When Progressive Principles Undermine Democratic Goals with Yascha Mounk

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • The Identity Trap with Yascha Mounk, Ph.D.

  • Outside of Politics: The Joy of Daily Games

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EPISODE RESOURCES

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YASCHA MOUNK

Much of the research mentioned in today’s podcast comes from Yascha Mounk’s work and writing in The Identity Trap. These works were also mentioned in the conversation:

DAILY GAMES

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

Sarah [00:00:33] Welcome to another episode of Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. Before we get started on today's episode, we are currently booking speaking engagements for 2024. Now, we've told you how much we love doing this and how much we learn from being in your communities; however, we also want to make clear that we bring an enormous amount of value, don't we, Beth?  

Beth [00:00:53] We do. We have now spoken with small churches and libraries. We have spoken to the global workforce at PayPal. We have talked to the student bodies at giant state schools and small liberal arts universities. What we know is that no matter where we are, when we leave, we get feedback that it was the most engaging event the organization has had in years because we do in person what we do hear on the podcast. We don't shy away from hard truths. We always say we're willing to talk about anything. We make great efforts to understand the challenges before a particular community of people that we're spending time with. We give grace and empathy so people leave feeling like we listen to their problems and we offered realistic strategies to move forward. I told a group last week, Sarah, it is important to me to be useful. I want to leave a speaking event knowing that no one felt their time was wasted, and we gave them something that they could put into practice that very day.  

Sarah [00:01:46] Now, that is definitely an orienting principle here at Pantsuit Politics. We do not like to waste anybody's time because I don't like to have my time wasted.  

Beth [00:01:54] That's right.  

Sarah [00:01:54] That's my number one pet peeve. We pride ourselves on this work, you guys. No talk is ever the same. We often have repeat customers, which is the biggest compliment. So if your organization is struggling to meet goals or is facing a tough transition or feeling disconnected, then reach out and let's see if we can come and speak and help.  

Beth [00:02:13] So one of the ways we try to approach the news in a more honest way is by acknowledging that the news is more than breaking headlines. So rarely is it just the facts. Our news environment is informed by our politics and our civic culture, and for lack of a better term, the vibe. And what both of us and we think probably many of you have felt over the past several years is that the vibe is extremely intense right now.  

Sarah [00:02:42] It's a little intense right now. And let me just say, as the left leaning member of Pantsuit Politics, I think the vibe is especially intense on our side of the aisle. Which stakes so high during the Trump years, during the pandemic for all of us, but particularly for vulnerable groups of Americans. I think we all felt this pressure to show up in the most impactful ways possible all the time, through our politics, through our language, through our choices that consume us. And the conversation we're sharing with you today is an effort to take a deep breath and a step back and ask. How is that working?  

Beth [00:03:19] And to do that, we have a scholar who I have greatly admired for several years now. Yascha Mounk is here. Yasha is a Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Affairs. He is one of the world's leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism. In his new book, The Identity Trap, Yascha explores the academic history of how many of our current popular progressive ideas surrounding identity, and why putting identity at the center of our social, cultural and political life can work against our shared goals in a liberal democracy.  

Sarah [00:04:00] Now, listen, this conversation starts really dense with the academic history so we can lay a foundation of what we're talking about, but stick with us. And if you get into this beginning conversation and think, "Wait, I'm lost," Beth has done a primer on this first part of Yascha's book on our premium channels yesterday on Monday. So that'll help you lay a foundation so you don't feel like you've been thrown into the deep end. But reading Yascha's book, the emotion I felt most often was relief. Relief that someone was naming what I was feeling when it comes to our civil discourse on the left. And we hope that he named something you've been feeling as well. And that's why we hope you stick with the conversation.  

Beth [00:04:39] As always, with a topic that is this vast, we will not mention everything worth mentioning. This is one conversation about one book, and it doesn't even hit everything that's in this book. It is a very rich text and we know it will launch further conversations with all of you after the episode, and we really look forward to that. We trust you with challenging discussions because you've shown over and over that you trust us to start them and to keep them going long after the episode is over and.  

Sarah [00:05:06] We're going to wrap it up real light. And we're going to talk about the new New York Times game connections at the end on Outside of politics. So stick around for that as well. Without further ado, Yascha Mounk.  

[00:05:15] Music Interlude.  

[00:05:33] Yascha, welcome to Pantsuit politics. We are thrilled to have you.  

Yascha Mounk [00:05:35] I'm so excited for this. 

Sarah [00:05:36] Okay, here's the first question. We got to get it out of the way. I told Beth, I said, "If we don't tackle this first, people will struggle to listen to the rest of it. Why are we engaging in analysis and critique of the progressive side of the political spectrum when the right side of the political spectrum is so destructive to democracy generally, I think is a pretty objective statement. So why do we want to focus on this side of the political spectrum when that side of the political spectrum is so dysfunctional?  

