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

An excellent look at how the concept of identity fails to create equality or equity, and also how it fails to meet basic standards of evidence. The history of the identity movement is discussed in enough detail without jargon, and the philosophical underpinnings of the movement also, that the average reader should be able to follow without problem. The author discusses critical race theory, gender transition, and some of the later versions of feminism, with greatest focus on CRT. He shows how the movement toward identity is working against a more just world, and dividing us along lines that may not be valid markers of who we really are. The only beef I have with this book is the constant use of 'gender' for 'sex'; while many people show more conflate them, they don't mean the same thing, and in this context, that needs to be clarified. The squeamishness of Americans has led to a misunderstanding of what people are saying when they talk about gender, allowing the identity movement to coopt the word and use it, like Humpty Dumpty, in any way they want. Otherwise, highly recommended. show less

Yascha Mounk is an academic. He identifies his views as liberal in the philosophal sense of following the principles of liberal European Enlightment thinkers.
As a student of the history of ideas, Mounk discusses the subject of the views of "woke" modern progressives in The Identity Trap as the "identity synthesis". The reviewer at Publisher's Weekly summarizes the synthesis as "an antiliberal, censorious, segregationist dogma on college campuses and online in the early 2000s ... [an] “ideology” [that] went mainstream in the mid-2010s, especially in medicine and education, where institutions began to adopt theoretical frameworks under which it was believed the best way to achieve equity for students and patients was not to treat show more everyone equally, but to offer “preferential treatment” and exclusionary experiences to members of marginalized groups."
The book contains a reasonable history of the adoption of critical theory and postmodernism in American institutions public life. Mounk is not able to explain how or why those ideas became associated with the American egalitian/populist politics of doubting businesses, institutions, authority and "elites" and praising tradition, folk wisdom, and the wisdom of crowd (and mobs) of "common" people. show less