How,
when, and even whether these ideas escaped their academic homes is the real quandary.
Most of Mounk’s thinkers penned their famous essays and monographs decades ago.
Foucault published Discipline and Punish in 1975, and Crenshaw coined
the term “intersectionality” in 1989. Why did their ideas only make it into the
mainstream—according to Mounk—many years later? What spurred college graduates
to make their “short march” in the 2010s as opposed, to, say, the 1990s?
Part
of Mounk’s answer lies in technology: the rise of social media and the
unprecedented democratization of knowledge it represents (for good or ill). The
other answer Mounk gives is the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump’s
nativist campaign spurred a new generation of activists to take lingering
racism (and misogyny) more seriously. “The widespread horror at the election of
Donald Trump,” he insists, “accelerated the takeover of the identity synthesis
in many elite institutions.” Worse, he writes, leftists started to turn on each
other, seeking to make a difference within progressive institutions as they
were barred from the halls of power in Washington, D.C.
That
story is, in my view, not incorrect so much as incomplete. Most of Mounk’s
examples of the “identity synthesis” cluster around the year 2020. And while
Trump’s presidency—and the horror it inspired among many progressive Americans—was
undoubtedly a catalyst for the rising popularity of certain ideas, such as
“diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “intersectionality,” that Mounk identifies
as elements of the “identity synthesis,” he largely skates by the effects of
that year’s two major events. The first, of course, is the Covid-19 pandemic,
which forced much of the nation indoors and into isolation. As concern about
the disease has receded and life has returned to “normal,” it seems
(anecdotally) like public passion for DEI and other hallmarks of the “identity
synthesis” has also retreated.