A Quick Sketch on Some Differences Between the Left and the Center Left

Let me try to state my problem with books like White Rural Rage and the perspective they exemplify. (Nathan Robinson has a good review of the book here and here is another critique from Ryan Zickgraf). Working through such arguments helps to illustrate differences between those on the center-left, including establishment Democrats and even liberals, and those further to the left, such as democratic socialists and left populists.

Here is an overly simple typology to help explain the difference between the center-left (basically the mainstream Democratic Party) and the left:

Center-Left: the main problem in America is Republicans (or conservatives)

Left: the main problem in America is capitalism (or neoliberalism) and empire 

Now in part this simply reflects differences in values. The left critique is more systemic because  those on the left want much more systematic change, whereas those on the center-left basically want Democrats to run things and pass mildly liberal laws. Thus, for Democrats, if they have power, say in a state like Connecticut or a city like New York, well, problem solved. The left, on the contrary, sees Democratic run cities and states as still having massive, structural problems that the Democratic Party is unwilling and unable to resolve. 

Just because the right is usually wrong doesn’t mean the Democrats are correct. America’s cities look nothing like Republican caricatures of them but they do have enormous, unresolved problems and injustices, these just look very different from the claims of the right.

In so far as the center-left has different values and desires from the left you can’t simply say they are “wrong”. After all, they have identified the problem for them—Republican voters and the Republican Party.

But I do think that this is wrong, or misguided, in three key ways, and helps to explain why we should be on the left, not the center-left. 

First, blaming large swathes of voters is strategically stupid. If you want to win over citizens to your perspective, so that they will embrace your values, vote for your party and referenda, and join your organizations, you don’t shit on them and dismiss them as racists, deplorables, rednecks, backward, etc. 

Yes, there are people who have vile racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. views. But many don’t. Many people are persuadable, undecided, simply sit out elections, etc. They aren’t defined by bigotry and can be persuaded (see those who voted Obama, Trump, then Biden). And even those with vile views can change their minds. We should be trying to do this. Changing people’s minds is a fundamental part of democratic politics!

Bernie Sanders embodies this perfectly. He walks into an auditorium at, say Liberty University, recognizes the differences he has with many of the students, and tries to persuade them. To reiterate, this is what politics is all about! 

So, it’s strategically stupid to dismiss millions of citizens as the problem and has made the Democratic Party non-competitive and basically non-existent in many rural and small town areas of the country. Write them off and reap the reward.

Second, it’s not an accurate depiction of how people are. Attitudes aren’t fixed, they change over time and over generations, both among individuals and across society at large. Witness how in a single generation a large majority of Americans went from opposing same-sex marriage to supporting it, to the point now that it is practically mundane in America, 20 years after it was weaponized to turn out conservative voters in 2004. Witness changing attitudes on race, gender relations, etc. These are not fixed. People’s attitudes do change, so writing them off as fixed is simply inaccurate. It is also politically myopic, because going back to the first point, a major part of politics is trying to persuade people to join you and to change what is possible. (Witness another simple example, as Americans have become more pro-choice in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overturned).

Third, it fails to understand the nature of power in America. America is not run by middle class rural whites. Yes, voters matter in a representative democracy, even one as oligarchic as ours. Still, the fact, as political sociologists, scholars of American politics, political theorists, and ordinary citizens all agree on, is that our country is more or less run by a ruling class of political and economic elites. Blaming ordinary voters just doesn’t really get at the problem. The Bernie perspective, which blames the 1%, the corporate oligarchs, and the structures of neoliberal capitalism, is correct as an explanation and touching back on the first two points, more likely to yield fruit, since this perspective can persuade people to join us, change their attitudes, and thus hopefully build a large majority to change the system. 

Thoughts on Biden and the 2024 Election

Basic point. After the 2022 midterms President Biden should have announced that he was not going to seek a second term. When he did not do this party insiders and allies in the public realm should have strongly pressured him to do so. If this did not work prominent contenders should have challenged him in the primary. 

