Yascha Mounk: ‘The Left is rebranding free speech as Right-wing’

Britain is once again roiled by identity politics. The streets are taken over most weekends by hundreds of thousands baying – ostensibly – for the rights of Palestinians, though in the wake of the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, many protesters seem primarily concerned with celebrating Hamas’s mass pogrom. 

Much of the animus for these marches comes from Muslims, but the marchers’ confidence and respectability is ensured by mass support from the woke Left of all colours and creeds. The question, therefore, of how the Left came to be not defenders of Jews, but cheerleaders for their destruction, is a pertinent one. So was the problem of their destructive impulses – which included rioting, vandalising and looting (including of Jewish businesses) – following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. 

What has gone wrong? This is what Yascha Mounk, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, contributing editor of the Atlantic, and founder of earnest opinion website Persuasion, is aiming to explain in his latest book, The Identity Trap. 

In it, the 41-year-old offers a broad history of a Marxist political tradition that became rudderless after the collapse of Communism, and which, disillusioned, turned against “grand narratives” of any kind, including those required to strive for a better world. 

Mounk traces the seismic impact of several intellectuals of the post-war period, most powerfully Michel Foucault and “a small cohort of French philosophers”, and a handful of postcolonial theorists, including Gayatri Spivak and the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, to offer an intellectual history of identity politics and the move away from universal values of freedom. 

The focus on group identity instead of values has fostered tribal hostilities, and gave the green light to authoritarianism and persistent pessimism. It has also eroded freedom of speech and the very idea of truth and fact in schools, in the police, and elsewhere.

One of the most troubling themes Mounk brings out in the “identity trap” is that there is now “an allergic reaction to talking about progress” at all, because progress is seen as a form of “quietism”.

It can seem, says Mounk, that when one talks about progress one is really saying: “Those things have gotten better [so] don’t worry about the problems. But that’s not the point. If you want to understand how to make progress, you have to understand how we’ve made progress in the past. 

“And so if you falsely come to the impression that we haven’t ever made any progress, then the logical solution is to say, let’s burn it all down. If it were true that Britain or the United States today are as racist as in 1850, then that would be a pretty strong case for burning down our institutions and then throwing liberalism in the rubbish heap. 

“But that just is historically absurd. It is patently untrue when you look at the median income of African Americans today compared to 50 years ago, when you look at the British Cabinet today as compared to 50 years ago. And so I insist on pointing out that progress because it’s the best guide for how we can continue to improve society.”

Mounk is a respected commentator, with a degree in history from Trinity College Cambridge – where our paths crossed – and a PhD at Harvard examining the role of personal responsibility in politics and philosophy. He is said to be Barack Obama’s “favourite thinker”.

Yet more than prestigious degrees, affiliations and endorsements it’s Mounk’s family history that gives him a meaningful background for defending liberal-Left ideals. All four of his grandparents, originating in the shtetls of Poland and Ukraine, were sent to prison for their Communist beliefs in the 1920s and 1930s. 

They survived the Holocaust “by going east to the Soviet Union. Obviously many people died in the Soviet Union as well, including by being murdered by the Communists. My maternal grandmother, as it happens, survived in Gori, which is the town in Georgia, where if you remember your history, Joseph Stalin came from.” 

His mother grew up in Warsaw until, “in 1968, 1969” a state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign meant that one day she turned up at the music school, where she was studying piano, to discover signs saying that the Gottliebs (her family name) and the few other Jewish students enrolled there ought to leave with their families and go to Israel.

His maternal grandfather was the technical director of the state printing company. The family, having given up their Polish passports, were now stateless and travelled to Vienna while awaiting visas for other destinations.

“My uncle and grandmother eventually ended up in Sweden, my mother and grandfather in Germany. On my father’s side people wound up in Denmark and the United States.” Mounk’s mother, Alicja Mounk, moved to Germany to study sound engineering at the music university in Detmold, then switched to study conducting, becoming the first female conductor of an opera house in Germany. 

Mounk, born in Munich, has a half-brother on his father’s side, and lived all round the country; his 2014 book, Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, was about the oddness of growing up caught between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism.

I can’t help but note that the post-war state-sponsored expulsion of Jews from Poland, after so much trauma, is yet another chapter in Jewish history most people ignore. “Historians of Central Europe are well aware of the fact, but it’s not something that most educated people, probably not even most educated Jews, know about,” notes Mounk. 

