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.

Review of Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore, Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Debating Democracy is part of a book series that features a debate between two prominent authors on a key issue. The book consists of an initial, lengthy essay from each author articulating their view and then concludes with a shorter, rebuttal essay from each author in which they address some of the points of their interlocutor. 

In this case prominent political theorists Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore debate questions relating to knowledge and democracy, a subfield that is now commonly referred to as epistemic democracy. Put simply, the book is very engaging and both are forceful proponents of their perspectives. I have regularly referenced both of them in several books.

In terms of the debate, Brennan argues that ordinary citizens in a democracy like the United States are relatively ignorant and incompetent, whereas Landemore argues the opposite. Each of them have expressed their perspectives in more detail in other, longer works, such as Brennan’s Against Democracy and Landemore’s Democratic Reason.

To begin, Brennan runs through the standard litany of complaints against democracy. Namely, voters are deeply ignorant of policy specifics and they are not instrumentally rational in pursuing what they want politically. Brennan does not think that people are inherently irrational but rather because many people are politically ignorant, this leads to behavior that he sees as irrational.

Some thoughts: As I’ve argued before, the first point just isn’t that interesting. Why are Americans ignorant on many specifics? Does this matter? These questions are basically  unanswered and we are left wondering, as Page and Shapiro do in The Rational Public, why should we care? For instance, being able to name the nine Supreme Court justices sounds like a trivia question. What do questions like this tell us? Do they indicate or correlate with anything important? As Landemore later says, these questions regarding the “inputs” into the political system don’t necessarily tell us much about how real world democracies operate.

The rationality part is harder to justify for Brennan. He provides a few selective samples but there is probably more information against his perspective. People do indeed turn up and vote for candidates, parties, and causes they believe in and care about. Abramowitz provides good evidence on this point in The Great Alignment. Brennan also frequently cites polls of Americans to indicate that voters are ignorant but we must distinguish between these two different groups, voters versus the broader American public. Voters in general are more educated, wealthier, and more informed than non-voters. And again, Brennan’s presentation of evidence is selective. There is much evidence that voters are instrumentally rational in their political behavior—one would not have to look too hard to write an updated version of Page and Shapiro's book on the rational political behavior of the public.

For instance, consider that voters will defy partisan perspectives to vote for specific issues that they believe in, such as when voters in heavily Republican states pass referenda raising the minimum wage or when voters in heavily Democratic states pass referenda limiting affirmative action. In each case voters defy elites from their own parties to pick out and pass specific policies that they believe in. This is also why Democrats are currently trying to use referenda to legalize abortion in red states. Because even in states where Republican elected officials are popular, severe abortion restrictions usually are not. 

Brennan points to evidence from Caplan and many others that more educated voters have different opinions from less educated voters on many issues. I think this sounds like a good and obvious case for universal suffrage, so that all perspectives are represented. Landemore later makes a similar point. After all, I and most non-economists disagree with many of the predominant opinions of professional economists. We precisely don’t want only their opinions represented politically. We think they are wrong.

This takes us to the following point. All of Brennan’s proposed reforms here, in Against Democracy, and elsewhere, are designed to increase the political power of the most informed people (and hence, most educated, credentialed, highest income/wealth, status, and generally higher SES). But the empirical research, and a good amount of theoretical research as well, suggests that these people already have far more power than anyone else. The ultra rich, and secondarily the professional classes, basically run the political system and dominate the upper reaches of the economy. Why, precisely, must they be more empowered? Isn’t it possible, in fact, that their disproportionate power is part of the problem? Contra Brennan, I argue in Does Democracy Have a Future? that we already have a de facto version of Brennan’s desired polity. And it ain’t pretty. Landemore also makes a roughly similar point.

But what about the claim that voters care more about identity than policy? If voters act largely on group identity because of tribalistic motivations, why does this entail we should make America less democratic? Why would this entail, as Brennan suggests, that some people should not be able to vote? Katherine Cramer examines the role of identity in Wisconsin politics without coming to any elitist conclusions in The Politics of Resentment. Even Achen and Bartels’ book Democracy for Realists, which stresses the role of identity and offers an elitist perspective, does not suggest we should disenfranchise anyone just because the role of identity is larger than policy preference with regard to political behavior.

