TRIGGERnometry - Can Democracy Survive Identity Politics？ With Yascha Mounk

00:00:00.000 What becomes dangerous is if, you know, the person who I agree with politically also has

00:00:05.620 the same ethnicity as me, also goes to the same church as me, also is part of the same

00:00:09.920 little league team as me, and the outsider, the person who I distrust, is just a stranger

00:00:15.700 in all realms of life, because then it becomes easy to actually vilify them to such an extent

00:00:20.660 that they're capable of doing terrible things to them.

00:00:30.000 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:34.700 I'm Constantine Kishan.

00:00:35.900 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:41.460 Our brilliant guest today is a political scientist whose latest book is called The Great Experiment,

00:00:46.740 Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. Yasha Monk, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:52.160 Thanks so much for having me on.

00:00:54.020 It's a real pleasure to have you on. You and I have been messaging back and forth for years now,

00:00:58.800 trying to get you on the show. I'm pleased that we can do this now with your book coming

00:01:03.520 out, which Francis and I both really enjoyed. Before we talk about it and the case you make

00:01:08.180 in the book, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are, what

00:01:13.040 has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:17.000 Great. Yeah, I think we have probably, we haven't talked about this, a somewhat similar background.

00:01:21.400 My grandparents originally are from, were born in Lviv in Colomere in what's now the western

00:01:28.020 part of Ukraine. They ended up, were Jewish, they ended up surviving the Holocaust in the

00:01:35.780 Soviet Union actually, went to Poland in hopes of, you know, building up a better political

00:01:42.320 regime. They were ardent communists. They realized that the hopes were misplaced and were in fact

00:01:47.300 thrown out of the communist regime in 1968. And so I ended up growing up a little strangely

00:01:53.200 in Germany. And then went to, went to university in England, spent, spent a few very nice years

00:01:59.720 there before coming to the United States for grad school. And so now I've been living in America

00:02:04.040 for, you know, about 12, 15 years. And my intellectual journey is that, you know, I thought I would

00:02:09.500 do various things, but I'd do theater and a bunch of different things. But in the end, I sort of got

00:02:13.240 stuck on, on writing and academia. And when I was a grad student in political science,

00:02:17.960 I was surprised to hear the consensus in the field being that certain countries in the world just

00:02:27.840 have these very stable democratic institutions, these very stable democratic systems. So we don't

00:02:32.060 have to worry at all about how democracy will play out in countries like Britain, like the United States,

00:02:37.620 like Germany. And perhaps in part informed by the history of my family, I thought, hey, I've seen a

00:02:43.560 couple of big historical surprises. And I'm not so sure that's true. And so I started to warn about

00:02:50.140 some of the threats to our democracy. And that's sort of how I made my name. And so my last book was

00:02:57.200 called The People vs. Democracy. And it was about the threat of authoritarianism and populists on the

00:03:03.100 right and also on the left. And this book is really trying to think about, you know, I think one of the

00:03:09.280 things that is making this political moment so fraud, which is how do we build these deeply

00:03:14.400 ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that treat the members fairly without falling apart,

00:03:20.260 without fragmenting, without making everything about group identity, without oppressing some

00:03:25.400 people in terrible ways. So that's where I'm at. Well, it's a really interesting book, and I want to

00:03:30.720 delve into it. But before that, can we talk a little bit about history? Because it seems to me,

00:03:35.540 and I'm welcome being corrected on this, that the experiment that we are conducting in the West

00:03:41.840 is an experiment, and it is unique in terms of human history. Historically speaking,

00:03:47.040 my understanding is generally, even multi-ethnic empires, whether that was the Ottomans or the

00:03:51.820 Russian Empire, there was, you know, various Chinese empires, they tended to be a primary ethnic group

00:03:57.340 that was considered superior, and all the others would be some form of second-class citizens,

00:04:02.660 that they wouldn't necessarily be persecuted, but they would have reduced rights, or they would

00:04:07.820 have to pay special kind of tax or something. How unique is the sort of multi-ethnic, quote-unquote,

00:04:14.540 multicultural societies that we are now experimenting with in the West?

00:04:19.360 Yeah, so this is one of the things that I, you know, had a sense of before writing the book,

00:04:22.860 but researched much more deeply as I was preparing to write it. And, you know, historical precedents

00:04:29.000 are not good. You see that a lot of the worst conflicts in human history pit these different

00:04:36.280 ethnic, religious, cultural, sometimes national groups against each other. Not every big crime in

00:04:42.500 history is along those lines, but most of the big crimes in history, most of the wars and civil wars

00:04:47.120 and genocides and forms of ethnic cleansing do pit one group against another in that kind of way.

00:04:54.380 And the history of democracy is not great either, because actually most democracies in the history

00:04:59.920 of the world have either prided themselves in the ethnic purity, or at least in the ethnic purity of

00:05:05.300 those who really had something to say. That's true in ancient Athens, in the Roman Republic, in

00:05:11.060 the city-states of medieval Italy. Or like the United States, they were founded at the moment when

00:05:16.860 they really were diverse, but they excluded and oppressed some groups in terrible ways, as was

00:05:24.180 the case, obviously, with slavery. And so, actually, the kind of multi-ethnic empires you're talking

00:05:32.460 about are some of the better examples, are some of the places where people were relatively free to go

00:05:40.400 about the religion. There are places where, for a few centuries at least, these different groups

00:05:45.640 managed to coexist somewhat peacefully. But as you're saying, obviously, there was still one

00:05:51.920 dominant group, and it did have privileges. It did have a lot more standing. There was real

00:05:57.320 restrictions on minority groups. And obviously, we want to live in a democracy. And, you know,

00:06:03.320 paradoxically, the empires made it a little bit easier in one key respect, which is that in an empire,

00:06:08.460 you don't have power, and I don't have power. And so, if your group has more kids, or there's more

00:06:14.280 immigrants that look like you rather than me, it doesn't really change anything. Because, you know,

00:06:18.300 we didn't have power to start off with, and we sort of had to rely on the monarch. In a democracy,

00:06:22.860 you're always looking for a majority. And so, if you feel like, hey, I'm in the majority group,

00:06:26.480 and now suddenly there's these other people coming in, and they're having more kids, and they're

00:06:29.600 growing more quickly than I am, then perhaps they will lose power. So, in certain ways, you know,

00:06:34.860 it's not a coincidence that despite their flaws, some of the countries where the coexistence of

00:06:40.840 these different groups has worked the best, precisely where these big multi-ethnic empires,

00:06:46.560 because in certain respects, absolute rule makes it easier than democracy to sustain that kind of

00:06:52.920 difference. It's a very, very good point. And looking at an empire which has got many diverse people,

00:07:00.780 many diverse cultures into one melting pot, as it were, perfect example is the United States of

00:07:06.580 America. But I would say to you, Jascha, and maybe this is me looking at it from an outside eye,

00:07:12.560 the US seems more divided than ever. Well, it certainly does. And sometimes looking at it,

00:07:18.500 you know, I sort of have two hats, right? I've been living in the United States long enough, but

00:07:21.700 I feel like I'm really in this political discourse. I've become a United States citizen,

00:07:27.520 I've been a citizen now for about five years. But looking at it sometimes from Europe, you do think,

00:07:33.540 wow, I mean, for all of the problems we have in various European countries, just the sheer

00:07:37.560 rancor, the division, the thing that really strikes me, the disdain that people have for each other in

00:07:42.200 this country, the disdain that many of my friends have for average Americans just goes so much deeper

00:07:46.800 and is so much more extreme than what I know from Europe. So I think that's right. But my book is

00:07:53.400 actually quite optimistic. So here's something that I've noticed about the way that people talk about this

00:07:57.120 topic, which is that, look, the fundamental starting point is really tough, right? A lot

00:08:03.120 of the biggest crimes in history pit one group against another, as I said, democracy makes it

00:08:08.080 harder in some ways. There's a third point, which is that humans tend to form groups and then favor

00:08:17.640 the members of the inner group over everybody else. And we tend to think about that as other people

00:08:23.040 doing it. But we all have this instinct. So I'm really struck by the fact that I teach a bunch of

00:08:28.040 kids. I'm a college professor and I have a very diverse student body and they think of themselves

00:08:35.260 as some of the most tolerant people in the world. In some ways, they are quite tolerant and other ways,

00:08:39.260 they're quite intolerant. But, you know, they don't think that they're groupish, right? They don't

00:08:44.420 think that they would ever treat somebody better because they're a member of the same group over

00:08:47.980 somebody else. And I have them play the simple game where I ask them, is a hot dog a sandwich?