Is this because Biden is bad? No, not particularly. In many respects he has been better than the last two Democratic presidents and his administration has moved in a post-neoliberal direction on a lot of economic issues, while also being reasonably pro-labor, both symbolically and in substance. These are good things. He is unequivocally better than Trump.

He is also incredibly unpopular. Ever since his popularity went south during the summer of 2021 he has been underwater in polls. His approval rating numbers are terrible and he polls badly against Trump in head to head contests. In the best polls he tends to be tied with Trump, both nationally and in key swing states. In the rest he trails, both nationally and in key swing states, and on average he is behind. 

The reason he has a chance to win is because Trump is also incredibly unpopular. Consider these YouGov polls from April 28-30: Biden is 42% favorable and 58% unfavorable in one of them and an insane 39% favorable and 58% unfavorable in the second poll. By comparison Trump’s numbers, though bad, look relatively mild: 45% favorable, 54% unfavorable in one, 44% favorable and 55% unfavorable in another. According to 538, as of May 3rd Trump has less than a 1% lead nationally (it’s about .7%). 

That’s not a big lead and plenty can change in the run-up to an election. But as 2016 demonstrated, when two unpopular candidates run against each other anything can happen. The electoral college is up for grabs and the outcome hinges on the decisions of a tiny number of voters in swing states. That’s pretty risky. (It was hard enough just to win the electoral college in 2020 when Biden was genuinely popular).

Also, consider the fact that overwhelming numbers of voters, nationally and in swing states, in both parties and among independents, consider Biden too old to seek another term. In general, around 75% of voters say that he is too old for another term. That is a devastatingly bad number. The only reason he has any chance is because Trump is also deeply disliked.

So, Biden should have stepped aside, endorsed no one, and let the many eager candidates duke it out in the 2024 primary. Since this did not happen, and indeed none of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph happened, we are left with no good options. 

But running someone, anyone, whose approval ratings aren’t in the 30s seems like the best option at this point. Figuring out the logistics is the hard part.

Review of Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Second Edition. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016)

Ilya Somin is a law professor and a prominent writer on the topic of democracy, ignorance, and knowledge levels among ordinary voters. Put simply, he argues that ordinary voters are largely ignorant of important political facts and that this is problematic for the functioning of representative democracy. I largely disagree. 

I have been reading and reviewing many books in this vein for at least two reasons. One, too few democratic theorists who are supportive of democracy seriously engage with these critics. Hélène Landemore sets a positive example as a contemporary defender of a very hands-on vision of democracy who also engages with the arguments of critics. But I have read many, many works of democratic theory that don’t seem to acknowledge democratic critics like Somin, Brennan, Caplan, and others. Contrary to these works, I want not just to contribute to some insular pro-democracy conversation but to engage with criticisms of democracy, specifically regarding the competence and knowledge of ordinary citizens.

Second, in the manner of John Stuart Mill, ideas can become a dead letter when they don’t engage with criticism. The positive corollary is that ideas are strengthened when they meet their critics head-on. So by engaging with critics like Somin we get a better sense ourselves of democracy’s value and the ability of the demos to be capable, wise participants. The first major work of political theory to defend participatory democracy, Carole Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory, does just this, advocating her position in part through a discussion and rejection of alternative, more elitist views of democracy.

So, in that spirit let’s tackle Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance. In what has become something of a ritual for these types of work, the first chapter covers the obligatory survey results that demonstrate the supposed high levels of ignorance on the part of ordinary voters. Here Somin offers the criticism of voter ignorance that is to be expected from such accounts. He follows this in the next chapter with a thoughtful discussion of several different democratic theories, arguing that voters are not knowledgable enough to live up to the demands of any of these four, very different democratic theories.

Somin defends the claim that voters are rationally ignorant, i.e. he argues that voting as an act doesn’t accomplish much, individual votes aren’t decisive for electoral outcomes, and therefore voters have no incentive to acquire lots of accurate information. In short, if your vote means little and accomplishes less, why bother becoming informed? It would be irrational to spend considerable time and effort to acquire the information and analysis necessary to be a thoughtful voting citizen.