Yascha Mounk [00:06:05] Well, first of all, I agree with you. I was a graduate student in political science when I started seeing a lot of far right populists doing very well in elections in Europe. And coming from Europe and observing this from quite close up, I was very concerned about that. And I was surprised that many of my professors were very smart. People didn't seem very worried about it. They didn't like both political parties [inaudible], but was going to stay in opposition. And, yes, democracy is quite brittle, it's quite fragile in poorer countries, and countries where it hasn't been around for so long. But in France or the United States, you really don't have to worry about it. And so I was actually one of the first to warn about the real danger that these right wing populists would pose to democratic institutions. I kind of like to say when I was a democracy hipster, I was worried about the doom of democracy before it was cool. And that's what I've done a lot of my time worrying about for the last ten years. I wrote two books about the dangers of populism, for example, the people versus Democracy where our freedom is in danger and how to save it. I talked about an embassy on my podcast. I wrote many articles about it. So I take those very, very seriously. There's nevertheless some reasons to also look at some of the things that might be going wrong in our own end of the political spectrum. One of them is straightforwardly electoral. After seven years of fighting somebody like Donald Trump, he's still running even with Joe Biden in polls for the next election. We might say, look, this is just because everybody is nuts and we don't like the average voter.  

[00:07:41] Great. We still live in a democracy. And that means we have to trust at least somewhat in the wisdom of the average voter. And even if we don't trust in the wisdom, which actually I do in certain ways, we need to at least be able to win. And so perhaps looking in the mirror a little bit and thinking about what could we do better is actually part and parcel of trying to fight against these problems. But beyond that, I think that's just an important question about the kind of society in which we want to live. But the bottom is what I'm driven by. I'm a political theorist by training. And so trying to think about what kind of society do we actually want to build is really important. I don't want to build the kind of society that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or any of those people are trying to build. But just saying the opposite of what they say is going to be a safe guide is pretty bad as well, because then we'll just do a 180 and they actually get to determine what we believe. And so we have to have serious conversations within the left about what kind of society do we want. And I'm on the left in part because I do think the sort of traditional, historical, universalist, aspirations of the left to create a world in which how you treated is less dependent on the group into which you're born, a critique of a preexisting world, precisely because who you were was so determined on your opportunities, on your treatment, on how you would live. There was a lot of what was appealing to me about the left. And I think that we're giving up on some of that in ways that is just really counterproductive.  

Sarah [00:09:10] And it's all one ecosystem. It's all exist together. So you have to, in a certain extent, I think, look at it together and see how it's complementing, contrasting, having a conversation together.  

Yascha Mounk [00:09:23] Yeah, absolutely.  

Beth [00:09:24] Yascha, I read Persuasion and I listen to The Good Fight and really value your work. And I heard you say on The Good Fight recently as you were introducing your book, The Identity Trap, that you had done the work and wanted to offer a critique. And I thought that was so clever because something I really value about your work is how you very explicitly go back and forth between an academic conception, a philosophical conception of what's happening, and then how that gets flattened out for the masses through social media and pop culture. And so knowing that that's how you're working in this book, you're telling us here has philosophically and academically how this is developed and then here is how is how it has translated to the public, can you just give our audience a description of the identity synthesis and how you got there?  

Yascha Mounk [00:10:11] Yeah, absolutely. So the book has four parts. And, as I said, in the first part of the book, I really do what I was trained as a political theorist and intellectual historian is, I tell the intellectual roots of what this new set of ideas about race and gender and sexual orientation, which is now so influential, actually come from. The ambition of that part of the book is to say, now where did the ideas that started really influential in American universities and some other countries universities by about 2010 come from? And then the second part of the book says, all right, how did those ideas then get popularized and sometimes vulgarized into the form in which they had real mainstream influence by about 2020? And then I go on in the third part to critique some of the applications of those ideas and areas from free speech to cultural appropriation, and then finally to offer, I think, a more ambitious and forward looking humanist universalist alternative for the kind of society that we should build. So in the first part of the book was the part about the intellectual roots. I did the reading. I did the work. This is what I know to do. This is what I've been trained as an academic. And what's very clear is of the story of it's told on the right of a modern politics at the moment about the 'origins of wokeness' is simply wrong. They tend to say that this is a form of what we call cultural Marxism, which is meant to be a kind of a little bit of an attack. But it's also just the wrong intellectual category. They think that you can understand this phenomenon by taking traditional Marxist political forward, taking out class and stuffing in these identity categories.  

[00:11:47] Though, actually, when you do read the sources of these ideas, that turns out to be wrong. I start my story not with Marx or Marquis, but with Michel Foucault in the fifties and sixties in postwar Paris. And he really is very skeptical of all forms of what he calls ground out. Now, one of his core narratives is philosophical liberalism is the underpinnings of our democratic political system, but one of them is the Marxist set of ideas that are really influential in the country at the time. He clearly sets himself against it. So it's actually started as an opposition to Marxism. And what the tradition takes-- I'm just going to very briefly tell you a few key actors. Very briefly. So what politician takes from Foucault is a skepticism towards the possibility of universal truth and an emphasis on political discourses. The idea that power is not just exercise top down Joe Biden or Donald Trump tell you what's happening and you're sort of bound by that because we live in, of course, a state. But it is in much more informal, complicated ways. So this podcast has coercive power through the discourse it imposes on society. We then go to postcolonialists, particularly Edward Said who says, look, we need to have a more political conception of these discourses. Foucault wants to understand them and perhaps disrupting temporarily. He doesn't think it can get better or worse. He's the quietest in that sense. But, actually, the West has always exercised the power of the Orient or the East through its discourse of Orientalism.  