00:08:52.980 And they debate that for a little while and they think, what on earth does that have to do with

00:08:55.680 political science? But they also clearly enjoy it. And when I have them play a little group where

00:08:59.400 they have to give people points that they can redeem for a little bit of money. And it turns out

00:09:05.780 that the kids who think that a hot dog is a sandwich start to discriminate against the kids

00:09:10.160 who think that a hot dog is not a sandwich. So a question like that is actually enough to

00:09:14.560 motivate this in-group favoritism mechanism, right? And so you take those three points of

00:09:21.900 difficulties together and you realize that it's really hard to build diverse democracies.

00:09:28.100 And it's not a surprise that we sometimes are divided. It's not a surprise that we have real

00:09:32.140 injustices. But that actually allows you to be a little bit optimistic because then you say,

00:09:36.000 hey, the task that we're trying to accomplish here is really hard. But you know what? When you look,

00:09:41.460 even at a divided country like the United States, we're doing a lot better at it than a lot of other

00:09:46.100 countries around the world. We're doing a lot better at it than so many societies that have

00:09:49.980 failed in history. We're doing a lot better at it than America did 150 years ago. And a lot of people

00:09:56.660 come to this topic in the other way around, right? They're like, this should be easy. How hard is it

00:10:00.780 to tolerate your neighbor? How hard is it not to be a bigot? And then they look at the injustices in

00:10:05.020 our society that are real and they say, oh my God, there's something uniquely wrong with us.

00:10:08.320 How can we have any hope for the future? So I think when you start with a realistic

00:10:12.720 appreciation of a difficulty of what we're doing, you can actually come to an optimistic point of

00:10:17.260 view. Whereas what a lot of people do is they start with really naive assumption that this

00:10:21.120 shouldn't be hard. And then they end up being really fatalistic because of the problems that

00:10:25.580 we do see in the real world.

00:10:28.140 Yasha, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, my attitude has always been, and I think this is

00:10:32.040 something my parents have inculcated in me when they sent me as someone from Russia over to

00:10:38.260 the UK was the idea of what you might call the civic patriotism, which is the solution to our

00:10:45.260 inherent evolutionary developed tribalism is to build this thing called the nation state to which

00:10:50.900 you can subscribe no matter what your skin color, what your religion is, whatever, as long as you

00:10:56.920 buy into the idea that we're all American or we're all British or we're all whatever.

00:11:01.280 Um, is that the answer here? Because in your book, you look at that as one of the potential

00:11:07.100 solutions and that is not without its challenges either.

00:11:11.320 Yeah. So I think it's an important part of the answer, right? So let me take another step back,

00:11:15.840 perhaps to start off with. I mean, when I was growing up, my parents, it's interesting that your

00:11:20.420 parents, you know, uh, uh, sort of taught you like civic patriotism as part of the answer. I think my

00:11:26.340 mom in particular taught me something slightly different when I was growing up, which is to be

00:11:31.580 skeptical of any form of group, right? So she thought about her history of being thrown out of

00:11:37.440 the country she grew up in when she was 20 and her parents' history of, um, you know, having to flee

00:11:43.180 for war and losing most of her family in the Holocaust. And she blamed quite reasonably in a way,

00:11:48.820 this groupish mechanism of humans, right? This, we are the in group and you're the out group. And,

00:11:53.380 um, we're going to be really altruistic towards member of the in groups, actually sometimes capable

00:11:58.440 of, of huge, uh, courage and, and, and altruism. Um, but, uh, you know, if you're not part of the

00:12:04.580 group, we can do whatever we want to you. And so she, I think, hoped that we would all identify

00:12:09.960 as, as individuals or perhaps as cosmopolitans, right? That we would all think of ourselves in

00:12:13.940 our own individual terms and care about everybody in the world equally. And that was, uh, very appealing

00:12:19.480 to me, um, uh, as a moral vision. I think there's something of it, but we should preserve,

00:12:24.020 but it's just not a realistic, uh, prescription for how most people in the world are going to act.

00:12:30.240 And it's not realistic for me, for myself either, right? If I hear of an earthquake or a terror attack,

00:12:35.540 um, somewhere in the world that I've never been, but I don't know very well, I'm saddened by it.

00:12:40.440 And I want to help. And, and, and, and I want to think about how to avoid that. But if I see

00:12:45.000 a terror attack in, in London, which is a city I know well, where, where I've lived for a while,

00:12:50.280 or, or in New York city on the subway that, that I take myself, I'm affected in a different way.

00:12:55.120 And that's just part of human nature, right? We, we, we might want to push against it a little

00:12:59.060 bit and say, Hey, we should also care about people far away and let's not make it too easy for

00:13:02.720 ourselves. But we're always going to care a little bit more when it's places we know, um, uh, that we

00:13:08.300 can picture, you know, countries that we have a real deep connection to. And the same is true about,

00:13:14.300 you know, religious and other groups, right? People will always have strong religious beliefs.

00:13:18.220 They will always identify in part by the kind of cultural origins they have. And to some extent,

00:13:23.100 perhaps, but always defined by the ethnicity too. And I don't think that we can ever quite get rid of

00:13:28.060 that, right? So we need to think about how do we build a society in which people have individual

00:13:33.180 freedoms in which they can determine themselves, how they want to lead their lives in which they can

00:13:37.700 be true to the kind of groups in which we're in, in which they have religious freedom, obviously,

00:13:41.160 in which they can say, Hey, I just want to be with people who have a similar kind of

00:13:43.780 cultural background with me and mostly hang out with those people and so on. And that's

00:13:47.760 perfectly fine too. But that comes naturally. What is harder and what we really need to sustain

00:13:53.880 our countries, to stop them from falling apart, to, to stop, uh, the risk of civil war, to stop,

00:14:00.040 uh, deeply fragmented societies is where we also build a level of identity where we have something

00:14:05.920 in common. And that to me is the importance of having, uh, an inclusive national identity,

00:14:11.720 having the kind of civic patriotism that you're talking about, or actually in my account,

00:14:15.320 also a kind of everyday cultural patriotism.

00:14:18.100 And yes, you've, you've touched on this about, you know, the, the need and the, the deep seated

00:14:23.700 need for people to form tribes, but there's also a physiological aspect to that in that

00:14:29.380 the hormone oxytocin that quite literally binds us together also gives us a suspicion

00:14:35.380 of the outside, because that's how we survived on the, on the African savannas. So that's another

00:14:41.460 layer of challenge, isn't it? Trying to get people to override and get over that particular

00:14:47.500 instinct.

00:14:49.520 Yeah. Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind is, is, is, is really great on this and showing,

00:14:54.080 uh, how satisfying it can be to be a member of, of, of, of, of, of, of groups, how it can bring

00:15:01.980 out the best in us. Um, uh, and that is to do probably with, with this hormone that gets

00:15:07.500 triggered when we're doing, when we're dancing, you know, when, when, when we're dancing together

00:15:11.600 or we're singing a song together, or you're at the, you know, you're at the football stadium

00:15:15.320 and you're singing the song of your home team together with thousands of people. There's

00:15:19.620 something that that experience triggers in us, which is a kind of high. Um, and, and it

00:15:25.620 can make us feel loving towards other people. It can, it can, uh, make us, uh, uh, risk our

00:15:32.520 lives. Um, it is in, in, in part what's happening in Ukraine today, where millions of people are

00:15:38.700 volunteering, uh, to risk their lives, uh, to stop this, this terrible invasion from, from

00:15:45.480 Vladimir Putin's troops. So, so, so these forms of collective, um, being together, uh, sometimes

00:15:53.360 in the form of national level of patriotism, sometimes in the form of your football team

00:15:57.340 or whatever other, you know, your friends being out singing karaoke together, it can be

00:16:02.020 different forms of group is really positive. But as you're saying, it then also pushes

00:16:07.140 very quickly to say, well, hang on a second, but if a member of our group is threatened,

00:16:10.860 we're going to go and beat you up, right? If there's something that, that threatens this

00:16:14.760 group from the outside, true or imagined, I'm also going to be capable of this sort of deep

00:16:19.460 honesty against others. Now, one of the solutions to this is that you don't want a society in

00:16:24.360 which groups are really monolithic, right? So, uh, one of the things I research from my

00:16:28.900 book is sort of modes of failure, right? How do diverse societies go wrong? There's all

00:16:32.420 kinds of ways they go wrong. They can be, uh, so many different groups that they never

00:16:36.680 agree on building a state in the first place. So you never get public services. You never get,

00:16:41.040 uh, uh, an effective state, um, like in Afghanistan and parts of Somalia, right? You can have these

00:16:47.180 extreme forms of domination where one group dominates and just oppresses the others like

