation FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), founded in 1999 to defend campus free speech. Adding to several books, including Unlearning Liberty (2012), Lukianoff has now teamed up with a 22-year-old student, Rikki Schlott, to chart and call out cancel culture, which the authors argue “has upended lives, ruined careers, undermined companies, hindered the production of knowledge, destroyed trust in institutions, and plunged us into an ever-worsening cultural war”.
FIRE’s research is illuminating. According to its figures, Lukianoff and Schlott write, 16 per cent of professors surveyed reported having either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, teaching or academic research, while 7 per cent said they had been investigated. Twenty-nine per cent said they’d been pressured by administrators to avoid controversial research.
The authors give the example from late 2022 of an adjunct professor of art history in Minnesota who had her contract renewal rescinded after a complaint from a student that she had shown an artwork depicting the Prophet Mohammed in class. The university president justified the action, saying in a statement that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom”. (The vast majority of faculty members supported the teacher.)
For UK readers, The Canceling of the American Mind might seem the more familiar of the two books — not least because of the row that was created in 2019, when JK Rowling was subjected to a torrent of abuse following her defence of a women’s rights supporter who had in effect lost her job for expressing the view that biological sex was a reality.
“Cancellation” is, of course, by no means just a leftwing phenomenon. Lukianoff and Schlott remind us how in America what is sauce for the progressive goose is sauce for the populist gander, as rightwingers in several states have proscribed books in public and school libraries and discussions in classrooms. Such moves practically constitute the presidential campaign of Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis. More absurdly, last month a book called Read Me a Story, Stella was flagged as inappropriate in Alabama, seemingly because of the author’s name — Marie-Louise Gay.
Preposterous as such actions can be, Mounk’s warring geese and ganders seem more threatening in many ways, because the war they are fighting isn’t one of cancellation but one of identity itself. As Mounk tells it, once there were leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama who embodied what might be called liberal universalism, founded on the idea of a society where racial and other differences cease to have significance. As King famously put it, people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
But, Mounk argues — I think persuasively — that the notion of little black children holding hands with little white children is today seen as “naive kitsch” by many younger progressives, who instead “increasingly embrace a vision of the future in which society would forever be profoundly defined by its division into distinct identity groups”. Even if most ordinary people — whatever the colour of their skin — probably still cling to MLK’s dream, a pessimism that was once confined to a small number of separatists is now far more general among opinion-formers.
In the wake of the civil rights movement, many in the US will have been disappointed by the failure of their country to match political advances with social and economic ones. Nevertheless, the logic they have derived from this mixture of success and failure is, Mounk believes, a malign one.
Whereas I am inclined to see it more as a generational development, Mounk believes this phenomenon originated in and derived its power from the world of ideas. His point of origin is the influential figure of the late Derrick Bell, black activist and law professor at Harvard. In the 1970s and 80s Bell found himself rebelling against the original nostrums of the American civil rights movement, including the idea that desegregation in education benefited black people. “Racism,” he once wrote, is not “a holdover from slavery that the nation both wants to cure and is capable of curing . . . It is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” Courtesy of work by one of his admirers, Kimberlé Crenshaw, this has become the basis for what has become known as “Critical Race Theory”, which holds that racism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice, but embedded in institutions and systems.
In recent years, Mounk tells us, this insight has been developed by progressive academics and others into a general analysis of society as a whole. “Intersectionality” (also Crenshaw) came next, and gradually morphed into what Mounk calls “standpoint theory”, which in its simplest form “came to be the kernel for the idea that I have ‘my truth’ — one that you have no right to question or critique on the basis of supposedly objective facts, especially if you do not belong to the same marginalized identity group.”
The logic is that, of necessity, members of different groups cannot properly understand each other. It’s an assertion that as a writer and journalist I encounter all the time, and seems to have become a straightforward article of belief among many younger people. And not just younger people: Mounk cites an article published in The New York Times in 2017 by an African-American law professor, headlined “Can my children be friends with white people?” Written in response to white-nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, it concluded, “I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.” A sentiment such as this surely does some violence to the memory of people like the two young New York Jews who, along with a black friend, were murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.
One of the most irritating developments of this trend is the accusation of “cultural appropriation”, which seems to have given licence to extraordinarily censorious behaviour and led to absurd debates about whether — for instance — a black, non-Jewish actor should play Shylock in a New York production of The Merchant of Venice or a white female author, Jeanine Cummins, could legitimately write a bestseller about Mexican migrants. If this discussion has any upside, it must be that soon all those fine actors who are old Etonians will be confined to films about the Cambridge Spies or country-house dramas penned by Julian Fellowes.
The identity trap, says Mounk, can have some truly terrible consequences. In late 2020, common sense dictated to public health authorities across the world that new Covid vaccines be given first to the vulnerable elderly. But in the US the perception that the elderly group skewed white led to initial priority being given instead to a widely defined category of essential workers who were more “diverse”. The implications of such an approach were perverse, and the policy was swiftly abandoned.
The outlook that led to this “progressive separatism” cannot, Mounk, argues, confer any advantage on minorities. “In a democracy,” he reminds readers, “fights over the distribution of scarce resources are, virtually by definition, usually won by more numerous and more powerful rather than less numerous and less powerful groups — making it, at best, an extremely risky tool for overcoming historical injustice.” Indeed, the claims made on the New Right for recognition of “white” identity are the mirror image of “progressive separatism” of this sort.
Better, Mounk says, to heed the words of the late black gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who wrote in 1970 that simply belabouring the heads of the majority for their (or their forebears’) sins “can never produce anything politically creative. It will not improve the lot of the unemployed and the ill-housed. On the other hand it could well happen that the guilty party, in order to lighten his uncomfortable moral burden, will finally begin to rationalise his sins and affirm them as virtues. And by such a process, today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy.” Look, and you can see that process happening all around.
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk Allen Lane £25/Penguin Press $32, 416 pages
The Canceling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us All by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott Allen Lane £25/Simon & Schuster $29.99, 464 pages
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Letters in response to this article:
Cultural appropriation? Dare I say ‘plus ça change’ / From Andrew Stokes, Sai Kung, Hong Kong