This belief is within the mainstream of rational choice thinking on voting and is perhaps less critical of the voters than a perspective that blames them more fully for their ignorance. Somin, and those like him in effect say, individual votes don’t mean much so people don’t invest much time in making them mean much. They aren’t stupid, they’re simply rationally spending their limited free time on other, more important matters. Thus, representative democracies are plagued by a collective action problem whereby individual ignorance is rational but leads to bad collective outcomes.

Obviously this is not how I see the issue but it is helpful to have someone make the case for this perspective as clearly and persuasively as Somin does. Somin is less critical of democracy than Brennan, for instance (author of Against Democracy). Therefore some of my critique of Brennan and defense of democracy, found in my various blog posts and several books, also applies to Somin but some of it does not.

On to the critical part. There are, as I see it, at least two problems with Somin’s account. First, he says that we need alternative policies to reduce the “harm” caused by voter ignorance and irrationality. But his book fails to demonstrate that such harms exist. He offers the standard survey results on voter ignorance and some suggestions for why this is a problem. That’s it. No real empirical evidence that substantial harms result from this ignorance nor any theoretical arguments that will convince skeptics.

Second, his interpretations of voter ignorance in surveys are contestable. Surveys of both voters and the broader public actually show that majorities correctly answer quite a few factual questions on politics and most other questions see pluralities get the question right. Very few, if any, have majorities get survey answers wrong, although some, like “Who is Chief Justice of Supreme Court?”, might get a majority that doesn’t know the answer. The point is, his interpretation of voter ignorance is very pessimistic, and also fails to show the extremely negative consequences that come from voter ignorance on political survey questions. 

To reiterate, Somin mostly just offers some suggestive ideas and arguments for why this ignorance might be bad. But he also recognizes that, by a wide range of metrics, representative democracies tend to be better than the alternatives. So where is the evidence for the negative impact of this ignorance? Even if liberal representative democracies tend toward oligarchy and have many flaws, they are better places to live than any of the currently institutionalized alternatives in the world.

Not to mention the survey data emphatically do not support his claim that voters are “systematically misinformed.” Simply put, this is an incorrect way to describe a public where either a majority or a plurality can correctly answer most political survey questions.

Why kind of alternative policies might help alleviate the problem of voter ignorance, according to Somin? Somin discusses some possible benefits of having a deliberation day before elections, an idea that several deliberative democratic theorists have proposed. Getting people to participate in talks and informative workshops on a specific public holiday devoted to this task could help reduce ignorance before a big election. True, and he considers some of the logistics involved.

He rejects, if less forcefully than I would, attempts to restrict the franchise. Good! This is the most elitist answer to voter ignorance, one that Brennan openly considers in his Against Democracy. It is vile. Somin also rejects efforts to make government more technocratic by informally empowering the more educated. As he recognizes, turning to rule by the experts, even if in a less extreme form than restricting the franchise, is still anti-democratic. It doesn’t solve democracy’s possible weaknesses so much as replace them with elite rule. In his words, “moreover, resorting to the rule of experts is less an attempt to raise the knowledge levels of voters than an effort to dispense with democratic control of government itself, at least with respect to whatever issues the expert regulators are tasked with deciding,” (pp. 215-216). His discussion of “foot voting” versus ballot box voting is original and has some genuinely interesting ideas, although I would still reject it for reasons not worth delving into here.

To reiterate, the main problem with his account is that Somin never shows how some voter ignorance on survey questions translates into bad outcomes. He doesn’t want to say people are inherently irrational. This is good. He just says that if people are politically ignorant they will be instrumentally irrational, i.e. they won’t be able to get what they want in politics. But he offers little if any evidence to back this up. It is something taken for granted by elitists who lament voter ignorance.