00:16:50.980 we've had in, in, in large parts of the history of the United States. Um, but you can also have

00:16:56.200 what's happening in Lebanon. So it's such a deep fragmentation that, you know, there's barely

00:17:01.100 any Lebanese identity. What there is, is Sunni and Shia and Maronite Christian identity. Um,

00:17:07.140 and those groups are really monolithic and the system wants them to be monolithic, um, because

00:17:12.240 it works in this compromise between elites, but the elites can only represent the groups

00:17:16.600 if the groups are really stable and don't interact with each other very much. Right. And then it

00:17:21.960 becomes dangerous because the moment that that's triggered, it's like, you know, I'm a Shia 100%

00:17:27.540 and I have nothing that connects me with somebody who's a Sunni. I have nothing that connects me with

00:17:32.280 somebody who's a Maronite Christian. And that then raises the very real risk of, of civil war in a

00:17:37.640 healthy society. You might say, Hey, I'm in church and, and, and that gives me serotonin. It gives

00:17:42.720 me a sense of being along my fellow worshipers. Um, but you know, some of the people who don't go

00:17:48.260 to my church, um, uh, in my son's little league game and, you know, we're supporting the same team

00:17:54.600 there. And so I have a sort of sense of connection with him in that context. Right. Um, and then,

00:17:59.360 you know, some of the people who are neither of that perhaps are part of the same political party

00:18:03.080 that I support. And so even as we're divided in some spheres of life, we also have

00:18:07.200 connections in other spheres of life. That's something that sort of helps to, to, to control

00:18:12.340 that instinct to say it's the out group. What becomes dangerous is if, you know, the person

00:18:17.260 who I agree with politically also has the same ethnicity as me, also goes to the same church

00:18:22.600 as me, also as part of the same little league team as me. And the outsider, the person who

00:18:27.420 I distrust is just a stranger in all realms of life, because then it becomes easy to actually

00:18:33.240 vilify them to such an extent that, that they're capable of doing terrible things to them.

00:18:38.380 Hey, Konstantin, do you love trigonometry?

00:18:42.380 I'm from Russia. I cannot love anything apart from vodka, miserable literature and the horrendous

00:18:49.380 downfall of my people. But yes, I find trigonometry satisfactory.

00:18:53.380 And do you like live shows? Of course, but only if it's Chekov play about collapse of Russian

00:19:00.760 aristocracy as they face death and obscurity before the glorious might of the proletariat

00:19:06.720 and the beautiful revolution. Okay, mate. Well, if you like trigonometry live shows, then

00:19:13.020 get your credit card out for the lads, because we're coming to the Edinburgh Festival this August.

00:19:19.380 We have only booked two shows, August 6th and 7th, because if we do more, the comedy industry

00:19:24.900 will treat us like the Czars and execute us. That's right. We're going to be in Edinburgh

00:19:29.760 for two days only. Saturday's guest is Andrew Doyle, which is sure to sell out.

00:19:36.200 Our other guest is Leo Kearse, which means when Nicola Sturgeon hears about it, she'll ban

00:19:41.240 us from Scotland herself. Tickets are sure to sell out. And when they're gone, they're gone.

00:19:47.220 Click on the link below and we'll see you in Edinburgh on the 6th and 7th of August at

00:19:52.440 the gilded balloon Teviot.

00:19:55.100 Come and see us before hordes of left-wing comedians try to put us in gulag.

00:20:01.700 What do we do then with identity politics, which encourages people to see themselves in this

00:20:06.920 way, which encourages people to tribalize, which encourages people to think that they're

00:20:12.760 oppressed, that the society that they live in is biased against them, that they're never

00:20:17.600 going to have the same opportunities as X group. What do we do with that?

00:20:21.580 Yeah. So look, one of the weird things about this topic is that no damn term you can use

00:20:28.200 actually describes well and neutrally what we're talking about, right? And these terms

00:20:33.080 that seem equivalent have slightly different connotations. So identity politics or woke or

00:20:38.080 whatever, they all mean slightly different things and they're all kind of embattled weird

00:20:41.220 concepts. So let's be precise about what we're talking about. Because I believe in this groupishness

00:20:47.140 that people have, because I think that people are always going to form those groups and sort

00:20:50.980 of fight for their interests, there's certain forms of identity politics that I'm fine with,

00:20:55.040 right? The fact that there is, to name a silly example, the American Association of Retired

00:21:00.620 People, right, that fights for the interest of elderly people, wants to make sure that we preserve

00:21:06.460 social security and have a bunch of other kinds of things. That's perfectly fine, right? And there's

00:21:11.240 other forms of interest group politics that will always exist in a free society that I'm not

00:21:16.400 to, not to concern about, not to worry about. So if all we mean by identity politics is people have

00:21:22.400 those group identities and they're going to have associations, uh, that fight for the interest

00:21:28.300 of those groups in certain ways. Sorry to interrupt. Let's just make this simple though. We're not

00:21:31.860 talking about people who are retired because we're all going to be retired one day if we live that long.

00:21:36.420 What we're talking about identity, when we mean identity, we see use the term identity politics,

00:21:40.720 is exclusionary ways of looking at different groups, particularly through the lens of race,

00:21:46.700 sex, sexuality, uh, whether you're trans or not, et cetera, this kind of thing, where these are not

00:21:54.120 things that will ever bring people together. Uh, like Francis and I, we have different ethnic

00:21:59.300 backgrounds, but we'll always, we will both eventually get to a point where we're retired.

00:22:03.100 Do you know what I mean? Hopefully. Uh, whereas what, what, what, I know what he's saying. I was

00:22:09.220 working up to it. So I'm an academic, you know, I, I do a lot of, I do a lot of public stuff,

00:22:13.380 but sometimes my, my professorial thing comes through, you know, sometimes I have to take a

00:22:17.020 long run after something. You'll have to go for it. Um, so look, the same is true for

00:22:22.880 the American Armenian association, right? That's pushing for Congress to recognize the Armenian

00:22:28.760 genocide, right? Uh, or for the American, or for the world Jewish Congress, which looks out for the

00:22:34.220 interest of Jews in various kinds of ways. And for the NAACP, uh, which looks out for the interest

00:22:38.620 of black Americans. That's fine. I'm not worried about that because that, so you know, not everybody's

00:22:43.320 going to be Jewish, not everybody's going to be Armenian. So that's different from the, uh, sort

00:22:46.800 of association. But that's okay. Right. It's perfectly fine for people to say, Hey, Jews have

00:22:51.820 particular kinds of interests and particular kinds of concerns and worries, and we need an organization

00:22:56.460 that is capable of representing that politically. So if you, if all you were talking about about

00:23:00.540 politics was that, I wouldn't be so concerned. Now, as you're saying, identity politics today

00:23:05.400 is a lot more than that. And, and, and there I start to get concerned very quickly. So let me

00:23:10.660 give you one concrete example. Um, one of the things I talk about in the book is, is, is a deep

00:23:17.520 research program in, in, in, in, in psychology for 75 years. It's one of the most well-established

00:23:23.040 findings, which is intergroup contact theory, right? And it shows that, uh, when we spend time

00:23:30.440 with people from different groups against whom we have minor prejudices and the right kind of

00:23:35.380 context, then we reduce those prejudices. So in one famous study in 1950, um, white Bostonians

00:23:42.260 who had black neighbors ended up having more positive views of them than white Bostonians

00:23:47.380 who were randomly assigned to similar, uh, housing units that were segregated. Right. But there's

00:23:54.000 important conditions around that. You need to be in a situation in which you equal within

00:23:58.500 the situation, even if you might not be equal in other parts of society, you have a common

00:24:02.660 set of goals and you're being encouraged to, to get along by, by authorities. Right. Now

00:24:08.820 let's talk about what a lot of elite private schools have started to do in the United States,

00:24:12.580 places like Horace Mann and, uh, uh, Dalton in New York city, places like Sybil Friends in

00:24:18.160 DC, where presidents tend to send their kids really influential schools that show you a lot

00:24:22.560 about what's going on in the American League today. Right. There you have teachers coming in

00:24:27.780 when the kids are 10 or eight or six and saying you're African American, you're going to that

00:24:32.640 group over there. You're Asian American, you're going to that group over there. You're Latino.

00:24:36.040 You're going to go to that group over there and you're white. We don't really know what to do

00:24:39.280 with you, but I guess you're going to go on that group over there. Right. And, and, and the goal,

00:24:44.120 which is understandable is, um, to make people aware of some of the discrimination they might

00:24:49.560 suffer and to make them more capable to fight for their interests and so on. But when you're taking

00:24:53.640 kids that young and you're telling them from, from on high, the most important thing about you is

00:24:59.140 the color of your skin or, or, or your origin, um, that just hardens these groups in extreme ways.