Brennan’s discussion of the Iceland model that Landemore focuses on is not very compelling. To only simplify slightly, he says that the Iceland example of direct democracy is not a good example because Icelandic voters did not pick the freedom of religion principle that he would want. He also assumes, without argument, that there are correct answers to all important political questions. But as I ask in my work, are there? Many questions are political, and precisely of concern for the entire public, because they don’t have independent, correct answers. This overlaps with ideas on democracy found in Wolin, Pateman, Barber, Young, Mouffe, Rancière, and elsewhere. 

Taking a different but related tack, Estlund also challenges Brennan’s assumption. Maybe there are correct political answers but who can identify them? Who gets to decide? As he says, who made you boss? Why should I accept that Brennan, or other intellectual elites, or economic or political elites, have the “correct” answers to questions that concern fundamental issues of identity, values, purpose, and meaning? Sure, it takes years of study to become an expert on East Asian politics but how does this give one insight into the “correct” answer of whether we should go to war with North Korea?

Both authors discuss ways to answer these questions. One is to divide possible perspectives into two camps: epistemic democrats versus proceduralist democrats: This is too neat of a distinction, first off. But in simple form it means the following: Epistemic democrats defend democracy because majority rule tends to produce the correct, or best outcomes. Proceduralist democrats defend democracy as a decision-making procedure that, when properly enacted, by definition produces the best results. They appeal to no outside, independent standard of right or wrong.

Now, pure proceduralism can’t be correct. If a democratic assembly decides to commit genocide, or invade another country, this is wrong, regardless of whether they adhered to proper democratic procedure. (I suppose they could respond by saying that proper democratic procedures would never yield such a terrible outcome, but this seems a cheat. It defines away the problem by saying real democracy will never do anything bad and it also violates its proceduralist commitments by appealing to an outside standard of good or bad).

But this does not mean we should become pure epistemic democrats. Elite thinkers like Brennan, Caplan, Achen, and Bartels assume that most, or perhaps all, political questions have independent, objective, correct answers (or at the bare minimum, better or worse answers. But at many points they appeal to explicitly independent standards to judge if political decisions were correct, right, false, and so on). But they simply assume the existence of such standards. Why? What is the metaphysical status of such political standards? And how can we identify them? Who is capable of identifying them? As Estlund says, who made you boss? For instance, why should I accept Brennan’s account of “correct” political decisions? Or the broader professional classes’ definition of “correct” political decisions? Or the wealthiest one percent? There is no agreed upon answer for most political questions which is why we must turn to everyone to produce a collective answer, one that doesn’t exist before the demos in effect creates it. This is what it means to be a political question!

Rather than identifying with either the epistemic democrat or the procedural democrat, I would defend something in between the two. I see Estlund as doing something like this. Maybe 80% proceduralist, 20% epistemic. What would this look like? On some moral issues there are answers we can clearly identify (clear to identify because there is almost universal agreement). Genocide, invading another country, persecution of political dissidents, institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. These are wrong. In many respects one could look at the various international agreements that defined the post-World War 2 era for a sense of which things are universally prohibited. So these are independent standards. A government, no matter how democratic or otherwise admirable, can never rightly do these things. As for everything else…

As Benjamin Barber argues, the realm of politics emerges precisely in those areas where we don’t have clear answers, where math, science, logic, philosophy, common sense, and so on do not yield widely shared answers. Politics emerges precisely when we have to come together and make decisions on issues for which we do not all agree. And on almost all these issues it is up to whatever that particular group of democratic citizens wants. These are questions of group identity, values, future direction, purpose, weighing of competing interests and perspectives, and so on, which don’t have identifiable objective standards or right answers, save for the small number of wrongs that are barred. Other than that, groups of people can do as they wish. 

There is a similar analogy here to being an adult. There are some things I cannot do or be while continuing to be a decent person (i.e. I cannot be a serial killer or rapist). But there are an infinite number of lives I might choose to live while continuing to be an admirable person. That is precisely what it means to be an adult. I get to decide and in many respects the right answer for how to live my life is whatever life sounds best to me. As much as it may bother Brennan, this is what many democratic decisions are like.

So again, for Brennan et al, they see politics like Plato does, as a domain of knowledge that is not really distinct from chemistry, engineering, etc. It has correct, objective, knowable answers that can be ascertained through expertise. The problem, again, is that they don’t address or justify this assumption so much as assume it. But this framing does help to explain some of the differences in perspective and intuition between epistocrats (i.e. those like Brennan, who believe that the knowledgable should rule) and democrats (who believe that the people in their entirety should rule). Epistocrats see the political world as Plato does, democrats see it as Protagoras does (i.e. it is a domain of action and values, not specialized knowledge). As Landemore says, reflecting the democratic view, political leadership is about moral vision, not specialized knowledge.