Thankfully, by focusing on instrumental ends, Somin doesn’t make the kinds of elitist judgments that say voters are bad because they want outcomes that he personally thinks are bad. But Somin also doesn’t look at actual policy debacles, like the Iraq War, or the multi-decade deregulation of the economy that led to the 2008 economic crisis, to get insights into how policy decisions were made that most people would agree (at least in retrospect) were bad. In other words, for the stuff that we all agree was bad, how did it happen? The answer sure as hell isn’t due to the ignorance of the ordinary voter. This is a point I develop at much more length in other work. It boils down to the claim that the elites who dominate the political and economic system are primarily responsible for the bad decisions it makes, as they are the ones guiding it.

Thoughts on Patriarchy

Reading Richard Reeves’ thoughtful work on how boys are falling behind in school in America has me reflecting on the changing, and increasingly complex, nature of gender relationships and equality in the USA and similar societies.

The USA, most of Europe, and much of the rest of the world have made massive changes in favor of gender equality in recent decades. What does this mean for second and third wave feminist criticisms of patriarchy? Well, that depends in part on what we mean by the term. Let’s define patriarchy, simply, as systematic inequality for women. This is a simple gloss on a complex topic but it will serve our purposes here. There was indisputably pervasive patriarchy in the USA (and many countries) through the mid-twentieth century. What about since then?

In so far as there is still patriarchy, or enduring and difficult to rid gender inequality, it is more subtle and less extreme than 1950s style patriarchy, or that which endured through the 1970s-1990s. And as women now outperform men on standardized tests and out-graduate men at all levels of education, including BA and PhD programs, things get more complicated. The professional classes, in academia, government, media, and the corporate world, are increasingly women-friendly, increasingly defined by gender parity, and maybe even moving in a direction where they are somewhat dominated by women. So, is there still patriarchy? As I see it, there are three main ways in which women, broadly speaking, are still not equal to men:

1. Partner violence. Men do suffer plenty of violence. But in the US at least, they generally don’t have to fear intimate partner violence. The horrifying reality is that many murders, perhaps approaching half of them in the US, are male partners killing their current or former female partners. This is a nightmarish danger from those supposed to love you that men, generally, don’t have to fear. And that is not counting the physical and emotional toll of domestic abuse that is short of death. This is oppressive. It is unequal for women. (The answer of course is not simple parity. Partner violence is an evil. We need to equalize it in one way only—completely eliminating it for everyone).
2. Domestic work. It has probably become much better than in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when many women first joined the workforce and still did almost all the housework (leading to the idea of the second shift—see Arlie Hochschild’s excellent The Second Shift). But even in the 21st century evidence suggests that women do more domestic work, including chores and child-rearing, than men, even if both work full time. This is more a norm, internalized and enforced in ways subtle and not, than a direct result of laws. And as more women join the professional class we may see the norms of office life, time off, domestic work, parental leave, and so forth slowly change. I hope we are. But this is an obvious case where women are in a worse, unequal position. The best news is that the latest research shows men are doing much more domestic work than they used to but still not an equal amount.
3. Pay and job prospects. Again, as the professional classes come to reach gender parity this may/will recede but women do earn less than men for a variety of reasons. Liberals harp on pay discrimination and conservatives deny the problem, but it is real, just subtle. Women work slightly fewer hours, they tend to take on more part-time jobs because they have assumed more domestic responsibilities, they often can’t commit to higher-pay, higher-hours jobs for these reasons, they miss time and advance more slowly up the ladder once they have kids (the motherhood penalty), and at the lowest end of the economy, some of the worst jobs, like maids, cleaners, and careworkers, are dominated by seriously underpaid and exploited women. So it’s subtle but it ain’t a free choice. Women, writ large, have less power in the labor market than men, although this again seems to be changing as many men struggle to get into or complete college and many women succeed into the professional classes. But ultimately the best answer here has to be not simple gender parity but full equality, i.e. we don’t need more poor men and more women CEOs. What we need, rather, is democratic socialism, where there are no poor people (of any gender), no CEOs, and firms are owned and run by the workers themselves on an equal basis. Otherwise you get lean-in feminism and neoliberal bullshit that sees a female boss as liberating or some confused identity-empowerment perspective where seeing professional women thriving is supposed to be some great gender triumph for poor maids.

