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The original was posted on /r/blockedandreported by /u/True-Sir-3637 on 2023-10-30 06:31:40.

[BARPod relevance: Mounk was on BARPod on July 2nd, 2020 and Lukianoff was on July 9th, 2021; both books talk extensively about “cancel culture,” identity politics, and various topics (and cases) that have been covered by the Pod]

I have been a bit underwhelmed by Yascha Mounk’s podcast and the whole Persuasion platform (nothing against Mounk personally, just seemed a little generic center-left and “why can’t we all just get along”-ish), so my expectations coming into The Identity Trap were fairly low.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by Identity Trap. It offered a compelling and accessible intellectual history of identity politics and the various theories behind it. It summarizes authors and their ideas in nuanced and generally sympathetic fashion while subjecting them to fair criticism. I was especially interested in how many original formulations of these ideas were passed through some kind of Tumblr-style (no, really, there’s a whole section in here on Tumblr!) reworking that often made them both more broadly appealing and logically incoherent.

There’s also a sense of progression to the book as it becomes clearer and clearer how all the pieces were in place for 2016 and 2020 at both the intellectual and societal levels. By the end, I felt much more familiar with the specific pieces of identity politics and capable of mustering some kind of plausible-sounding response to most (in some cases, just pointing back to the original formulation). Mounk also does a nice job of building an alternative case towards a more pluralist, liberal (in the John Stuart Mill-classical sense) approach to society and institutions. This alternative approach does seem more theoretical than practical though and I doubt that it will convince skeptical readers, but turning the book into an empirical argument would have doubled it in length, so I think it’s fine to stick in the realm of mostly theory.

In contrast, The Cancelling of the American Mind comes from venerable free speech warrior Greg Lukianoff and a new co-author, Rikki Schlott. I really like Lukianoff’s approach overall to free speech and what FIRE (which Lukianoff leads) is doing on First Amendment issues, plus I thought that adding someone younger who had gone through “cancel culture” as a student might add some interesting insight.

Alas, the book is… weird. It’s not even really a book, more a series of prominent cases “ripped from the headlines” with added commentary. If you were paying attention to Twitter, you probably are familiar with many of these cases already (Hamline, Stanford Law, etc.). While this might be useful in revealing the depth of the problem to the uninitiated, it feels episodic and unfocused. While Mounk’s book seemed designed to gently hold the hand of a disaffected centrist liberal while unraveling a lot of the assumptions of modern identity politics, Cancelling seems more designed to appeal to those who already subscribe to, say, The Free Press and want more examples.

That’s not to say that the ideas are bad or wrong; the content here is generally good, principled, pro-free speech, it’s just the book feels disorganized. There is an interesting discussion of raising children to be less fragile, but it’s next to chapters on corporate cancellation, K-12 education, higher education, comedy, science, and psychotherapy that all seem to muddle the message (perhaps this presages trouble for FIRE’s change from focusing on “Education” to “Expression” more broadly). There isn’t a really good buildup to an overall point, more a repeated hammer of “this is outrageous” incidents. Even the “Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All But There is a Solution” subtitle is clunky. I also don’t think it would convince any non-believers; the tone is a bit all over the map and there are weird points of emphasis like “look how great FIRE is by hiring someone without a college degree!” (Schlott dropped out of NYU).

Both books, as usual, don’t have that much in the way of detail to offer when it comes to solutions besides the standard “roll back DEI offices, allow for more free speech from an institutionally neutral perspective, be brave.” I’m not sure how plausible or sustainable those are in our current politicized culture. But Mounk’s at least does a nice job of outlining “how we got here” and I would feel more comfortable recommending it to someone who disagreed with me. I’m not sure who Cancelling is intended for other than the already-supportive (Cancelling does spend a couple of pages on Singal, so yay BARPod?).

Happy to hear from any other BARPodians who have read these books on your thoughts.