[00:13:18] And if we change the discourse, if we upset it, we can empower these formerly colonized countries to fight back against the West. And so from this, we take this kind of politicized form of discourse analysis. What it is to make progress on issues of gender, for example, is to critique the Barbie movie or to praise it or to whatever. It's all about the discourse of analysis. The next step is the work of Gayatri Spivak who's deeply influenced by the Postmodernists, herself an important translator of that tradition. But who says, look, somebody like Foucault and l [inaudible], they say that the workers in Paris can speak for themselves. They don't need intellectuals like us to speak for them. Well, perhaps, but the kind of political subaltern people in countries like India, where she's from, they have fewer resources, fewer visibility on the world stage, probably more obstacles to getting an education. They can't speak for themselves. We do need to speak for them. And so, even for this kind of essentialist accounts of identity, philosophically suspicious, dubious, we should pretend that they are right in order to raise consciousness for these groups and allow them to fight back. So she embraces what she calls a strategic essentialism for essentialist accounts of identity, around for strategic purposes we should pretend that they're right. We should encourage people to identify by these groups.  

[00:14:40] And then we get to the introduction office, boogie man of today's discourse of critical race theory. And that starts with someone like Derrick Bell, who is a really interesting figure, a key lawyer for the NAACP in the 1960s, fighting to desegregate schools and businesses and other establishments throughout the American South and some places in the north as well. But who comes to think of it as a fundamental mistake? Who comes to say, actually, we civil rights lawyers weren't listening to our black clients. They wanted better schools. They didn't really care about integrated schools that much. And perhaps Brown versus Board of Education was a mistake. Perhaps, actually, we should have fought for schools that were separate but truly equal. So this is a very, very radical attack on what he calls the "defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement". And it shows really the embrace of a politics in which you're not trying to live up to universal aspirations and principles in the way that Douglass and Martin Luther King and later Barack Obama did. But which is they know if they made false promises, we should reject them. And then you get to Kimberlé Crenshaw and the embrace of something like intersectionality. So just to step back, those are sort of the main themes that make up the identity synthesis.  

[00:15:54] When you take together the emphasis on a skepticism towards absolute truth and embrace of particular forms of politicized discourse analysis which do politics, is to critique, creating discourse, an embrace of strategic essentialism which now leads many progressive educators in the country to say that their task is to instill the "correct racial self-identification identity" in the pupils. You take the rejection of universalist politics, and the interpretation of intersectionality was not Crenshaw's interpretation, but which basically emphasizes that if you are a woman and I'm a man, I can't fully understand you. If you stand a different dissection of identities, I can't really understand you. That really mix up a lot of today's political discourse. And what I will say is that reading all of these theorists taught me a lot. I disagree with them in some fundamental ways. I love Barack Obama. I deeply admire many of these figures in black, liberal, political thought. People [inaudible] are fundamentally opposed to him. I think he's on the wrong side of that. But he's a smart, interesting academic with real insights and we should take them seriously. And I enjoyed reading the work in the extensive research for his book. Then these ideas become popularized memeified in social media and so on, in a way that I find much more troubling. And then we get to figures like Robin DiAngelo, who frankly I don't think deserve quite the same respect.  

Sarah [00:17:18] I have to tell you, reading this history felt like reading my own memoir in this really weird way. I'm 42 years old. So I was in college in the early 2000s. I was a political science major and a women's studies minor. My professors at the time were obsessed with Foucault, talked about them all the time. I felt like I came to college and the first lesson I got taught was distrust the meta-narrative. And it was in so many ways right. What I had been taught was how the world worked for my Southern Baptist upbringing was harmful and wrong. And to critique that and to learn the skills of critique were so valuable. And then I can literally just walk through this. Well, then I learned about identity driven politics and how important it was to be able to consciousness raise and stand in my identity and say, "There are parts of this that are essential to my understanding as a political being, and you have to respect that and you have to listen to me." How many times in my life, to my children, to my friends on this podcast have I said, "We are not experts in each other's experiences." One million times, Yascha. I said it one million times because I believed it. And I still believe it to a certain extent. But watching this progression of ideas and realizing like, oh yeah, this all made sense to me. I wrote a blog post on my personal blog where I said you just have to call something racist. That's the only thing that gets people's attention. Like, this is the most important work we can do. Just call out racism.  

[00:18:57] And I think you do such a good job of articulating this, there is something appealing. We're not saying that everything that you just talked about, all these different political theories, like you said, they are informed and interesting. But that doesn't mean that they are new gospel. Like, I have articulated recently full circle back to being a Baptist, what it feels like. It feels like you're never good enough. It feels like nothing is ever good enough. That's where we've gotten to as a space as opposed to a vision for a better future and a vision of equality and a vision of those universal truths. And especially, I think, what accelerated this journey for me was having my 14-year-old pair it back to me these extreme political ideologies. He's learning through that social media lens. He's learning on YouTube. And hearing the way they sound when they come back at you. I know I didn't fully understand the scholarship and history of critical race theory, but listening to it, it reminds you what you said. Well, maybe there is some fundamental wisdom here, because I do think that you spend decades teaching Americans we're all equal. This is the progress of Martin Luther King and the presidency of Barack Obama. They can hear when the message changes to racism is permanent and there's nothing you can do about it. They hear that. They can hear that. And they're reacting not in the best ways, but there are, I think, some honest reactions underneath that really aren't just about this being a boogeyman.  