To sum up, and briefly setting aside concerns for class, race, and other issues, women have not achieved full equality with men in our society (the same goes in many similar countries) because they are much more likely to experience partner abuse and violence, they do more housework, and they have less power on the labor market. Because our neoliberal polity is so class-stratified, all of these experiences vary widely depending on the people involved, and if or how they are experienced will differ from person to person.

But we are in a strange position. The US (and many other places) has made tremendous progress on gender equality. The reaching of parity in education, the massive role of women sports, broader cultural changes, the role of MeToo in exposing abuses, the slowly percolating changes in gender norms since the 1960s and 1970s— there have been so many contributing factors moving us towards political, cultural, and economic equality. Patriarchy ain’t what it used to be. Indeed, in education there is now a massive gap with boys, not girls, falling behind at every level! This is clearly a new problem and signals we are not in the old world. 

At the same time, key areas of inequality persist between men and women. Call it patriarchy, call it what you will, we still don’t have full gender equality. How to make sense of this world, in which women have not yet reached full equality with men, while at the same time many men are struggling more than women to get educated and employed, is a key challenge for the years ahead. As a final thought it should go without saying that full gender equality is a requirement for those of us on the democratic left.

Review of Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap (New York: Penguin Press, 2023)

Yascha Mounk, an academic and political commentator on the state of democracy, has just written a new book called The Identity Trap. Mounk’s new book wades into the culture wars on issues of identity, group rights, historical oppression, and what too many people refer to as “woke” or “anti-woke”. These last words are thankfully largely absent from the book.

What is really at stake here, in Mounk’s book and for those he engages with, is how to handle the historical legacy of racism in America as it was practiced through chattel slavery, then Jim Crow segregation, and in ongoing problems pertaining to poverty, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Additional concerns include how to assess the fact that American women were de jure and then de facto second-class citizens until arguably sometime in the 1970s, as well as other issues pertaining to homophobia and transphobia. According to Mounk, how these injustices are understood and addressed has changed dramatically in recent decades among those who are left of center.

These are important topics with significant real-world consequences. They deserve to be considered thoughtfully, with empathy and care. The current obsession among right-wing politicians and pundits with denouncing “wokeness’ is a great example of how not to do this. 

A better example is set by Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, who rightly acknowledges that when people and institutions want to address racism, sexism, and other injustices, their hearts are in the right place. We should listen sympathetically before we judge.

And as Mounk notes, the goals of most of the thinkers and activists he discusses are admirable, indeed necessary. It should go without saying that we must have racial equality, gender equality, the ability for people to live openly and equally regardless of sexual orientation, and so on. And it’s hard to capture quantitatively how much things have changed for the better on at least some of these points. When I was a kid growing up in the 1990s “faggot” was still a common slur and insult. I can still hear the common refrains of “that’s so gay” through high school, used as a common criticism of anything considered stupid. 

I’m not saying that things are perfect now. But there truly has been radical change on attitudes towards homosexuality and gay marriage, as well as important legal developments. Not only is gay marriage legally protected throughout the United States but Gallup polls now consistently show more than 70% of Americans support it. Just two decades ago this was considered something of a radical position. Such rapid, welcome change. 

I remember Obama publicly supporting gay marriage during his reelection campaign in 2012 and Republicans criticizing him for adopting this position in order to gain votes with the American public, a claim that would have seemed insane less than ten years prior. 

There have been similar, if uneven, triumphs regarding gender equality. Not only has the gender gap in education been eliminated, it has in recent years been reversed. Women now outperform and out graduate men on virtually every educational metric, from K-12, through college, and even in graduate school. Indeed, places like my own Political Science Department at UC Irvine, which had gender parity among both faculty and graduate students, would have been virtually unheard of a few decades ago. 