“And, you know, you saw [mass outbreaks of anti-Semitism] in the Soviet Union at every moment of insecurity, uncertainty. In the last years of the Stalin regime. You also saw it around the end of the Soviet Union, 1990. You saw it in Poland in 1968. This is one of the reasons why I ended up studying history, because if you grow up in a kind of suburb in the United States, you might think that history is an abstract thing that hasn’t shaped your life because, you know, perhaps your parents, grandparents, great grandparents have lived in the same place for hundreds of years. Growing up, my family, it was just being in the wrong place at the wrong time for many generations. The idea that your life might be shaped by history was not abstract.”

Mounk is the third big name to explore the topic in recent years, trailing Columbia professor John McWhorter’s brilliant polemic Woke Racism and biotech tycoon turned presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy’s clever Woke Capitalism. I wondered if his somewhat jargon-heavy book might be a struggle for even his most ardent followers; at the core of his argument is the deeply unsexy term “identity synthesis”. 

But Mounk doesn’t mind being unsexy, or eschewing polemic and, after three calls over Zoom, I was convinced he has done something valuable if old-fashioned. 

Mounk was flying back to DC from a Faith Angle conference for journalists interested in religion in Nice, bouncing from hotel rooms to airline lounges and, eventually, across the Atlantic, his local bookshop cafe. Dressed casually in a plain button-up shirt, he looked fresh and rosy-cheeked throughout, not much different from the frenetic long-haired undergraduate I remember.

Based in Washington, Mounk is single; his book is dedicated to his mother. He is clearly thick-skinned – he’s had some vicious, sneering reviews from the Guardian and New York Times (he says he was merely disappointed by a “lack of substantive engagement” from the Left) and appears at ease with his mission, buzzwords be damned. 

“It is in my job and my skills [to be] somebody who can think carefully about the world and make interesting arguments about it, that hopefully turn out to be true. And that’s what I’m going to continue doing. And, you know, if there’s no demand for that at all anymore, then I guess I’ll just, you know, become an artisan candle maker in a world of electric light bulbs.”

I ask him if his persistence in “taking ideas seriously” will really make a difference in a world governed by the frenetic and fragmentary electric shocks of social media. What role for “A story of ideas and power in our time”, as the subhead of his book goes, amid viral TikTok, YouTube clips and furious posts? “You know, in the end, good arguments are still winning a lot of people. There are some extreme ideologues in various corners of our political life… But I think actually most citizens are reasonable people who don’t think about politics terribly hard most of the time, but who have decent moral instincts and who are swayed by people who make sense.” 

I’m not sure about this, given the mass popularity of Donald Trump, an indefensible choice for the leader of the free world, but Mounk is right that even ideas generated by elites can reach people through the “trickle-down” mechanics of podcasts, articles, discourse. Dumbing down is not always better. 

Still, I’d have imagined next to the likes of McWhorter’s devourable, demotic bestseller Woke Racism, Mounk’s project would suffer. But Mounk insists he is doing something else entirely. McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics with a column in the New York Times, argues that wokeness is a “religion”; Mounk disagrees. “I think it should be understood and analysed as a political ideology like nationalism or Marxism or, you know, any number of other political ideologies that have proven to be very powerful and transformative in history. 

And that both allows us to understand it better, and puts us in a better position to argue back against it. John’s book has the interesting implication that since we are against religious fanatics, there is no point arguing with them. This is wrong, both because some people have fallen out of the faith, and there’s a lot of people who are tempted by this ideology without having fully embraced it. And I think making an argument to them about why it’s a mistake to go down that rabbit hole is an important thing to do.”

Perhaps. But surely, I put it to Mounk, you can take bad ideas too seriously and end up in a situation where you are trying to engage with terrorists. What about the disturbing behaviour on show at the pro-Palestine marches? Is the way to understand the widespread call among white university students for freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea” – a known chant used by Palestinian Jihad movements – really to look at the impact of the ideas of poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault or postcolonial maven Gayatri Spivak? 

Mounk’s book is good on the role of such intellectuals in creating new Left-wing ideological norms at universities, such as by installing postcolonial theory across arts courses, but isn’t it really a case of being real about something simpler? 

The lure of evil ideas? And the persistent desire since ancient times to legitimise the harming of Jews, a phenomenon the physicist-philosopher David Deutsch calls The Pattern? 