Yascha Mounk [00:20:22] Yeah, that's why I fought hard about what to call the book, and that's why I settled on this metaphor of The Identity Trap, because my book is ultimately critical of many of these ideas that a trap is something that has a few important attributes. One is that it contains allure by the assumption that lures you into the trap. And the second is that good, well-intentioned, smart people can end up falling into a trap. And falling into a trap is not like, oh, you asshole, you jerk. It's like, oh, something bad happened to you, that you didn't deserve to happen, right? And then finally it's bad for you. You don't want to fall into the trap. And so that's why I kind of like this metaphor. And the lure is the promise of the most open- eyed possible recognition of injustices in our country and the most radical possible action against those injustices. And, of course, there are deep and serious injustices in our country. And as we open up the conversation by saying what's really scary, political forces that may return to the White House. And so, of course, it is very appealing when somebody says, "Hey, here's a thing that's the most uncompromising, the most radical, and that's what you have to embrace," is, by the way, why I don't like the way of criticizing it or fighting back against it, but I like to call not-too-far. So it's like, oh, these ideas are all sort of right in the well, intentions, but I'll be going a little bit too far. Because I understand why some people say, "Well, can you go too far in fighting against injustice? Can you go too far in fighting for a good thing?" Why shouldn't I go too far? What does that mean?  

[00:22:04] But actually, for me, it's not going too far in the right direction, it is in fact in key ways going in the wrong direction, not because people are ill-intentioned, but because I think the vision for society of the [inaudible] is actually ultimately impoverished. It's not sufficiently ambitious. So perhaps one good example of this is precisely this debate about standpoint theory and standpoint epistemology. So there's a long tradition of castleford that's a reasonable last 30 or 40 years about how who we are influences how we see the world and what we can know. And traditionally an epistemology and theory of knowledge philosophers didn't think about that. That we need a card for it. What if the monsters trying to deceive me into thinking that the world exists when actually I'm out there alone, bored? How can I answer that? He wasn't thinking about how his social situation is influencing that.. He was standing in for all of humanity. And then some people started to say, "Well, hang on a second. If you're a black man in the United States, doesn't that influence how you perceive the world? Doesn't that allow you to see police violence and so on in a way that you might not as a white man. Or as a woman, don't you experience forms of sexual harassment or gender norms and stereotypes which assume you're going to be a caregiver or you should prioritize motherhood or other kinds of things in ways that are not going to happen to men." And that is right. And there's a subtle philosophical tradition, medical epistemology, that actually deals with that. But then the popularized form of that standpoint theory is much more extreme. And it doesn't just say, "Hey, it's hard for me to understand your experiences. I need to open my mind. I need to listen to you in order to do so. It says, "I cannot understand those experiences. If we stand at different intersections of identity, we're never going to be able to understand each other. And so therefore, rather than having political communication, what we should do is just to defer to each other.  

[00:24:04]  If I know that you come from a group that's more pressed than mine. I should delegate to you, hold space, and just do whatever you ask me to do. And that, I think, is both wrong on the substance. I think we are capable of understanding the injustices our fellow citizens face if we actually listen to them with an open mind. And it is wrong politically because very few people are going to be willing to delegate that judgment in that kind of way. And if they do delegate it, then be delegate it to the member of that group who already happens to agree with them. So really by just arguing by authority. And so that's why I want a more substantive vision of political solidarity. I hope for a country in which when I hear fellow citizens saying something that's happening to them, I want to say, oh, well, I have an experience that perhaps it didn't seem plausible to me, but tell me about it. And then I'm going to assess what they say. But you know what? If they speak compellingly and they have some evidence and I have an open mind, I'm going to come and agree with you and say, "Yes, I know that as a black man growing up in New York City, a lot of the times you would experience stop and frisk tactics, which were really demoralizing and damaging and scary." I've never experienced it myself. But, yes, I've listened to people. I've looked at some of the knowledge we have about it, and so that's really clear. I might not understand exactly what it feels like, but I know it's bad and unjust I don't want to fight against it because I stand in genuine solidarity with my fellow citizens, because that's the kind of society in which I want to live. Not because I say I don't understand you or what you're talking to me about, but I recognize you are a more pressed group. So I delegate to you, whatever you want to I'll do. But that's not an inspiring vision of political solidarity.  

Beth [00:25:47] I think your book helped me get clearer about something that I've been working on in myself. I've criticized myself a lot lately on the podcast for the way that I handled the Trump years. And as we go into a new election cycle, I'm really trying to say, "How do I ground myself during this time?" And I think part of what I dislike about the way I handled it in the first cycle is that I did that delegation. I tried to listen, I tried to do the work, and what I heard back is, "Well, Beth, the stakes are so high here for people of other identity groups. And you are married to a man with two kids in suburbia. You are so privileged, you are so white, you are a Christian. You're part of the majority on every dimension. And so, your role here is to support the people for whom the stakes are higher than you and to adopt the language of that kind of resistance posture." And it made me quite dismissive of ideas that I held for a long time in advance of that election and quite dismissive of people who are part of my circles of friends and family. And I don't want to live that way again.  

[00:27:02] And what I really appreciated in your book was that I was not being asked to reject the stories of the people that I've been seeking to listen to. Instead, I'm being invited to match the online version of that activism with the version that I see in reality. And what I see in reality is that the LGBTQ people in my actual life who I love and I'm close to are happy to eat at Chick-fil-A. And I see that many of the black parents in my life also do not think the school should separate students into affinity groups based on race. So I think in addition to saying it's not true that we can never understand each other based on our identity group, your book does a good job of saying also identity groups they're not homogeneous. They don't see everything the same way within themselves. And we're kind of reducing that experience when we claim online that there is a voice of the black community or a voice of the gay community or a voice of the trans community.  