None of this is to suggest that these concerns have been resolved. The progress on racial inequality has been more limited although here too there are some positive changes in racial attitudes, with Americans reporting overwhelming popular support for inter-racial marriage, willingness to vote for black politicians, and many gains for black representation in government. 

Again, none of this is anywhere near perfect. Just consider the criminal justice system for a case study in the ongoing, terrifying reality of race and class oppression. But still, popular protests, movements, organizing, etc, have led to dramatic changes in laws, social practices, and attitudes. What we need is neither blind optimism nor dead-end pessimism, but realism regarding the past and present of oppression. In Mounk’s words, “there are many important reasons to gain an accurate view of reality, one that is neither blithely optimistic nor cynically pessimistic. Perhaps the most important is that we need an accurate assessment of recent changes to know whether the tools we have deployed to make progress are working.” (250).

Those of us to Mounk’s left have every reason to be as committed to realism as he is. So where is Mounk coming from and what is he doing? Basically, Mounk is arguing that liberal and leftist thought in recent decades has taken an unproductive turn away from universal claims toward justice and in favor of more identity focused claims about the wrongs suffered by various radically distinct groups, wrongs that the (white, male) majority supposedly cannot understand.

Mounk’s book is more detailed than Neiman’s (which I reviewed in an earlier blog post) and, working with this greater space, he does a better job than Neiman of carefully explaining the ideas of various thinkers concerned with historic injustice, what motivated them, the genuine insights they had, and how some of their ideas have mutated into something that is less helpful, or even counter-productive. His chapter on standpoint epistemology and feminism is a good example of this.

And he does effectively show how too many activists, thinkers, and corporate types have moved away from universal appeals for equality and toward strange claims that essentialize identities and suggest, or outright claim, that Americans are and forever must be divided by our ascriptive traits. This view must be rejected by the left and has more in common with the ethno-nationalism espoused by conservatives like Viktor Orbán than with the ideas of the left.

Some on the left might dismiss Mounk as too establishment. There is truth to this. Indeed, he sees himself as a member of the center-left and uses his connections to talk to the leaders of several non-profits and private firms. But Mounk is respectful of the great historical tradition of leftist political thought, admires the deep concern for injustice that motivated much of the shift toward identity concerns dating back to the 1970s (i.e. the desire to root out racism, sexism, homophobia, etc), and has important insights into how it may have turned into something unhelpful. Mounk also includes an appendix that demonstrates why the identity synthesis is not a form of Marxism, contrary to frequent accusations from the “anti-woke” crowd on the right.

(Other scholars are more critical of the origins of this identity focused thought—the recent collection of works from Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels criticizes even this initial turn toward identity concerns and away from class among thinkers on the left in the 1970s and 1980s).

Having said this, what does this turn toward identity look like, according to Mounk? He calls this shift to focusing on identity the “Identity synthesis.” It has three main components. “First, the key to understanding the world is to examine it through the prism of group identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Second, supposedly universal values and neutral rules merely serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalized. And third, to build a just world, we must adopt norms and laws that explicitly make the way the state treats each citizen—and how citizens treat each other—depend on the identity group to which they belong.” (251). For those interested, chapter 14 discusses each of these components in more detail.

What should we think of these key features of the identity synthesis? For those like myself who are part of the historic democratic socialist left it can be hard to get our heads around these changes. Some subset of thinkers and activists, from center to left, have moved from the desire to unite humans across our differences to a new, frankly weird, ethno-essentialist, tribalized, and balkanized world in which we are fundamentally and permanently defined by our ascriptive identity traits (primarily race, and secondarily gender, sexual orientation, and cis or trans identity).