00:25:06.720 And by the way, the hope is to take these white kids and turn them into D'Angelo style anti-racists.

00:25:11.760 If you know anything about serotonin, if you know anything about, um, the way that groups tend to

00:25:17.360 work, you're much more likely to create racists. You're much more likely to create people who say,

00:25:20.700 well, my identity is as being white. I'm going to fight for the interests of white people.

00:25:23.960 Like these other groups are fighting for their interests. Right. And so, um, when identity

00:25:29.040 politics becomes the celebration of, and the encouragement of group identities to the exclusion

00:25:35.680 of everything else, um, it can start to go really, really wrong. And what would be a better

00:25:41.520 kind of pedagogical mechanism? Put them in a sports team, right? Where they might start to hate the

00:25:47.320 sports team of the other high school. That's okay. That's not going to tear our society apart.

00:25:50.700 But within the sports team, we're going to feel inequality. We're going to feel a kinship.

00:25:54.500 We're going to be working together for a common goal. And then we might also have valuable

00:25:58.700 conversations where we're like, Hey, you know what? I don't feel as seen in this school as I might,

00:26:03.260 or I, you know, I, I come from, uh, you know, a difficult situation at home and, and I, I face

00:26:08.340 these disadvantages and so on. They're going to be much more sympathetic to each other, much more open

00:26:12.520 to each other because their teammates were working on a common goal and, and, and they start to like

00:26:17.040 each other. They start to spend time with each other. So that's one of the many examples in

00:26:20.740 American society at the moment and in British and so on society too, where the wrong form of

00:26:25.380 identity politics becomes really dangerous. Yeah, I agree. And Yasha, I want to come back.

00:26:29.580 I promised you I'd get there. It took me a while, but I got there.

00:26:31.740 You did. And maybe I shouldn't have interrupted you. I thought we could, we could cut some corners

00:26:35.860 and get straight into it, but, uh, I'll, I'll make sure that you probably could have.

00:26:40.700 Yeah, there we go. So I want to come back to something you, uh, you use in the book and

00:26:44.420 something you mentioned earlier, where I kind of want to perhaps disagree with you, or at least

00:26:48.340 to push and see, see what comes back, which is you talk about this metaphor, uh, of the melting pot.

00:26:54.180 And then some people talk about the salad bowl, right? And the melting pot basically means

00:26:59.020 everybody comes to America, becomes American, and no one cares what their ethnicity is.

00:27:02.800 The salad bowl is sort of like all the people are in the salad, but they're kind of like the

00:27:07.700 tomatoes are separate from, from the cucumbers. Right. And you talk about what actually-

00:27:12.180 Which always puzzled me because that sounds like a terrible salad.

00:27:14.980 Yeah. Like a good salad, actually everybody is mixed up. So, you know, perhaps I like the

00:27:18.960 metaphor of a salad bowl if it's like, you know, a sweet green salad. Anyway.

00:27:22.220 Right. Uh, and then of course you talk about the way that it ought to be, I think is, is a park

00:27:26.800 where everybody can come and everybody can sit next to each other and have a picnic and mix as they wish

00:27:31.040 or not. Right. And this is where I might disagree with you because I know that having lived in the UK,

00:27:36.660 you've seen that we have had problems with integrating certain communities into the family

00:27:42.780 of, of, of British people, if you like. That there are some people who've integrated very well

00:27:48.160 after coming to the UK and others that are struggling. They're not doing very well. They're not,

00:27:52.400 uh, doing well in education. They're not doing well in terms of, uh, embracing certain aspects

00:27:57.520 of British traditions and values. They, they're not serving in the British military and anything

00:28:02.080 like the numbers of every other group. For example, they are excluded. They live in separate areas

00:28:07.040 and so on. Is that not a problem that has to be overcome for, for our diverse societies to triumph

00:28:14.000 and succeed in the future? Um, look, yeah. So, so let me talk through these metaphors for a sec,

00:28:21.120 right. You put it very well. The problem with the melting pot is that it asks people to give up

00:28:26.720 at least in one reading of it. I mean, it's a slightly unfair reading of the metaphor, but,

00:28:30.560 but that is how people often talk about it. It asks people to give up too much of a particularity,

00:28:35.040 right? So it imagines that once everybody comes to Britain or once everybody comes to the States,

00:28:39.440 the culture will bear some of the marks of the influence, right? Like the curry becomes the,

00:28:47.760 the, the typical British dish in a certain kind of way. And, uh, you know, Americans love, uh,

00:28:52.640 spaghetti with meatballs and, you know, Kung Pao chicken or whatever, but everybody within this

00:28:57.280 society is kind of indistinguishable, right? Um, and I think that that we've asked people too much.

00:29:02.320 I think it's perfectly fine for people to say, I want to be a hundred percent British, but I also,

00:29:05.840 I'm going to continue to be a hundred percent Indian or, uh, a hundred percent Chinese or whatever,

00:29:10.400 right? I'm also going to continue to want to be true to the cultural heritage of my ancestors.

00:29:15.040 There's no problem with that. And in fact, it's one of the great things about these countries

00:29:20.000 today. One of the reasons why I love London and why I love New York is that, uh, you continue to

00:29:25.520 see the influence of those different cultures and that one neighborhood of London feels a little

00:29:29.680 different from the other neighborhood, but everything isn't the same and about every person

00:29:32.480 not the same. So, so, uh, so that's where that's from. Now the salad bowl is really dangerous,

00:29:37.280 right? Because it creates the kind of separateness that I think you're worried about,

00:29:41.120 right? It pushes us to the point where we say we, we just live in these completely different

00:29:46.000 communities and, uh, you know, perhaps we somehow managed to sustain the peace. Perhaps,

00:29:51.280 um, uh, you know, we're able to pay tax and sustain a welfare state together. Uh, but really we have no

00:29:57.200 points of connective tissue. We have no points of overlap at all. And, and I do think that at a time

00:30:03.280 when that form of multiculturalism was very politically, uh, fashionable, uh, there were some real

00:30:10.000 mistakes in terms of policies people adopted. So in Britain, for example, uh, the new labor

00:30:14.800 government introduced, uh, state-based faith schools. Um, uh, now, uh, it's one thing in a

00:30:21.520 free society for, for parents who say, we want to send our kids to a private school and that's a

00:30:25.440 faith-based school, but that's the right to do that. But for the state to come in and encourage

00:30:29.760 people and say, Hey, uh, you're Hindu, go to the Hindu school. You're Jewish, go to the Jewish school.

00:30:34.480 You're Muslim, go to the Muslim school. That I think is, uh, uh, really raising the risk

00:30:40.560 of having these completely separate communities that don't speak to each other, mistrust each

00:30:44.640 other, and that then also become much more likely to harm each other. So, so the salad

00:30:48.480 bowl for that reason, I think is a, is a real mistake. Um, and so my image is that of a public

00:30:54.240 park because of two things in a free society, you have the right to decide who you hang out with,

00:30:59.440 right? And if, if we have a fun conversation as we're having, we can go to a park together

00:31:03.440 after this conversation and say, we just want to be among ourselves and keep this conversation

00:31:06.720 going. We don't want to talk to anybody else. Or we might say, Hey, this is a fun conversation.

00:31:10.160 And now we're kind of feeling loose and perhaps there's some fun people sitting next to us and

00:31:13.760 we get into a conversation with them and, and we make more friends. In a free society, you have a

00:31:18.640 right to do either of those things. You can be Amish and stay among the Amish community all of your

00:31:23.520 life. And that's your right to do. If all of society becomes like that, right? Or if there's some

00:31:28.960 groups that completely cut themselves off from the rest of society in a way that, uh, undermines

00:31:36.000 any abilities to sustain common values, um, that, that becomes an economic problem that, uh, becomes

00:31:42.960 a problem of, of potentially deep mutual mistrust, then, then I really start to worry. So it's fine for

00:31:48.880 some people to say, Hey, the most important thing about me is my group and I'm going to remain a member

00:31:52.400 of it. But looking at it from above, as it were looking at from the outside, you need enough

00:31:57.200 people to have enough of those connections, but you don't end up in the salad bowl, but you don't

00:32:00.880 end up having these really separate communities. Now, I don't know enough about the situation

00:32:04.720 describing to know whether or not that's a fair description of some communities in Britain,

00:32:08.400 but certainly, um, uh, if the description is, as you say, it is, I would agree that that's a problem.

00:32:14.960 I would put that under the salad bowl rather than the public park.