Not quite, to Mounk’s mind. “If you look at the history of a British and American Left, there have been deeply shameful moments, but there has also been a genuine tradition of support for things like free speech; you know, a humanism that has emphasised the importance of each of us, irrespective of the group into which we’re born. And I think that that has been a healthy instinct, and has often contributed to improving society. What’s interesting is the extent to which those on the Left are now explicitly giving up on those values… and rebranding free speech as an exclusively Right-wing or even reactionary value.

“And when it comes to Israel, the history of that is complicated. There was a time in which Israel was a Left-wing cause and Right-wingers were more sceptical of the creation of Israel. And then with American support for Israel, that started to shift. But I do think that the [formerly] humanistic Left would have been able to condemn Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians. 

“It may, on the whole, have been on the Palestinian side. It may have been very critical of Israel, but I do think it would have recognised Hamas as a theocratic, fascist organisation, and it would have been able to mourn the death of babies and grandmothers, the loss of innocent life. It takes the ideological categories of an identity-obsessed ideology that only sees people through whether they are white or people of colour, whether they are colonisers or colonised, to justify what Hamas did.”

I’m still not convinced that this is sufficient for understanding what is going on now on the streets, and ask Mounk if there is not just a more raw acceptability of open anti-Semitism, which has its own distinctive logic and power. “One of the reasons why some people are attracted to this ideology, is that it gives them a highfalutin excuse to hate the Jews,” allows Mounk. 

“I don’t think it makes it irrelevant to understand what the nature of the ideology that is being taught at our universities is in part because I don’t think our universities could teach [explicitly] ‘we should hate Jews’. But ‘here’s the set of conceptual categories that allow you to discount the murder of Jews and so on’ is a [different story].”

Mounk chronicles ideas that leap from Paris to American college campuses, and from there to the world. How did those ideas end up being so pervasive, and in the UK in particular? Why are universities so disposed to gobbling them up? Well, he says, the lefty inclinations of students and intellectual elites is fairly universal and, despite examples of extreme reactionary politics in prewar German universities, tends to stretch back quite a way. 

“What would in the 1920s have been seen as the intellectually exciting project of defending fascism leads to terrible destruction. And what’s left of Right-wing politics is sort of uninspiring. It’s often quite sensible. And a lot of the sort of good things about Europe’s postwar order was built by moderate conservatives like Konrad Adenauer in Germany and Churchill in the United Kingdom. But it’s not sort of intellectually super exciting. 

“I think there is a general intellectual movement which is responding to the ideological vacuum of its day. In Britain, in the United States, the Left was unmoored by the collapse of the Soviet Union. For 100 years, what it was to be on the Left was based on economics rather than culture, but then the prestige of class-based explanations ebbed away throughout the second half of the 20th century then collapsed alongside the Berlin Wall. 

“The second thing is that the United States and other societies did have significant injustices in how they treated minority groups that needed articulation and that allowed for the lure of the identity trap, and the claim that this ideology is the most radical, uncompromising and principled one to remedy injustices. 

“And finally, there are strong intellectual links between English departments or sociology departments in Britain and the United States in particular. They are both now dominated by the influence of postmodern ideas and the structuralist ideas that originated in France.”

Britain, perhaps, retains some distinctive seeds of hope. Mounk recalls how getting into Cambridge as a young German teenager was like “getting into Hogwarts” – it was magical, and the UK held a particular “fascination”. But more importantly, in Cambridge – and in the UK more broadly – he learned how to think critically and irreverently. 

“The idea that the way you gain perspective was to make arguments and to disagree with your teacher respectfully but robustly, that you were treated as an equal in that way, even though, you know, your supervisor might be allowed to walk across the lawn and you might not, or they might go to sort of high tables and you wouldn’t, that, you know, in an academic setting you were treated as equals. That was a revelation.”

“The other thing,” adds Mounk with a twinkle as a student arrives, “is that, you know, I hope I acquired a sense of humour. I think only England can rescue a German, because if Germans go straight from Germany to the United States, Americans can have a good sense of humour, but they are used to dealing with people who are earnest. And so it’s very easy to go to America from an earnest country like Germany and never learn a sense of humour. Whereas in Britain, in order to survive and thrive, you need to acquire a sense of humour. So, I hope that Britain helped me overcome my Germanic humour.”

In the current climate, humour is ever harder to come by – and all the more important.