Yascha Mounk [00:28:03] Yeah. In the book I quote Bayard Rustin, a great civil rights movement hero who was himself gay. And he says from this point, the notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites and of certain small groups of blacks who legitimately claim to speak for the majority. So he was really attuned to the way in which a lot of the time the people who speak for community, who claim to speak for the community really are not very representative of that. And, of course, what's going on here is that often those people are very highly educated, make a lot more money, move in often predominantly white progressive circles, and they broadly share the politics of those social circles as much as the politics of the people who happen to share their skin color or their sexual orientation or something like that. And that's what made Pete Buttigieg line about Chick-fil-A so great. I don't approve of politics, but I kind of like the chicken. That's what a lot of people are like. And I do worry, coming back to Trump, that the misunderstanding of that is a fundamental problem for beating Trump. The fundamental fact about the 2020 election, which Joe Biden did win, is that he won it in good part because he significantly increased his share of the vote among white voters relative to how Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  

[00:29:39] And by the way, Donald Trump was competitive in that election, in good part because he increased to share the vote among black voters, among Asian-American voters, and especially among Latino voters. And so we need to understand that in order to actually hold a vision of the future of this country, that's going to win not just a majority to keep Trump out of the White House in 2024, but a kind of political majority which will force Republicans back to sanity. Because in the long run, as a scholar of democracy, I know that if you have one pro-democracy party, one anti-democracy party, it's not going to work. But sometimes the opposition will win. So what we actually need to move through this moment is just a clear, broad, resounding political majority, which then forces the other political party to come back to sanity and to moderate as well. And to do that, we can't assume that the sort of most far left voices speak for that group just because they claim they do it. Just let me give two very quick examples of it. One, it's kind of a tired example by now, but it's telling that every Hispanic advocacy group talks about Latinx people. But according to polls, one or 2% of Hispanic people in the country prefer [inaudible]. And yet my university president, who I admire, every institutional leader in my view in my world uses Latinx because that small minority of people is sort of going to be angry if he doesn't say that, but everybody else is not going to protest in the same way if he does.  

[00:31:13] This is how unrepresentative people start to speak for groups more broadly. And I think there's is a problem here, especially for college educated people, people who perhaps are part of a broader social elite. Because what I see a lot of the time is what's called an availability heuristic. They're like, what do African-Americans believe? And rather than actually going out and speaking to African-Americans from a broad walk of life or perhaps listening to a focus group or looking at a poll, they say, well, what do my black friends think? And a lot of people you talk with now, thankfully, do have black friends. But those black friends went to the same elite institutions and they have views that tend to be very progressive because those are the median views of members of US institutions. So they say, "Hey, look, Jack and Jim and whoever else I know from Harvard or from Columbia or from wherever they went, they all have these super progressive views." So that must be representative of how black people think. That's a really dangerous political shortcut.  

Sarah [00:32:11] I think we named so many things there. I think one of them, and you talk about this in your book, is when the stakes are high there is this in-group out-group thing and you feel powerless in the face of the behavior of your opponents, so all you can do is police your own group. And goodness gracious, have we experienced that on the progressive left in the last six years? There's limited electoral power and impact for a lot of different reasons. And so what do we do? We call out each other. We shut down each other's language, even in clear violation of some of these principles. I was on Ibrahim X Kendi's Instagram page the other day. There was a controversy around Jamie Fox using anti-Semitic language. The carousel, I think, was at best inconsistent and at worst harmful. And there were three or four black Jewish women sitting at the intersection of that identity class who said this is a problem and they got shut down, every single one of them. And I thought, I didn't think this is what this was supposed to be about. But the stakes are high. The policing gets even more intense. And there's this sense of, like you said, sort of the Olympics, who's the biggest authority. And then there's this really weird purity situation, which you named so well, I think around the idea of cultural appropriation. Where it's like, well, who's appropriating who? And is this whose culture? And do you have a right to call it out or are you appropriating the culture for that? Because, of course, culture builds on each other. And we get ourselves twisted in knots. Then that goes through the wash of media consumption and then it looks really ridiculous to the average American just dipping in and out of this political discussion.  

Yascha Mounk [00:33:53] Yeah, one of the moments when I really had a kind of light bulb moment in doing research for this book was figuring out what happened in these progressive spaces after 2016. I think the story of how identity synthesis goes from campus to the rest of the society is complicated. It has to do with the rise of social media, with a way that transforms how people think about their own identities, with what kind of journalism it encourages and spreads in a viral manner with what I call the short mass for the institutions where people who imbibe these ideas at college go out into institutions and really sort of push for them to be implemented. There's lots of things, but the final transformation happens after 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, and it's precisely because of that purity mechanism. I found this really interesting research, but groups are actually usually quite receptive to inside critics. So when I've been a member of a group for a long time and I say, "Hey, I worry that we're going off the rails in a certain kind of way or worry we're making a strategic mistake here," usually groups are relatively good at listening to that, and that's a really important mechanism for keeping them effective and safe. That's good research on this. But in situations of external threat, internal critics are no longer heard. So when you have a feeling that we're under attack from the outside, internal critics are often seen as traitors and they're often actually evaluated worse than critics who come from outside of a group.  