00:32:18.000 Right. Uh, but I suppose what I'm saying is, um, if we accept, as I completely accept your idea

00:32:25.440 that human beings are always prone to tribalism, then unless people are encouraged by the state

00:32:33.760 to shed some of their past identity, right? Some, not all, but some, what possible reason would we

00:32:41.840 have to go to a park and communicate instead of going to a park and going, this is my part of the

00:32:47.920 park and you're not coming in because this is where, you know, the, the, the pointy hat people

00:32:52.880 say, and this is where the flat hat people say, and we're going to keep apart because that is our

00:32:57.040 instinct. As you say, what is going to encourage us to do that? If it's not the state saying, look,

00:33:02.720 we're all British and you can cook the food you want and, and whatever, but we all speak a certain

00:33:07.280 language. We all buy into certain values. We all develop a sense of patriotism about

00:33:11.680 our country, et cetera. How is that going to happen unless the, the, the, the society encourages

00:33:17.120 people to buy into a single identity? Um, well, I think, so, so, so you said state once and said

00:33:24.800 society once, and I'm much more comfortable for society to do this than for the state to do that.

00:33:28.720 It depends a little bit on the context. Um, uh, and it depends a little bit on the kind of

00:33:32.720 commonality you're talking about, but yes, absolutely. We should in countries where that's

00:33:36.880 historically been the case, Switzerland or whatever is a different case, but in Britain,

00:33:39.840 in the United States, we should all end up speaking the same, uh, language and we should

00:33:44.720 have, uh, real, uh, uh, shared values with each other. We should agree on the fundamentals of how

00:33:51.920 our political society is governed and the kind of mutual tolerance, uh, that that entails. And we

00:33:58.480 absolutely need social institutions, including especially schools and, and, and universities,

00:34:04.240 uh, as well as media, uh, that, that encourage that. Um, now I'm actually quite optimistic about

00:34:10.960 that. So language is a great case, right? You have fears on the right that immigrants who are coming

00:34:15.840 in and really learning the language of, uh, whether it's English in Britain, the States or German in

00:34:20.640 Germany and so on. Um, uh, and you have some people on the left saying they shouldn't, uh, so there's

00:34:27.040 a fashion book in the States at the moment, which basically says, don't integrate at all. If,

00:34:30.240 you know, if you're always going to speak Spanish and always going to speak Chinese, that's perfectly

00:34:34.240 fine. I think that just misses the sociological reality. Um, because sociologists have, have,

00:34:39.360 have a really fascinating model, um, uh, about how language acquisition works for immigrants.

00:34:45.680 And it's striking how true it is in, in many, many different contexts. So here's what happens,

00:34:51.360 right? The first generation comes in and especially if they come from somewhat less educated backgrounds,

00:34:56.880 had less educational opportunity, especially if they come as adults, they often don't learn

00:35:00.960 the language very well. Some do, but, but many people might live in a country for decades and

00:35:05.120 never fully learn the language, right? Their children are going to speak both languages well,

00:35:10.240 because they go to school in English or German or whatever the language may be. Um, uh, uh,

00:35:16.160 but at home, they, they at least need to understand the language of origin. Often what happens at home

00:35:20.560 actually is that the parents speak to them in the language of origin. They often respond in English,

00:35:24.480 right? But the majority of these kids prefers to speak English with their siblings, with their

00:35:31.040 cousins, with other people from a similar background of migration. So they speak the language of origin

00:35:36.160 pretty well, um, but they prefer English. By the third generation, by the generation of the

00:35:41.200 grandparents of the immigrants, English or German or the language of a new society wins a complete

00:35:46.720 victory. So only about 1% of the grandchildren of immigrants still speak any of the language of

00:35:54.960 origin. Now that, by the way, is a little bit sad. We nicely spoke it a little bit, right? Um, uh,

00:36:00.640 but that just shows that, um, actually the power of integration in our societies remains very strong.

00:36:07.680 Now there's reason to worry about that in the future. There's reasons to think about under what

00:36:11.360 circumstances would that change, but, but for now I'm just actually quite confident about the ability

00:36:17.280 of Britain to turn the children, the grandchildren of people who come to the country into people who

00:36:23.040 feel British and who are seen as British and, and certainly who speak English.

00:36:27.680 Hey, Constantine, do you like trigonometry? Of course. What's not to love? Incredible interviews,

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00:37:54.960 Yasha, at the very start of the interview, you gave the example of the sandwich and whether

00:38:02.160 people see a hot dog as a sandwich and if they don't. And you found that people were disagreeing

00:38:08.400 and there was discrimination going on. But there's one important thing that you miss, Yasha. Social

00:38:14.240 media. People going on social media or on Twitter and going, you're a fucking idiot because you think

00:38:19.920 a hot dog is... Do you know what I mean? There's a whole other element to this conversation now,

00:38:24.640 which didn't exist 20 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I worry

00:38:31.200 about is the way in which social media can split us into these very tiny tribes, right? So for a lot

00:38:38.400 of the history of these diverse societies, the tribes are kind of relatively big, right? I mean,

00:38:44.800 perhaps there's two tribes in a society, perhaps there's 10, perhaps there's 50. But there were these

00:38:49.840 long-standing religious, cultural, ethno-linguistic groups.

00:38:54.720 Social media can, in certain circumstances, deepen the attachment to them and deepen

00:39:01.360 mistrust against outsiders. But a lot of the time, what happens is actually a slightly different

00:39:06.080 problem, which is, you know, here's a good story from Twitter, right? Like this vegan activist

00:39:11.520 who has a lot of followers and posts about how anybody who's not vegan is kind of bad and all that

00:39:17.040 stuff. And then she lives in a suburb in the States and she, you know, comes home and she sees the

00:39:22.960 little girl who's crying. And she walks up to her and says, are you okay? What's going on? Why are

00:39:27.440 you crying? She said, oh, all my friends bought ice cream and I didn't have money to buy ice cream.

00:39:31.920 And she said, oh, the truck's still there. Come, I'll buy you an ice cream. And she posted,

00:39:34.720 you know, a nice little story about this on Twitter, right? What do you think happens next?

00:39:38.480 Well, obviously, all of her hardcore fans turn on her and say, you know, how can you sell out like

00:39:46.000 this? You've become a shill for the dairy industry. You know, how dare you buy this ice cream

00:39:50.800 that contains dairy for those kids. And that's a political problem for us. It's a little bit

00:39:57.040 different, I think, in nature, right? Because suddenly we have not five or 10 or 50, but a

00:40:02.560 thousand groups that are just fanatical in their advocacy of some particular issue. And then we have

00:40:09.440 a political system where you have two political parties or perhaps five or six political parties

00:40:13.200 in some countries. And they just can't bundle these thousand groups in any meaningful way anymore.

00:40:20.800 And that's a real political problem. But perhaps one way of that goes with a larger point that I

00:40:26.640 want to make, which is that, look, when I look at the thing that so many people are worrying about

00:40:32.960 right now, the state of these countries with all these different ethnic and religious and cultural

00:40:40.800 groups, I'm pretty optimistic. I think integration is working pretty well in Britain and the United

00:40:45.920 States. And I think these societies, though they still have problems, though they still have

00:40:50.000 injustices, are much more tolerant, are much more integrated than they were 50 or even 25 years ago.

00:40:56.880 And so I'm really optimistic about that. When I look at the political level, I'm really worried,

00:41:01.680 right? I'm worried about the 2024 elections in the United States. I'm worried about the

00:41:05.760 fragmentation of our politics. I'm worried about just the assumption that anybody who doesn't agree

00:41:10.160 a hundred percent with your party line within that tiny group, whether it's vegans or some other thing,

00:41:16.320 it's just an evil person, right? And social media has a lot to do with that piece of it.

00:41:22.480 Yeah. And that's the thing, Jascha, in that I see it as being such a divisive influence that you've

00:41:28.240 mentioned about a thousand groups. I can see those thousand groups in two years' time splitting into

00:41:34.480 10,000 groups. And like you said, these political parties, they're not going to be able to hold all

00:41:40.800 these groups together. The prime example of that is the Labour Party in the UK, where they simply can't

00:41:47.520 hold the old-style left-wing socialists with the new left-wing or the new left progressives and

00:41:55.680 everything else in between and the centrists. It simply doesn't work. So what does that mean for

00:42:00.800 our political systems? Well, you know, one thing that I am struck by is that

00:42:06.400 politicians that try to sustain a unifying message actually do relatively well. And so the problem is

00:42:18.720 that, you know, the people who are active in politics often are the most strident advocates

00:42:24.320 for one of those different kinds of groups. And they often think of the near enemy as much worse

00:42:31.440 than the far enemy, right? The person within the political party who has slight disagreements,

00:42:36.720 you know, deserves to die. You know, who cares about the Tories? You know, we can forget about

00:42:40.800 them, right? The important thing is that the person in the other faction is sort of subjugated, right?