And boy are there plenty of examples within the corporate world of how these essentialist identity claims can lead to some really weird places in practice. Even Nathan Robinson, who as I mentioned above has been a thoughtful and sympathetic observer of these changes, has referred to many new corporate practices as instances of “neoliberal woke idiocy.” How else to describe highly-paid consultants lecturing highly-paid executives on their “privilege”, by which they mean their whiteness or maleness, not their class position in the process of production? Because to challenge their class position would be to challenge the hierarchal structure of the capitalist firm. On the other hand, asking the CFO or Vice President of Marketing to apologize for their “whiteness” challenges nothing. Which is precisely why many corporations have embraced key elements of the identity synthesis while remaining rabidly hostile to labor unions, firm democratization, and the other key priorities of the left.

Similarly, neoliberalism gives us universities with bloated managerial personnel but faculty consisting mostly of exploited adjuncts. The identity synthesis discussed by Mounk does nothing to change this, other than offering even more incentives for hiring more well-paid administrators. Self-flagellation classes for white members of the managerial class are hardly the most serious problem with neoliberalism. But they aren’t helping. Indeed, the psychology research on group dynamics suggests that the best way to develop solidarity across difference is to bring people together, treat them as equals, and have them work together on a shared project. (A jury is a good example of how this can work well in practice).

I should also say that, although much of Mounk’s criticism is compelling, I still think these practices are less widespread than he alleges. And anecdotes are hardly definitive but I will mention that I experienced little to none of these problematic elements of identity politics in my time as a graduate student and instructor in the University of California system nor during my later time as a faculty member in the Cal State system. Furthermore, we should unequivocally celebrate the fact that key American institutions, from schools to government to much of the private sector have become open socially to historically oppressed groups and those with non-normative identities. 

But these welcome changes don’t help with the longstanding leftist demand to democratize the economy and make it radically more egalitarian. After all, a more diverse Wall Street is still Wall Street. High finance ultimately needs to be radically transformed, not merely diversified. And in some respects, to be detailed below, the identity synthesis may be making this project of collective action on behalf of all workers even more difficult to accomplish.

A world of permanent groups?

There are many important questions that follow from and add to these conversations. Mounk generally handles these topics with care, explaining how, for instance, important insights among feminists about the unique experiences of women contributed to a set of ideas known as standpoint epistemology.This line of feminist thinking, at its best, demonstrated how many women, even in a world of formal equality, were the primary caretakers and child-rearers at home, and that this might have given them an understanding of the world different from men who spent their days at the office and did little domestic work. This is an important insight.

But as Mounk points out, this argument regarding the distinct experiences people may have does not entail that it is impossible for us to understand one another. In his words, “this gives all of us a moral obligation to listen to each other with full attention and an open mind. But the point of this hard work is communication, not deference. As long as we put in the work, we can come to understand each other’s experiences, especially insofar as they are politically relevant.” (144). Indeed, at its best, standpoint feminists argued that women who had experience with domestic work and child-rearing could teach others specific forms of knowledge that they had gained, knowledge missed by those who did not do these tasks. This chapter (8) on How to Understand Each Other is quite good.

The pages ranging from the 130s through the 140s provide a valuable discussion of standpoint epistemology and the powerful insights of earlier feminist theorists on the specific things one can learn from experiences of oppression. (For a good summary see the paragraph on p. 146). Nevertheless, the popularized version of this, which Mounk calls “standpoint theory,” makes much more radical, and less defensible, claims on knowledge, group solidarity, and the ability of humans to understand one another. At its most basic, the popularized version, which predominates today in some activist and corporate circles, claims that we are permanently divided into separate groups that cannot ever fully understand one another. This claim is much stronger, and more problematic, than that made by the initial feminist scholars who Mounk rightly praises. And it seems that many progressives now want to embrace this stronger form of separatism.

Let’s continue with this line of thought. One problematic element of the identity synthesis is what Mounk terms progressive separatism. We could also call it permanent and essentialist ethnic separatism. The basic idea here is that the experiences of oppressed groups are so distinctly unifying for those groups, and so incomprehensible to outsiders (i.e. white people) that these oppressed groups should emphasize and embrace as essential their group identity and largely interact with their own group.

