It’s been quite some time since I hosted a book giveaway on this newsletter, and I’m excited about this one. Now, full disclosure, I am only halfway through The Identity Trap — lot going on — but I really like it so far. It’s a very thoughtful, carefully constructed critique of certain surprisingly influential strains of identitarian excess.
Yascha, who (more full disclosure) is a buddy of mine, does an excellent job tracing the histories of world-altering ideas and thinkers in a nuanced, compassionate manner. There are so many ways criticism of illiberal tendencies in lefty and liberal spaces can go wrong — sometimes bonkersly so — and he succumbs to none of them. It’s clear, on every page, that he is he applying the same level of rigor to this subject that he has previously applied to helping us all to better understand Donald Trump, far-right European populism, and other important subjects.
The publisher, Penguin Press, has generously offered to send three copies to Singal-Minded readers. They can’t do e-books, unfortunately, and the contest is U.S.-only.
To enter, simply fill out this single-item form that will ask for the email address associated with your Singal-Minded subscription. Google Forms will helpfully dumb all the entries into a spreadsheet, and then I’ll use a random number generator to pick three winners. For the first drawing, whoever is picked will win a copy as long as they are at least a free subscriber. After that, I’ll keep drawing until I land on paying subscribers, meaning two of the three copies are reserved for that exalted crew. The contest is open until 10:00 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow, Tuesday the 3rd, and any entries that come in later than that will be tossed. I’ll notify the winners by the end of the day Wednesday. (Please only enter once — if someone is drawn and I see they entered more than once, I’ll disqualify them.)
For those who want a bit more information about the book, here’s the blurb from the publisher:
For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.
But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin.
This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.
In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.” He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.
Good luck!
Maybe it should be a "singal item" form.
Mounk was excellent on Sam Harris' pod. Can't enter as I'm UK based but this is definitely in the must read pile