This week on Forward!

But my book barely has any stories of people being fired or cancelled because I think for the

stakes go well beyond that. They go to questions like how our children are

educated, how we are encouraging the next generation of Americans to see

themselves and to see each other. I don't want a society in which every person is

leaning more into their sort of tribal self-interest and why it's joined the game

and say, great, we're going to be proud right people fighting for our interests.

That sounds to me like a description of a terribly deeply divided society.

It is my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast, the author of the brand new, the identity

trap, a story of ideas and power in our time, writer for the Atlantic, Johns Hopkins,

professor Yasha Monk. Welcome back, Yasha. Andrew, I look forward to talking with you about this book.

Yeah, we had you on a couple of years ago talking about your last book, The Great Experiment

about democracy and you actually hinted at the themes of the identity trap in that book.

But you delved in headlong and I dare say this is something that is really imperative.

There's been this fascinating progression over the last number of years where

and you catalog it painstakingly in the identity trap where what you call the identity synthesis

has risen and overrun academia and media institutions and nonprofits and other things.

But now there is this kind of, wait a minute, is this really what we want?

Is this really working? What is it? And so your book strikes me as very, very timely.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, you know, I am by training an intellectual historian and a political theorist.

And I've just been struck that over the last decades we've seen the emergence of this genuinely new ideology

which is very different from previous strains of left-wing thought.

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