We live in a changing world with geopolitical forces and academic ideas that are challenging our democratic norms. Extreme politics, both on the right and the left, are very much on the rise in many different countries.

Both of these extreme forms of politics are undermining our classic democratic norms of universalism, principles that originated with and were enshrined by the American and French Revolutions. 

Today’s guest is Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is the author of numerous books and articles defending the liberal and universal values of free democratic societies, but today we’re going to focus on just two of his books. 

The first of these two books is called “The Great Experiment” which was published last year. In that book, he writes that our modern multi-cultural societies in the West are under tremendous pressure to integrate these diverse populations in ways that ensure prosperity for all, and most importantly that manage to maintain our democratic norms.
This year, he’s back with a new book that focuses specifically on one of those traps, the book is called “The Identity Trap” and in it, he examines the meteoric rise of an ideology which he calls the identity synthesis, in the last couple of decades, especially in the United States from obscure academic environments to the mainstream.

In this episode, we talk about what needs to happen to ensure the success of multicultural democracies, we talk about the origins of the identity synthesis and its development, and how different countries have different models to meet these challenges head-on. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Books mentioned in the episode:

The best book I’ve never heard of: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (1940)
The book that he loves but just can’t recommend to others: The Half-Girlfriend by Chetan Bhagat (2014)
The best book that he read in the last 12 months: Essays by George Orwell
The book that he found disappointing in the last 12 months: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)
The book that he would take to a desert island: The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
The book that changed his mind: The Happiness Curve, by Jonathan Rauch (2018)


Find Yascha:
Website: https://www.yaschamounk.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yaschamounk/
Pre-order his new book: https://amzn.eu/d/gePpkZ8

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!