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The Good Fight

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Rethinking Identity

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7963 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2021

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, the Ethicist columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and one of today's deepest thinkers about the nature of identity. His scholarly writing, journalism, and novels help us to envision a world in which our professed categories enrich rather than impoverish—or, in his terms, a world which reveres “universality plus difference.”  In this week’s conversation, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Yascha Mounk discuss neutrality as a liberal ideal, the limits of identity politics, and the merits of race-abolitionism. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John T. Williams, and Brendan Ruberry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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That's better H-E-L-P.com.

0:28.8

This is the great point of Mills on Liberty. He's talking about a liberal society, not just a liberal government.

0:38.0

He wants people who are persuaded by him to think of their fellow citizens as people who are making their own lives

0:44.8

and entitled to do so. But non-speople you can't say I think you're making a mess.

0:48.8

What you can't do is stop them, but you can argue with them. He's not against arguing with them.

0:53.0

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

0:57.0

A few days ago we finally had the long-awaited elections in Germany, the first elections in in which Angela Merkel has not been a candidate for the

1:14.4

chancellorship in about 16 years.

1:18.6

Surprising, the Social Democrats ended up coming top beating Angela Merkel's Christian democrats

1:26.4

by about 1.5 percentage points. After that, I distanced for it though is the Green Party followed by the

1:35.2

center-right Liberal Party and finally the far-right AFD.

1:40.9

Now there are three really interesting things to pay attention to in this

1:48.8

election I think. The first is a very good piece of news for the state of liberal democracy around the world to at least in Germany.

1:58.0

And that is that the far-right AFD for the first time in its history lost the chair international election, got about

2:06.0

two percentage point less than we did four years ago, and that in general the center of gravity in the German electoral system still seems to be very much with moderate parties.

...

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