[00:35:21] So from having a sort of special place with people going, "Okay, I know Sarah, I'm going to listen to her and what she has to say because I know she's of good intentions." Suddenly it's, "How dare you speak up against it? Are you secretly a spy. Are you secretly a traitor? Are you secretly on the other side?" And this is a key mechanism of what happens in these institutions. There's a great paper by an anthropologist in 1990s who anticipated some of this literature who said, "How come the enemy of humanity always turns out to be in the office just on the whole?" In that moment after 2016, 2017, where many people were understandably rightly scared about what was going on in the country, and we all wanted to have a form of political agency. And we're starting to realize that all of the hopes for somehow getting rid of Trump and not impeaching him or whatever was going to happen, it was not going to happen. Well, the one thing you have control over is your own political community. And you can try and purify that. And the most visible way of purifying that is to throw somebody out and turn five of them because of some real or often perceived misstep.  

[00:36:25] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:36:40] I found so much clarity in your writing about cultural appropriation. I love the phrase, the joy of mutual influence, and this emphasis that you put on the fact that every good thing art, food tradition is a blend of cultures and has been from practically the beginning of time. And I also appreciated how you said often when we are criticizing something as cultural appropriation, there is something wrong with it. But we're not naming what's wrong about it. It helped me so much. I remember we had this like a mini controversy when we first started the podcast about whether white children could dress as Moana for Halloween. And by you talking about how sometimes we'll see a party, using the example in the book of a frat party where people are dressing for Cinco de Mayo in insulting costumes. And you say what's wrong here is not the cultural appropriation of Cinco de Mayo, which is kind of a dubious holiday anyway, but what's wrong is that they are being insulting about this entire identity group of people. And that helped me figure out why I was never bothered by the white girl dressing as Moana, because that is celebratory, not condescending or degrading in any way. So I found that description really helpful and wonder how you sort of came to that formulation.  

Yascha Mounk [00:37:54] Yeah. Thank you. This is one of the points that just really bothered me when I started seeing this crop up and in our culture. For me, worries about cultural purity were always the preserve of a right. And there's a long tradition of that. Richard Wagner worrying about how Jews in classical music in Germany were somehow going to make German music impure. Viktor Orban today worrying about how America's cultural influence is going to somehow undermine pure Hungarian culture. This is what rightwingers usually worry about. And I saw a surprisingly similar discourse crop up in some of my friends and colleagues and many parts of the left. And I was kind of perturbed, I really tried to understand what's going on here. And you described it very well. But I think what's going on, first of all, is that there are some things that truly are bad that we call by the name of cultural appropriation. So one, for example, is white musicians in the 1950s and 1960s having big careers by imitating music of black artists or sometimes outright taking their songs. That was clearly bad, but what was bad about it can be described much more straightforwardly. What was bad about it is that those black musicians weren't allowed to have big careers, that they couldn't perform in many concert venues, that many record labels wouldn't find them, that many buyers wouldn't buy records by black musicians. That's what was wrong. It's very wrong, but you can explain it very straightforwardly. But that's what gives this sort of idea its intuitive power.  

[00:39:38] So then we come to something this controversy you mentioned, whether it's a threat, I believe at Texas A&M-- perhaps it was a different Texas university-- celebrated what they called already rather offensively "cinco de drinko" party. And you had a bunch of mostly white kids showing up to this party and some of them were dressed in sombreros or ponchos and others were dressed in construction vests or maids outfits. Now, what's interesting about this is that in my mind, the construction vest and the maid outfit is at least equally offensive, probably more offensive than the sombrero and the poncho. And the reason for that is that it seems to imply that all that Latinos are good for is to be domestic servants or manual workers. That many of our Latino students at this university shouldn't really be at university, they should be back home cleaning up my mom's house. And that's the message that's sent, that's deeply offensive. But if you think but this is a case of cultural appropriation, it's really hard to explain because the maids outfit is not part of Latino culture. If anything it's part of the French culture, I assume. In the same way of construction, there's nothing Latino about the construction of it. So these are not instances of cultural appropriation. So to explain what's offensive here, and it is clearly offensive, you have to say what's bad is bad intention to mock.  

[00:41:01] That intention to offend, that intention to send the message that all what Latinos are good for is both forms of manual labor, that's what's offensive about this cases, not cultural appropriation. And so my rule of thumb for cultural appropriation is very simple. Sometimes something that's called cultural appropriation is in fact bad. When it's bad, it's nearly always possible to explain in straightforward language, not invoking cultural appropriation, what's bad about it. The exclusion discrimination against African-American artists in the fifties and sixties. The intention to mock your classmates in this cruel way. It's not hard to express those things. Where we struggle to express this. It's because usually there's nothing wrong. And, in fact, philosopher Anthony Appiah and others have described and defended mutual cultural influence is a constant of human culture. Virtually anything we do and use today culturally is a result of a confluence of different cultures. And, in fact, part of what I love about America, part of what this country will and should look like if we get things right, is that we're going to be influencing each other in all these kinds of ways.  

