In the United States today it often seems like our discourse around race and gender is hopelessly polarized. Either you believe that racism is just as bad as it was in the 1950s, or you believe that we live in a completely post-racial society in which racism and intolerance are things of the past.
What is most refreshing about The Identity Trap is its deliberate and successful effort to break out of this binary. In the book, Political Scientist Yascha Mounk explains how he believes the modern political left has mistakenly remade itself around an ideology that positions racial identity as the most important aspect of every individual American, and racial oppression as the defining feature of American society. But at the same time, he acknowledges that there are real issues with racism in our country.
As a self-identified liberal, Mounk has written this book in order to help his “tribe” overcome this problem and enable it to fulfill its ambitions to make America a more inclusive society and a stronger democracy.
If you’d like to learn more about The Identity Trap, you can check out my full review of the book for FAIR Substack, for which I am the Managing Editor.
The origins, consequences and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become highly influential around the world.
For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. It is no surprise then that many who passionately believe in social justice have come to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity if they are to resist injustice.
But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minorities has transformed into an obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new…
I’ve recently been particularly interested in the sharp decline of trust that Americans feel in our institutions. As I see it, for all their flaws, our country cannot survive without functioning institutions, so we must find a plan to restore them in a way that Americans across the political spectrum can get behind.
A Time to Build provides the most compelling blueprint I’ve yet encountered for that restoration. In accessible language and convincing (and at times surprising) arguments, Yuval Levin reminds us why these institutions are so central to our lives (though it may not always seem so) and shows us how the seemingly small actions we take in our own communities can have a significant impact on institutional trust on a national scale.
Americans are living through a social crisis. Populist firebrands - on left and right alike - propose to address the crisis through acts of tearing down. They describe themselves as destroying oppressive establishments, clearing weeds, draining swamps. But, as acclaimed conservative intellectual Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of forces that unite us and militate against alienation.
Both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly respond to crisis by threatening to dismantle institutions that they perceive as belonging to…
At Christmas dinner this year, you might wonder whether the differences you see between your relatives of various ages are part of a broader generational difference that extends to many more families beyond yours.
In Generations, Jean Twenge presents mountains of data from her interviews and research as a social scientist to show that yes, there are indeed measurable differences in culture, values, and behavior between generations of Americans. While some of these differences are of little consequence, many of them are profound enough to drive widespread changes in America’s cultural norms.
This book, more than anything else, is what motivated me to stop using social media and to closely monitor the time I am spending on my smartphone. (I am at the very oldest end of Gen Z, if you are interested).
A groundbreaking, revelatory portrait of the six generations that currently live in the United States and how they connect, conflict, and compete with one another-from the acclaimed author of Generation Me and iGen.
The United States is currently home to six generations of people:
-the Silents, born 1925-1945 -Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964 -Gen X, born 1965-1979 -Millennials, born 1980-1994 -Gen Z, born 1995-2012 -and the still-to-be-named cohorts born after 2012.
They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep…
Since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party has been committing genocide in its far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, traditionally known as East Turkistan. It has imprisoned more than one million of the region's Turkic ethnic minorities in what it calls "re-education camps," an act that has been characterized as "the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust." And it has transformed the entirety of Xinjiang into what has been aptly called an "open-air prison," where Turkic people are constantly monitored by surveillance cameras and police patrols.
In Middle Country, Grayson Slover recounts the week he spent as a "student tourist" in Xinjiang. Slover weaves in relevant history and political analysis for readers to grasp how his first-hand experiences fit within the broader context of the CCP's genocidal campaign.