And as Estlund argues, who is to identify the correct standards? Plato’s philosopher kings? Brennan? Political scientists? Harvard grads? Those who can pass a political knowledge quiz, as Brennan suggests? But this still leads to the follow-up question—why should we assume this subset of “enlightened” citizens will produce better results? And who will decide that their results are better? There are no universally shared standards to identify if the policies enacted by a participatory democracy, a representative democracy, a Brennan-style epistocracy, and a military dictatorship are better or worse, save for the limited set of abuses that are off-limits (and prohibited by various international agreements—the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and so on spell out things such as torture, genocide, and aggressive war that are banned).

Some closing notes. Landemore operates with a good definition of politics: “the pursuit of the common good under conditions of uncertainty.” (page 143). With this in mind, let’s consider a few more points.

Landemore argues, and I agree, that Brennan’s empirical claims are less compelling when applied to real world democracies today. First, by Brennan’s own standards, democracies perform better than alternative regimes. Why is this? Given his belief in this claim, why is he skeptical of democracy? Brennan doesn’t offer a compelling answer to these questions, though he suggests that democracies of the world do better because they are not fully democratic and retain elitist elements. But this entails two follow-up questions: One, if this is so, shouldn’t more purely elitist regimes, such as Singapore (or perhaps China) perform even better? If not, why not? And second, if actual democracies such as the United States retain many elitist and oligarchic elements, isn’t it possible that their flaws and mistakes (whatever these may be) are also caused by the elites who dominate these societies, rather than the masses? But Brennan cannot dwell on this point for too long or it would undo the justification for his entire theory. If democracies are not run by the people then it does not really matter if the people are ignorant, for they do not have political power. Their ignorance would, in effect, have no efficacy. But to concede this would be to move more in the direction of Landemore and me—that problems in countries like the US largely result from elite dominance and might be  resolved through more democracy.

Let me conclude by quoting Landemore at more length on the real world of politics, which is defined by uncertainty. “Uncertainty means that we cannot fully anticipate what the future will be like, whether in the short term or the long term, and whether, in particular, it will be sufficiently like the past (the way, say, business cycles may repeat familiar patterns) or different in radically new ways (as when a pandemic, a war, or a climate emergency suddenly complicate familiar political questions in unpredictable ways). As a result, no one person or group of persons can be trusted to have the relevant knowledge or skills that make them the superior decision-makers in every situation, and it becomes rational to follow instead a simple heuristic that distributes power over the entire group: give everyone the same participation rights in the decision-making process.” (162-163).

As she rightly argues, “by contrast, small oligarchies of “knowers” may be more prone to group think, especially if they don’t have to be accountable to a large, critical, and diverse society.” (175). 

What this entails is a perspective on democracy, politics, and knowledge that is defined by humility and openness: “Political knowledge is a living thing and comes in various guises. We should be humble about who has it and about the possibility of defining or identifying it ex ante.” (p. 207).

Inflection Points

There are certain events which serve to clarify political cleavages and fault lines. We are witnessing one right now in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. And it is worth considering. When she was elected in 2018, AOC said that she and others like her on the left were not really Democrats—they had a fundamentally different worldview from the Democratic Party establishment and in a multi-party system they would be a completely different Party. This is true.

Let’s ponder a few of these inflection points because they help to show how those of us on the left have a fundamentally different worldview from the Democratic Party. We are not and have never been Democrats. (I may write a political theory follow-up that explains in more detail why these fundamental differences exist).

Signature Clinton 90s bills.The move to the center championed by President Clinton, the DLC, and the “new Democrats” was an inflection point that strongly divided the left from the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Clinton, working with Democrats and Republicans, signed into law welfare reform that transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), repealed the Glass-Steagall banking regulations, enacted a large crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration, and signed into law NAFTA. Each of these was supported by Republicans, mainstream Democrats, and opposed by those on the left. Clinton’s policies contributed to three million disillusioned people, mostly on the left, voting for Ralph Nader in 2000.

