Marshall here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

My guest today, Yasha Monk, is making a return appearance on The Realignment.

Last year he came on the show to discuss his book, The Great Experiment,

Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart, and How They Can Endure.

Today, he's released a new book. It's called The Identity Trap,

a story of ideas and power in our time. In the book, Yasha explores the origin

of a set of ideas, described by supporters as either anti-racism or social justice,

and by critics as critical race theory or wokeness, that have transformed America over the past decade.

Ultimately, he argues that this set of ideas, which he decides to call the identity synthesis,

will ultimately fail no matter how noble. Yasha was born in Germany to Polish parents,

and is one of the best-known academics in the populism and future of liberal democracy space,

so he's perfectly equipped to have this conversation, especially in the good faith way of it,

it should be conducted, something that's kind of absent from a lot of the culture war dynamic issues.

He also answers the broader question of why this is a topic worth exploring the first place,

because as I point out to him, there are numerous listeners, especially this podcast,

who would argue that social justice and culture war issues are actually impediments to

broader focus on economic issues, so he gets to that question as well, too. A huge thank you to

the Foundation for American Innovation, supporting the work of this podcast. I hope you all enjoy

this conversation. Yasha Moog, welcome back to the Realignment. Thank you so much.

I really look forward to our conversation. Yeah, we spoke last year and you're

quite prolific, so you have a hefty back-to-back 2022-2023, but obviously the category of

topic you write on is very, very pression and important right now, so this all makes sense.

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