Sarah [00:42:14] So true. Listen, I once had curry pizza in Utah. When it works in America, it works. That was delicious, you guys. Well, my aha moment reading your book was you are in the chapter about critical race theory. You're quoting this journalist who did profiles of these very famous scholars, and she summarized the key precepts that are law is subjective, neutrality is political, words are actions, and racism is permanent. And I thought, well, that's just a walk through what Beth and I have struggled with over the last five years. It's just a very succinct summary of how we struggle with the judicial system, how we struggle with acts of violence, and how to distinguish those from harmful language and definitely how we've struggled around conversations with race. I would add one that I've thought of since I've read your book, which I think there's this undercurrent of the presence of any oppression means the absence of progress. That's what I hear from my 14-year-old a lot. Like, we haven't gotten it right, that means everything is broken. We haven't perfected it, so all is lost. But I really want to make sure, like when we are articulating those principles and critiquing them, you also do a beautiful job of articulating what we are striving for, the values of liberalism that we do want to articulate and we do want to strive for. And we do want to center ourselves around. The intuitive trap of some of these principles can't continue to lure us.  

Yascha Mounk [00:43:42] Yeah, and many of these themes that you talk about really do come from the intellectual history of that. The chronicle, the idea that racism is permanent, that we really haven't made any progress comes straight from Derrick Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory, who has an article called The Permanence of Racism, in which he argues and continued to argue until he passed away, that the America of, let's say, 2000 and 2005 was as discriminatory, as racist, as was the America of 1850 or 1900 or 1950, just in different ways. And I find that offensive. Not offensive to the good people of America today. There's plenty of injustices that persist, and we can deal with a little bit of criticism. It's offensive to the people who suffered more extreme forms of discrimination, injustice in the past.  

Sarah [00:44:33] And who sacrificed mightily to address that injustice.  

Yascha Mounk [00:44:36] And who sacrificed money to address that injustice in the name of living up to the principles of the country. I mean, one of the things that's moving when you read Frederick Douglass and [inaudible] 4th of July, Martin Luther King Junior or Barack Obama is that all of them are unsparing in description of injustices in that time. But they do hold on to the belief that things can get better. Martin Luther King says we've been written a check, but the bank won't accept. And he could say, as people like Derrick Bell say, therefore, we should rip up the check and set out and try something else. No, we demand that you cash that check because you have an idea of what the society is like but invokes those noble ideals. Those are good ideals, by what right are you excluding us from them? And so, one way of talking about all of this is the different themes we talked about earlier, from strategic essentialism to [inaudible] epistemology and so on. Another way of talking about it is when you boil down this identitarian philosophy to three main claims. And those I think are, number one, the key present to understand the world is to think about it in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. Robin DiAngelo once said that whenever a white person interrupts a black person, they're bringing the entire apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them. And the striking thing about that sentence is that it makes me think that Robin DiAngelo has never had a black friend. Because of course that might be true in some situations, but somebody is using the social power to keep somebody else down. I'm sure that's happened many times.  

[00:46:22] But also you interrupt each other. We've interrupted on this podcast. You interrupt each other when you're friends. You interrupt each other if you're in a romantic relationship, it's part of how humans communicate. So if you think about any time it happens, you're bringing the apparatus of white supremacy to bear on somebody, it means but you can't actually be friends with members of that group. The second key claim is that the only function of universal values, like the Bill of Rights, is to pull the wool over people's eyes and hide sort of real forms of oppression from them. But it's just serves to perpetuate these problems of injustices and therefore we've not really made any progress. And then the third claim is therefore we shouldn't aim to live up to these values. We should get rid of them and create a society in which how you're treated by the state and how we treat each other is forever going to be fundamentally dependent on the group to which you belong. So these are all fundamentally attacks on philosophical liberalism. Fundamentally attacks on the founding values of the United States and our democracies. And it is is a liberal response, but can take on board some of the wisdom of this tradition and other traditions that talk about the experiences of minority groups, but I think do so without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And that's number one. Yes, of course, to understand reality we have to be aware of a kind of discrimination. You might suffer on the basis of group to which you belong. But there's also many other prisms for understanding how society works. We have to also look at social class. We also have to look at ideology. We have to look at people's intentions. We have to look at historical context.  

[00:48:02] And so, yes, in some context, a white person interrupting a black person may be bringing white supremacy on them. And the other one that can be best friends bickering with each other. And that's a very different situation. Secondly, yes, it's true that America and every other society has failed to live up to its noble ideals in deep and unjust ways. Yes, it's true that, as Frederick Douglass pointed out in his famous speech, the principles of a declaration of independence rang hollow as long as African Americans were deeply discriminated against or enslaved, and they continued to be discriminated against in important ways today. But we have been able to make progress towards having a less sexist, less homophobic, less discriminatory society. And that is in good part because people demanded inclusion under these principles, and therefore this is the most important difference. The society we should aim for is not one where who you are will fundamentally determine how you're treated, but rather a society in which what group you're born into comes to determine the rest of your life opportunities, of your treatment, of the way you're seen, so that we can actually treat each other as true equals. That is what our ambition should be, and that is what we ambition of many liberation movements from the gay activists who fought for same sex marriage, to the black activists who made up a core of the civil rights movement have been fighting for many decades.  