Corporate diversity consulting, from figures like Robin DiAngelo, lays the emphasis on having all groups, including white people, strongly identify with their ascriptive characteristics, especially race or ethnicity, and often then groups them by race into separate, race-specific trainings.

As Mounk rightly asks, “will a greater emphasis on the differences between ethnic groups, or a widespread embrace of “whiteness” really inspire members of dominant groups to make the world more just? Or might the spread of progressive separatism, on the contrary, encourage them to guard their dominant status as best they can?” (190). Yes, exactly.

Constantly insisting on “white” people identifying as white, seeing themselves as a discrete group, and as a group that greatly benefits from this status, is a recipe for Trumpism, not equality or progress, let alone the democratic socialism the genuine left wants.

Telling all white people they benefit from whiteness and that they must abandon this benefit for the sake of other races is the perspective of the Confederacy. I don’t mean to make a cruel or hyperbolic accusation here. What I mean is the following: A society without racism would benefit everybody. We would all benefit, materially and in our interpersonal relationships and day-to-day lives if we lived in a racially equal and more just world. So telling white people they benefit from the unjust status quo and must give up this benefit is both incorrect and strategically foolish.

To claim, as Robin DiAngelo does, or as Isabel Wilkerson does in her well-intentioned but misguided book Caste, that white people as a whole benefit from the status quo is to make the argument that key leaders of the Confederacy made, namely that the entirety of white people in the South constituted an aristocracy that placed them above the black slaves. Even if many of these white people owned little or no property, struggled with poverty or hardship, were barred from voting, etc., they were aristocrats. Racial equality would hurt them. This was the argument of southern plantation elites, ideologues, and politicians.

MLK criticized a later Jim Crow-era version of this argument, made by segregationist defenders of Jim Crow, when he said that to fill the bellies of poor and powerless white southerners, the economic and political elites of the south told these poor whites to “eat” Jim Crow. MLK was criticizing the claim that all whites, no matter how poor or desperate, were part of some racial aristocracy.

Of course the key difference is that the proponents of progressive separatism tell whites to cast off this privilege, whereas the defenders of the Confederacy, and later Jim Crow, told whites to cling jealously to their status. 

And this matters. The progressive separatists want to eliminate racial inequality, a deeply admirable goal. But they are embracing the same framing as that of slaveholders and segregationists! And these defenders of slavery and segregation were not simply morally vile, their very framing of the issue was wrong. 

Telling whites they are an essentialist tribal group in a zero-sum competition for status with other tribes is, in the 2020s, the language and framing of the Le Pens of the world. It drives those who identify as white into the arms of the far right. As Mounk argues, “instead of encouraging citizens of diverse democracies to reconceptualize themselves as part of a broader whole, progressive separatism encourages them to see each other as members of mutually irreconcilable groups.” (193).

What is this likely to lead to? Well, zero-sum intergroup competition. Again, Mounk: “social psychology also suggests that it is very rare for people to act against the interests of what they regard as the most salient group to which they belong.” (198). An ever-growing emphasis on whiteness doesn’t produce allies, it produces Trump voters.

As a concluding rejection of the identity synthesis, I leave with Mounk’s words: “At the heart of its vision stands an acceptance of the enduring importance of dubious categories like race. It tries to sell people on a future in which people will forever be defined by the identity groups to which they belong; in which different communities will always be mired in zero-sum competition; and in which the way we treat each other will forever depend on our respective skin colors and sexual proclivities.” (262).

No, thanks. 

Is Mounk’s criticism of the identity synthesis overstated? Sometimes. But he clearly identifies genuine problems with some of the most influential ways of thinking about identity and injustice today, especially regarding progressive separatism.

Racism and sexism are monstrous evils. The identity synthesis, however, is not the best way to confront and eventually defeat them. Ultimately, the best hope for the left, both to persuade people and to enact dramatic structural change, lies in the universal, enlightenment-inspired leftism articulated by people from Martin Luther King, Jr to Noam Chomsky. We’re all human beings.