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This is Deep State Radio coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington DC and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host David Rothkoff coming today from Washington DC as usual. I am really happy today to have one of our periodic discussions about a book we think is important for you to read.

The book is the identity trap, a story of ideas and power in our time comes out shortly. It is written by one of the most thoughtful people we know, Yasha Malk.

He is a political scientist known for his work on the rise of populism in the crisis of liberal democracy. He's a professor of practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and a contributing writer for the Atlantic. Welcome Yasha.

Thank you for having me back on David.

No, no, the last discussion was great. I always follow closely what you have written. This book is on a subject that to me seems especially important.

What led you from the last book to this book?

As you mentioned, I've been worried about the state of our democracy for a long time. I like to say that I'm a democracy crisis hipster. I worried about the crisis of democracy before was cool.

I've written a lot about the nature of populism, about how to build diverse democracies that can actually thrive and sustain themselves.

The things led me to think about the new set of ideas, about various forms of identity of race and gender and sexual orientation, but it becomes so influential today.

The first is my set of questions about how we are going to be able to win the client's table of actual majorities we need in order to force a Republican party to reform itself to become a pro-democratic party again.

And I think part of the difficulty is that on some important issues, Democrats at the moment talk past the majority of the population that even for what I call the identity synthesis, what some people call quote and quote, walkness is superficially deeply opposed to the right wing of authoritarianism of somebody like Trump in electoral terms.

One is for you to be others young, they actually help each other in various ways.

And then the second point is a more substantive set of concerns, but I want to build a society in which we live up to the United States Constitution rather than ripping it up, a society in which we're fully aware of the ways in which racial and other injustices still shape our society today.

But in which we come to make these things less important, in which we're less defined rather more defined by the groups into which we're born.

And I think this really interesting new ideology that has taken on tremendous power, first in universities and then in other parts of social and political life over the last decades is on the other side of those debates.

It's a trap and set of ideas that good, decent, smart people can be attracted to for understandable reasons that ultimately make it harder for them and for all of us to achieve the goals of society in which we want to live.

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