00:42:46.880 And that's a very old mechanism, by the way. In the first treatises on freedom of religion,

00:42:52.720 people were saying, well, you know, we really should have some tolerance towards Jews and Muslims

00:42:57.360 because they're misguided and, you know, we can sort of put up with them. But Christian apostates,

00:43:02.640 they deserve death, right? Like, that's unacceptable. So this mechanism is a really,

00:43:08.240 really old one, actually. But when you have politicians that manage to transcend that a little

00:43:15.200 bit, that are not captive to these activist groups, that speak a language of unity, that actually

00:43:23.600 try to address the country as a whole, they tend to do pretty well. So, you know, in the primaries

00:43:30.960 of the Democratic Party in 2020, you know, of the 16 candidates, basically 15 of them were running

00:43:39.760 after Twitter and were running after the most extreme voices of it and thought that that really

00:43:43.920 represents what voters wanted. And the reason why Joe Biden is the president of the United States is

00:43:49.520 that he's too old to follow Twitter. And so despite some personal weaknesses, which are also evident

00:43:56.240 with him, he actually was speaking to the middle of a party in the middle of a country in a completely

00:44:02.400 different way than his competitors in the primaries. Now, he's not always kept that up as much as he

00:44:06.960 should. But I think that shows something that a candidate who's not full of charisma and youthful

00:44:12.560 stride was able to win out against all these other candidates precisely because he wasn't caught

00:44:17.840 by that. And, you know, you mentioned the Labour Party. You know, I'm certainly not a super fan

00:44:23.840 of Keir Starmer. I think he too has some weaknesses. But there's not a surprise that he's doing a lot

00:44:28.640 better in the polls than Jeremy Corbyn was. And that is because he is trying to speak to the middle of

00:44:35.760 a country rather than to the activist base of parts of the Labour Party much more than his predecessor.

00:44:42.160 Yes, it's a very interesting point you make, particularly given that I think one of the

00:44:48.240 things that's starting to happen is Twitter is bleeding through into politics. And so you're

00:44:53.120 seeing the wedge issues of the culture war coming through and becoming real for politicians that are

00:45:00.240 maybe not quite able to deal with them or uncertain of the right approach. So, you know, we have these

00:45:05.760 endless debates about defining what a woman is, something that about three years ago everybody had the

00:45:10.480 answer to. Now everybody's worried about saying the right thing. So how do you think politicians will

00:45:16.320 tackle the need to, on the one hand, as you say, reach to speak to a broad coalition, while on the

00:45:22.320 other hand constantly being asked these sort of Twitter-based questions, you know, what is a woman,

00:45:28.320 where should a trans woman be kept, you know, when, if that trans woman commits a crime,

00:45:33.920 should trans women be in sport? I mean, I can go on and on in every,

00:45:38.000 in every area of, of this sort of cultural discussion. How are they going to be dealing

00:45:42.720 with that in order to solve some of the problems that you, you address in the book?

00:45:48.080 Um, look, the, the first good point is simply to remember that Twitter does not represent public

00:45:54.480 opinion, right? So, um, I see this in journalism 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I mean, I wasn't around,

00:46:00.880 but from what people tell me, uh, you know, people had a healthy sense that a letter to the editor

00:46:06.160 does not represent the average view of your readers, right? Because most people read an

00:46:10.480 article and they say, Oh, interesting. I agree with it. Oh, I don't agree with it. But they're

00:46:14.320 not going to go and write to you about it. So who writes to you about it? The person who's triggered,

00:46:18.400 right? The person who's like, this is terrible. This is wrong. Right. And so when there was a little

00:46:23.600 bit of a transaction cost, people realized, Oh, if we get a bunch of letters about this article

00:46:28.880 saying that, you know, it's terrible and offensive or whatever, you know, perhaps that we represent

00:46:33.200 something that our readers think, perhaps it doesn't, perhaps this means that like 0.1% of

00:46:37.040 our readers feel very strongly about this in some direction. And so, you know, people would print

00:46:41.200 leaders to the editor and, you know, there was a whole culture around it, but, but people knew that

00:46:46.640 they couldn't just assume this actually represents what people think in the world. With Twitter, we've

00:46:52.560 somehow lost that lesson and it's because it's public, right? Like with letters to the editor, you know how

00:46:57.840 many came in, but your readers don't, everybody else doesn't. So it somehow feels less humiliating or it feels

00:47:02.160 less worrying. Right. Whereas in Twitter, if you say something and everybody pounces on you for it,

00:47:07.200 it feels like you've been like publicly shamed. And so then you're like, Oh my God, how do I avoid

00:47:12.560 being publicly shamed in that kind of way? Um, and so double down, Yasha, you double down,

00:47:18.000 you double, that's the answer. And never apologize for bullshit. Like you've done something wrong,

00:47:23.360 say it, but never apologize when in fact you haven't. But, but that makes a real difference

00:47:30.000 because suddenly we know that on the left and on the right, the people who use Twitter actively

00:47:35.280 are very extreme relative to the average of a population, because most people have better

00:47:39.600 things to do than to argue on Twitter all day long. I say with a lot of followers who spend way

00:47:43.200 too much time on Twitter, but I'm, you know, I'm political scientists that care about politics.

00:47:46.720 I think about it all the time. Most people don't, right. And, and most people have pretty moderate

00:47:50.720 opinions actually. And so, so, so, so the first thing to do is simply spend less time on Twitter.

00:47:56.960 If you're an important decision maker, look much more at opinion polls, much, look much more

00:48:02.720 at focus groups in which you hear ordinary people actually talking out issues. Then you do it,

00:48:08.080 what you see on Twitter, because you're going to miscalculate about where people are. That's the

00:48:12.720 first lesson for, for political candidates. Um, in particular, the second is when there's a firestorm

00:48:17.840 on, on, on, on social media, right? When one of your employees is being targeted, if you need an

00:48:22.240 institution, just wait it out a couple of days, right? Nearly all the time, people get bored of

00:48:28.000 these campaigns. They just need somebody to shout at that day because they woke up on the wrong side

00:48:32.880 of the bed. Um, and by the next day, they're going to be shouting at somebody else, right? So rather

00:48:38.320 than firing somebody, rather than jumping to some huge conclusion about how you're going to change

00:48:42.160 your organization, just assess it in, in a calm way. If there's accusations that somebody in your

00:48:48.880 organization did something heinously wrong, investigate. If it's true that it did do something

00:48:54.160 substantively wrong, there should be consequences. If, if it's the sort of thing for which there

00:48:58.560 should be consequences, but don't just fire them the moment that 200 people on Twitter are calling

00:49:04.720 for their heads. That's a huge mistake. And so I think, you know, social media is always going to be a

00:49:09.840 little bit crazy and that's actually fine. I don't worry about what happens on social media.

00:49:14.720 I worry about what happens off social media. I worry about the inability of our institutions to

00:49:21.280 actually, uh, put that in context and, and, and act on it in appropriate ways.

00:49:28.640 It's that is a very, very, very good point.

00:49:33.920 Yesha, what do we do with what you're talking about and the need to have these, you know,

00:49:39.680 melting pot societies, as it were things to be more homogenous in the era of globalization,

00:49:46.000 where people are becoming more fluid about where they live. If you take the European Union,

00:49:50.880 freedom of movement, doesn't that mean that that sort of state that you want to work towards in that

00:49:57.760 state of living is becoming ever more difficult. And dare I say, old fashioned.

00:50:03.120 You know, my impression is always that that's not the case. And like, I'm, I'm as close to a

00:50:09.840 damn cosmopolitan as they come. I mean, not only am I Jewish, but you know, I grew up in Germany and

00:50:14.160 I've lived in Italy and France and I went to college in Britain and I, you know, I'm living in the States

00:50:18.880 now. I have two passports, you know, but like, I wouldn't up and leave and live anywhere in the world.

00:50:26.160 And I have a pretty strong sense of belonging, actually, and perhaps it's a bit more complicated

00:50:30.560 than others, but it certainly doesn't extend to every place in the world. And most people are way

00:50:36.480 less mobile, have way less experience living in other countries, have way more family and friends

00:50:42.400 in one particular place than I do. So I think some of those descriptions, I know David Goodhart in England

00:50:48.000 likes to go on about this sort of, you know, the cosmopolitan elite that really, you know,

00:50:53.760 are people of nowhere. I just don't know many of them. Um, you know, most people, uh, yeah,

00:51:01.040 if you're pretty educated and, and, and perhaps have some money, you're very comfortable flying

00:51:05.840 to X, Y, or that place tomorrow for two weeks. But after two weeks, most people want to go home.