Iraq 2003. There is no greater litmus test. It split the Democratic Party nearly down the middle, with a slight majority of Senate Democrats supporting the Iraq War vote and a slight majority of House Democrats opposing it. It remains a fundamental dividing line to this day between, on the one hand, leftist independents and left-leaning Democrats, and, on the other, the establishment center of the Party. It was still a consideration when those of us on the left supported Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Primaries against his rivals, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, each of whom voted in favor of the war.

Signature Obama policies. Contrary to popular perception, Obama did not sign the Wall Street bailout into law, which was signed by Bush. But he did inherit about half of the remaining bailout dollars to oversee, which he did while simultaneously offering little mortgage relief to the millions of families losing their homes. Other dividing lines? No prosecution of Wall Street crimes, a decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, and the use of endless drone strikes. Those of us on the left welcomed Obama’s unwillingness to fully invade any new countries and his determination not to create another Iraq debacle. But by celebrating and expanding the fight in Afghanistan as the “good” war, he did not do nearly enough to draw down the forever wars. Still, he was clearly better than Clinton and Bush.

The Saudi War on Yemen. Virtually unmentioned in the mainstream press, Saudi Arabia has been waging a vicious war against Yemen since 2015. Some combination of indiscriminate airstrikes and subsequent humanitarian catastrophe has led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and an ongoing Cholera outbreak. All of this has been rather unquestioningly supported, through the provision of intelligence and weapons, by the United States under Obama and Trump (no surprise). Only the left has documented these crimes, called for an end to US support, and called directly on Saudi Arabia to end its murderous war.

Biden’s Foreign Policy. First, the good news. Under Biden the US has stopped supporting offensive Saudi operations in Yemen. The mass drone strikes of the Obama and Trump years are down considerably. And the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, however poorly executed, was long-overdue. Due to changing circumstances, popular pressure from the left, and distaste for the forever wars across the political spectrum, Biden has been a better president than Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Trump. At least that was the case.

In the wake of the brutal terrorist attack from Hamas, it is easy to give in to calls for revenge. Israel’s President and Defense Minister have openly dehumanized Palestinian civilians and called for war crimes. What has Biden done? Pledge unwavering support for Israel as its government calls for and systematically commits war crimes in Gaza (and in the West Bank, where soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian civilians with such routine occurrence that it is simply a daily fact of life).

This is unjust and it is wrong. Nothing can justify the mass slaughter of civilians. No past injustice can justify what Hamas is doing. And nothing can justify what the Israeli military is now doing.

Where We Stand Today. Rather than a few differences here and there, these are some of the most important issues and votes of the past thirty years. Indeed, the Iraq war vote was probably the most important vote of the 21st century. When around half of the Democrats heroically voted against it, one could argue that there was room for the left within the Democratic Party. 

When it comes to unconditional support for the war crimes of the Israeli military, however, the Biden administration and Democratic members of Congress are making it clear that those calling for peace are an isolated, fundamentally distinct minority. Thirteen Democrats signed onto the recent call for a ceasefire in the House of Representatives. Thirteen out of more than 200. The overwhelming majority of Democrats have joined all Republicans in pledging unconditional support for war crimes.

This is reflected in the media as well. The left, both longstanding magazines like The Nation and the Progressive, as well as newer places of analysis such as Jacobin and Current Affairs, have uniformly condemned the terrorism of Hamas while also condemning the massive and ongoing war crimes of the Israeli government, which as of October 16 had killed more than 800 Palestinian children in Gaza. They also all correctly call for an immediate ceasefire. 

Meanwhile, the right-wing media, no surprise, demands retribution, violence, and even borderline calls for genocide. Where do the centrist and establishment media stand? Basically next to those on the right. NBC coverage of the conflict looks like a press release for Netanyahu, while the morning rundown (October 17) from the New York Times reads like a press release for the Biden administration and its support for Israel’s ongoing war. The framing of support simply varies from bloodthirsty calls for revenge (Fox) to dispassionate necessity (New York Times). 

But when you systematically target civilians and their homes, schools, roads, and hospitals, it matters not what you say but what you do. Does anyone care about the Hamas justification for its mass murder of Israelis? Of course not, because nothing can justify it. And nothing can justify the hell that the Israeli military is raining down on Gaza.

This is where we are today. Almost the entire Democratic Party is joining an increasingly right-wing Republican Party in professing unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which features a daily raft of well-documented war crimes.

And a small minority on the left are calling for peace. This is a reminder. Don’t call us Democrats. In place of endless recriminations, war crimes on both sides, and dead bodies, those of us on the left call for a ceasefire. We call for peace.