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

One of our leading public intellectuals traces the origin of a set of ideas about identity and social justice that is rapidly transforming America—and explains why it will fail to accomplish its noble goals

For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.

But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology that wants to put each citizen’s matrix of identities at the very center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It denies that members of different groups can truly understand each other. It vilifies most forms of mutual influence as “cultural appropriation.” And it increasingly wants to make the way that governments treat their citizens depend on the color of their skin.

This, Yascha Mounk argues, is The Identity Trap. Though the proponents of these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve the progress towards genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn how dangerous right-wing populists are to American democracy. But, he argues, those on the left and in the mainstream who have fallen into the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.

In The Identity Trap, Mounk builds on his training in philosophy, intellectual history, and comparative politics to provide the most ambitious account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become extremely influential around the world. He is the first to explain how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, the media, and the nonprofit sector by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive. And he ends on a passionate plea for how universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality.

The Identity Trap helps to explain the huge political transformations of the past decade, and Yascha Mounk is exactly the truth-telling friend that opponents of the far right need to succeed.  It should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand America, and the world, in 2023.