00:51:10.480 Uh, you know, and perhaps if you're in your twenties and you have a professional opportunity to go live

00:51:14.320 in a country for a few years, that's a bunch of people who love the idea of that. But after that,

00:51:19.120 most of them want to go home or they decide, Hey, I've fallen in love here. I've stayed here and I'm

00:51:22.480 going to make my home here, but I'm going to build roots here and stay in this new country

00:51:26.000 and actually really be rooted there. You know, the number of people who really are sort of let

00:51:31.120 me live in Hong Kong for two years and then in London for three years. And, uh, you know,

00:51:34.880 then in Rio de Janeiro for five years and, you know, then in Seoul for one year, that is an extremely,

00:51:40.640 extremely, extremely small number of people. I would say we've had David on the show. Uh,

00:51:46.080 and just so to defend him a little bit, I think his argument is a little more complex than that,

00:51:50.800 because his argument isn't that, uh, say someone like you and you were, you were definitely in

00:51:55.920 anywhere in his conception. Uh, you might have a feeling of attachment to New York or London

00:52:01.760 or wherever you live. But, uh, what his point was that most people who are of that persuasion,

00:52:07.840 they're never going to go back to the small town from which they come. Uh, or indeed they've

00:52:12.080 probably never lived there since they went to university. And so that, that formation of long-term

00:52:17.200 community bonds, the deep attachment to a sense of place that perhaps some of the anxieties about

00:52:23.440 rapid change that, that come with having that sort of community attachment are not as strong.

00:52:28.880 And, and that I think is probably the difference between you and someone who grew up in, I don't

00:52:33.440 know, uh, Wigan and lived in Wigan their whole life and had a job that is very much tied into, to the

00:52:40.000 city and their friends and family all live there. And their identity is that, and they go to the

00:52:45.040 rugby games and, and, and, and, and on it goes. I think that's the difference.

00:52:49.360 So, so that's fair, but I think, um, when his terminology doesn't work very well,

00:52:53.440 we're getting a little bit in detail on this particular theory here, but I think it actually

00:52:56.720 says something about where the problem lies and where it doesn't lie. What I see around me

00:53:01.280 is people who have a very strong sense of belonging to particular places and particularly

00:53:06.640 to, to communities that they're a part of. They're not these individualists who lack social ties.

00:53:13.440 They are people who are part of, uh, an affluent neighborhood somewhere who are part of perhaps

00:53:18.960 a university town with a campus and a strong community who are part of a very strong professional

00:53:24.560 circle with, uh, you know, fearing the judgment of the peers in a very, very strong way. They have

00:53:29.280 very strong attachments. The problem is that we have an educational and socioeconomic elite

00:53:35.840 that often has become, uh, uh, dissociated from a lot of the rest of the country socioeconomically.

00:53:42.800 Right. And so, you know, they look down on the, on, on the middle of a country. They look down

00:53:47.920 on people who are less educated. They look down on people who don't speak the same fancy language

00:53:51.440 as them. They look down on people who use quote unquote the wrong term, which is one that's been

00:53:55.840 invented in the last two years. But that's not because they're people of anywhere who can up and

00:54:00.160 leave or who can, you know, it's because actually they're really afraid of what people are going to

00:54:04.480 say to them within the community at the next dinner party. Right. Um, uh, and they actually

00:54:10.160 have this extremely strong form of peer pressure, um, uh, which helps to explain why you can go from

00:54:17.040 one view to the next in a year and anybody who deviates from it in a slight way is sort of

00:54:22.320 subject to these pretty extreme forms of social punishment. And so to me, this is groupism,

00:54:27.280 right. To me, this is actually, uh, yes, I'm a member of this particular group. And part of the

00:54:33.040 identity of this group is to look down on other groups within our society. Um, but it's not,

00:54:38.640 Hey, it's individualists who are people from anywhere and they don't have affiliations.

00:54:42.560 It is an extremely strong group affiliation. Uh, but one that's developed among, uh, uh,

00:54:50.080 you know, uh, an educational and to some extent socioeconomic elite that has become, uh, disjointed

00:54:56.400 from, from, from less educated people. So I don't know, perhaps David and I are saying the same thing,

00:55:00.560 perhaps we're saying different things. You are, you are. I think you'd actually agree.

00:55:03.280 Yeah. Yeah. So that being the case is, and this elite group of people, they don't only have a disdain.

00:55:10.480 And I use that, and I use that word accurately, I think for people that they deem from a lower class

00:55:15.920 in them or however you want to describe it, but there is also a disdain amongst that group of

00:55:20.560 people for the nation state, particularly in America and the United Kingdom, where they feel

00:55:26.080 a sense of shame that they come from the United Kingdom or America. And as a result, doesn't that

00:55:31.920 also mean we're losing harmony in that instance? Because once you start to want to detach from the

00:55:38.000 nation state, then what you're really doing is saying that, you know, that we no longer have a

00:55:42.480 collective identity. Well, we saw, we saw that in Britain with the Labour Party and its debate

00:55:48.240 over the British flag recently, right? Where, where the idea of, of a major political party embracing

00:55:54.560 the flag of its country becomes, becomes somehow controversial, which is a huge mistake because

00:56:01.920 the nation continues to have this strong symbolism and the strong emotional power. And if you're leaving

00:56:07.120 it to, you know, especially the far right fringes, that becomes really dangerous, right? I mean,

00:56:14.000 that's a lot of what went wrong, what allowed some really dangerous people to, to, to win political

00:56:18.560 power. So, so, so I agree, but I actually think that the biggest problem is just,

00:56:25.120 it, it's people

00:56:32.000 no longer believing the basic thing you have to believe to actually be a small d democrat,

00:56:38.960 right? So you can despair of your fellow citizens. You can say, my God, they vote for this person

00:56:43.680 what is like, or they, you know, made a big mistake morally on this issue. A majority of my fellow citizens

00:56:49.200 think something that I think is really bad and wrong. That's fine, right? Democracy doesn't mean that

00:56:54.000 you always have to agree with a majority, and it doesn't mean that you always have to love your

00:56:57.200 fellow citizens. But to believe in democracy, you do have to think that most people are capable of

00:57:03.680 doing the right thing most of the time. But most people are decent human beings who are responsive

00:57:10.480 to urgent moral reasons. And you might lose some debates, you might lose some important debates,

00:57:14.960 but, but you still have to retain the hope that you can convince them the next time around.

00:57:20.240 And, and what I see a little bit in, in, in my intellectual circles is that that's been lost over

00:57:28.240 the last years. But a lot of people have started to think, you know, the average citizen is just a

00:57:34.320 bigot, you know, the average citizen is just a bad human being. And, and that really, that really worries me

00:57:42.080 even more. Yeah. Well, I suspect there's a version of it that comes in other circles that you don't

00:57:50.000 swim in on, on perhaps the other side of the, of the discussion too, where there's, you know, I think

00:57:56.160 it's almost like the stakes have been raised so much now that we can no longer accept losing,

00:58:01.120 because losing is existential now. If we lose, then, you know, the, the left wing argument would be,

00:58:07.200 well, then Roe Wade gets overturned and this happens and that happens. And on the right,

00:58:12.880 likewise, it's like, we're losing our country and we're losing to these people who hate our country.

00:58:18.800 And by the way, the most loud people on Twitter do hate this country, you know? So if you look at that,

00:58:25.040 you're kind of going, well, that sort of makes sense. So, you know, we've got a few minutes left

00:58:30.640 before we ask you our questions for locals, Yasha. You seem positive. You seem optimistic. In a few

00:58:37.520 minutes, how are we going to get to the sunny uplands where we're all living peacefully ever after?

00:58:43.440 Well, look, um, let me start because we haven't talked that much about it

00:58:48.000 with some of the things that make me positive about the current situation, right? So look,

00:58:52.720 we have problems of some amount of fragmentation in our society and we have problems with injustice

00:58:57.440 and racism in our society. And both of those are real. Um, but just the current state of our

00:59:02.240 society is a lot better than, than people think. And there's a lot better than it was a few decades

00:59:06.480 ago. Look, I'm in San Francisco right now as we're having this conversation. 30 years ago in the United

00:59:12.160 States, a majority of Americans thought that interracial marriage was immoral, but it was immoral

00:59:17.040 for a white and a black American to marry each other. Today, that figures down to the single digits.

00:59:22.560 It's plummeted in the course of a, of a few decades. Um, and we know that this is a change in, in reality,

00:59:30.000 not just in, in, in what people are comfortable telling pollsters, uh, because of real change in,

00:59:35.600 in who they're marrying and who they're having kids with. Um, a few decades ago, about one in 33

00:59:40.720 Americans were, were newborn. Now it's about one in seven, right? That's a very rapid and very

00:59:46.000 significant change in the nature of society. Well, let's take immigration, right? On the far right,

00:59:51.520 you have people who say, uh, look, immigrants a hundred years ago from Italy and Ireland in the

00:59:58.400 United States, for example, they succeeded because they're the right kind of immigrants,

01:00:02.080 right? Was immigrants coming in today from El Salvador and Vietnam and Kenya, they're not

01:00:07.040 succeeding because there's something somehow inferior about them, right? Now people on the left

01:00:13.360 and in the mainstream of society rightly reject that attribution of blame, but I'm struck by how

01:00:19.280 often they echo the pessimism. They say, yeah, it's true that these immigrants today, they're

01:00:22.800 really not succeeding. You know, they're not doing well, but the reason is that our country is so

01:00:27.120 racist and so discriminatory, which don't stand a chance. No, there is discrimination, there is

01:00:32.160 racism, but actually the best studies show that this pessimism is simply misplaced, that, um, yes,

01:00:38.160 the first generation often struggles. Yes, it's a slow process of socioeconomic progress,

01:00:42.320 of educational mobility, but actually immigrants from all these countries I mentioned are rising

01:00:47.600 the socioeconomic ranks, are rising the educational ranks at about the same speed as immigrants from

01:00:52.960 Italy and Ireland did a hundred years ago. Now, what that proves is that there's nothing inferior

01:00:57.760 about them, but the far right is obviously wrong about that. But what it also proves is that our

01:01:04.000 society is not so unjust and so discriminatory that we don't stand a chance. They have a chance and

01:01:08.560 they're seizing it. And that's something we should celebrate. Um, so what I see is a political

01:01:16.080 level that's really, really screwed up, a really dangerous kind of cultural civil war of the elites,

01:01:21.440 which is trying to be imposed on the rest of society, but actually a lot of very reasonable people

01:01:26.640 in the middle of society going about their lives, making connections with each other, uh,

01:01:32.800 integrating with each other. Um, and the question is, well, we're going to be able to sustain

01:01:37.680 that progress in the, in the coming decades. Now, you know, I talk in the book a whole lot about a

01:01:44.480 bunch of policies that we can pursue, you know, it's easier to tolerate your neighbor and to be

01:01:49.280 open to newcomers when you have economic growth and you feel like, you know, if you lose your job,

01:01:55.200 you're not going to be impoverished. And when you feel your political institutions are inclusive,

01:01:58.720 and there's all kinds of little policies and reforms we can pass in order to sustain those

01:02:02.960 background conditions. Um, but, but, but, but my real optimism comes from, from, from the actual

01:02:10.480 changes we already are making in society. Perhaps one last point. Um, Americans have completely

01:02:17.920 accepted, and I'm starting to see a similar kind of rhetoric creep in, in the United Kingdom,

01:02:22.080 that, uh, the country's going to be majority minority by 2045 or something like that. Uh,

01:02:29.760 and that this is giving Democrats the sort of rising, uh, political majority. Um,

01:02:37.520 this is the one thing that, uh, Democrats and Republicans in this country agree on, uh, and it's

01:02:43.680 wrong and it's dangerous. It is wrong because actually voting behavior is way more complicated than that.

01:02:52.000 Um, in the 1960s, Irish Americans were one of the most reliable voter groups for Democrats.

01:02:56.720 Now they're one of the most reliable voter groups for Republicans. Donald Trump was competitive in

01:03:02.000 the 2020 elections because he increased his share of a vote among every non-white voter groups compared

01:03:08.800 to 2016 among African Americans, among Asian Americans, particularly among Latinos. And Joe Biden is the

01:03:15.520 46th president of the United States because he significantly improved his share of a vote among white

01:03:21.120 voters relative to Hillary Clinton. So we've actually seen a racial depolarization of the electorate in

01:03:27.840 the last years. And that's a good thing. I don't want to live in a country where I can look at the

01:03:30.800 color of your skin and know who you're voting for. That sounds terrible and dangerous. But I'd go even

01:03:36.640 one step further. I no longer believe that America is ever going to be majority minority. Now, if you

01:03:43.600 accept the definition of the United States Census Bureau, if you accept the one drop rule generalized to

01:03:51.520 every demographic group, if you accept that anybody who has, you know, seven white and one

01:03:58.160 Asian grandparent is a person of color, right? If you accept that anybody who has any kind of

01:04:05.280 concept connection to a Spanish or Portuguese speaking country, like my Brazilian Uber driver

01:04:12.240 yesterday who dropped, who dropped, who picked me up from the airport, who had a Bolsonaro 2022

01:04:18.560 hat in his car and told me about how much he loves Donald Trump, you know, if you think that those

01:04:25.520 people all define as people of color and that they're naturally on the left politically, then

01:04:30.640 perhaps all of this view of the future of America might be right. But that's just a really strange way

01:04:38.160 of looking at the world. And so I think what's actually happening is what the sociologist Richard

01:04:43.440 Alba has described as sort of broadening of the American mainstream. By the time at which in some

01:04:49.920 technical level, America is going to be majority minority, it just won't make sense and it already

01:04:54.960 doesn't make much sense to describe the country as somehow naturally split into this monolithic

01:04:59.680 group of white people and this monolithic group of people of color. So if you're a racist who just

01:05:04.400 cares about the purity of white people and thinks that, you know, any non-white ancestor that any

01:05:09.360 American has somehow makes them impure and makes them non-white, then it makes sense to say that

01:05:14.160 America is going to be majority minority by 2045. If you're somebody who's actually thinking about

01:05:19.280 sociological reality and people's self-conception, how they think about themselves, how they interact,

01:05:24.480 who's friends with whom, who's married with whom, how people are voting, this whole concept doesn't make

01:05:29.600 any sense. Yeah, Yasha, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. If people want to

01:05:36.240 find you online, if they want to buy your book, how do they do that? Well, by The Great Experiment,

01:05:43.920 it's called, in the United States it's called The Great Experiment, where diverse democracies fall

01:05:47.440 apart and how they can endure in the UK. It's called The Great Experiments, how to make diverse

01:05:53.040 democracies work. You can buy it in your bookstore, you can buy it on terrible online retailers like

01:05:57.200 Amazon, you can buy it anywhere. Three more plugs, follow me on Twitter,

01:06:01.600 Yasha underscore Mung, Y-A-S-C-H-A underscore M-O-U-N-K. Listen to my podcast, The Good Fight,

01:06:09.120 and subscribe to my online publication called Persuasion, which tries to stand up for philosophically

01:06:15.520 liberal values against its many attackers from the left and the right. Fantastic, Yasha. Well,

01:06:22.000 before we let you go, we've got a couple of questions from our local supporters that only

01:06:28.640 they will see. But before that, our final question is always the same. What is the one thing that we're

01:06:33.680 not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? I'm going to go to a completely

01:06:38.880 different topic. Look, I don't know whether aliens exist, you know, they probably don't,

01:06:44.320 and we're probably not going to make contact with them. But if you know anything about human history

01:06:50.400 and what it means to be colonized, you should know that it is a very bad idea to be sending signals

01:06:56.400 out into outer space saying, hey, aliens, if you're around, here we are, we're sitting ducks,

01:07:00.960 come and get us. And that's what humanity is doing. I think we shouldn't.

01:07:05.120 And by the point, by the way, the point has been made on that is any civilization that's not from the

01:07:10.400 earth that was capable of coming here would probably be a lot more powerful than we were.

01:07:14.640 So maybe you're right. Perhaps the wonderful altruistic beings that just want to share their

01:07:20.320 fancy food with us, or perhaps they want to do terrible things to us as most human societies did

01:07:25.760 when they had the guns and technologies to go and subjugate other human societies.

01:07:31.280 There's a nice positive note to end here to be honest. Fantastic stuff. Well, thanks for joining us,

01:07:36.320 Yasha. We're going to ask you our questions from our locals in a second. But for now,

01:07:39.920 thank you so much for joining us, watching the show, listening to it. We will see you very soon

01:07:44.480 with another brilliant episode like this one or our show, all of which go out at 7pm UK time.

01:07:49.760 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:07:54.960 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:07:58.800 What would be the effects of a democracy falling apart? Would it be like the old Yugoslavia?

01:08:04.000 For example, would England collapse into a disparate nation-states?

TRIGGERnometry - July 07, 2022

Can Democracy Survive Identity Politics？ With Yascha Mounk

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