Beth [00:49:36] I thought it was helpful your distinction between race blind and racism blind to that end, saying that it is of course important to be conscious of identity groups, but that our aspiration should be to move beyond them in the way that we fundamentally treat each other. I want to ask you about the one place that I still feel some friction. You include in the book a very full throated defense of free speech and talk about the importance of speech as a universalist objective. And I think I broadly agree. I have a feeling that if we were presented with 100 scenarios, you and I would agree on most of what free speech requires in those scenarios. I am having a hard time in a number of context, figuring out where the public private distinction around speech should give way. So you talk in the book about how it is important to have free speech as a First Amendment principle, but also culturally. And you talk about de-platforming. And I really struggle with this because in the Internet age, I have a hard time taking seriously some of the rallying cries around banned books because those books are still available in the world. I think it's hard to truly ban a book here in 2023. I also think it's unwise to try to ban a book. I think a lot of Florida's curriculum standards have gone in a really anti-democratic direction. But I think what I need some clear principles around is when are we talking about free speech being jeopardized versus discernment and wisdom and an appropriate amount of social shame that does help us adhere to some of these universalist principles? And when are we just talking about curation? Because the world is vast and we can only have so many voices at one time on any particular subject. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are around that.  

Yascha Mounk [00:51:33] Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. First of all, let me say that I agree with you, obviously, on some of the stuff that's going on in Florida. I debated Chris Rufo on NPR about the Stop WOKE Act for that reason. And I am absolutely critical of the identity synthesis. But when I teach on the subject in college and I teach weeks on cultural appropriation books, weeks on free speech, my goal is for students to understand the arguments on both sides and to be fully comfortable making an argument that agrees with me, but also an argument. That disagrees with me. That's what I think of as my role as an educator. And as a result, in my classes, I assign Derrick Bell. I assign Kimberlé Crenshaw. I assign all of these people. I could not teach that class in a public college or university in Florida, but if-- which seems unlikely-- the Stop WOKE Act is ultimately found unconstitutional because it bans the teaching of identity politics, of critical race theory in public colleges and universities in the state of Florida. That I think is just a complete perversion of what university should be like and what academic freedom should be. So just to start off with, I fully agree with you on that. You're right that it is a casual line to be drawn here. And the reason for that is that on the one hand, I think we need a real culture of free speech, not just legal guarantees of free speech for people to be able to bring the whole selves to political conversations.  

[00:52:58] I'm struck and honestly horrified by how often people I will meet for lunch will say casually, "Well, of course, I would never say this publicly." And this is not people saying secret terrible things to me. The kinds of things we've been saying to each other over the course of the last hour that people are really scared. And these are professors, journalists, institutional leaders, corporate leaders, really influential people who feel like I can't actually say the truth when I talk to people. By the way, sometimes it's politicians who are worried about own staff in what they can say, and they're more worried about what the staff is going to say than winning the next election. Which, given the stakes, is not a good damn thing. Somebody asked me once, "Why do we not have any charismatic politicians in the Democratic Party?" Well, we have a few, but one of the reasons is that so many Democrats are so worried about how they talk about the world, what they say, that's it's hard to be charismatic. So I think all of this has real costs. On the other hand, you have a very basic liberal principle, which is freedom of association. I get to decide myself whether to invite you to dinner. And if I want to stop inviting you to dinner because you've offended me, that is my good right in a free society. Now, if you're in a social environment where everybody stops inviting you to dinner because of what you said, that's going to feel really, really crummy for you. But that's the right of the people around you.  

[00:54:19] So how do we balance these two instance? I'll say a couple of things. One, there are certain areas in which we can, in fact, have sensible laws and regulations. So your friend can stop inviting you to dinner because they find what you say offensive. But your credit card company shouldn't be allowed to stop doing business with you, right? In the same way in which we don't think that a water utility or an electricity utility should be able to punish their customers for political views. I think that should be true of a very broad range of financial institutions and other kind of basic service providers. I don't think American Airlines should be allowed to say you're not allowed to fly in this plane because we don't like what you believe. If you start shouting about your views on the plane, that's a different matter. But just because you have a blog where you say things that many people will consider offensive does not mean that a private company should be able to stop you from flying around the country. I think those are just some basic guidelines to preserve free speech. And by the way, free speech often for marginalized people who make decisions about who is punished in that way. By definition, more powerful. And the idea that in a systematic way that's going to help the marginalized, I think is just deeply and hopelessly naive.  

[00:55:25] But beyond that, I do think that in our own kind of social circles, we should look for the line, which is perhaps sometimes difficult to trace, which certainly shouldn't be enforced by the state of our regulations where my right to say I'm going to stop inviting you to dinner because I don't like what you believe turns into a culture which really just becomes deeply orthodox in constraining ways where we can no longer have real conversations with each other. And Jonathan Rauch, a really interesting thinker, has offered a few hallmarks of that kind of culture. So the punitiveness where it's not just I want to stop inviting to dinner, but I'm going to fire you from your job. Deplatforming was not just I run a publication, I decide, I curate. I decide who I think is interesting and smart and who's not. And part of that is my political set of views. I might not invite people whom I deeply disagree to write from you. That's fine. But this often involves demands to deplatform others. So it's not just I'm not going to deplatform them; it's if you platform them I'm going to stop talking to you. I'm going to try to organize a boycott of you.  

Sarah [00:56:41] Not just excluding from the platform, but using the platform to further exclude.  

Yascha Mounk [00:56:45] Right. Or saying unless you also exclude, I'm going to organize a boycott of you. And part of this is just social media pylons and open letters and so on. These are not hard and fast rules. But be on the lookout for those kinds of things. When you see the punishment in your social circle take the form of this punitiveness of demanding that people be fired, of saying not just am I not going to give you a platform, anyone who does give you a platform I'm going to malign, then I think we're getting into a danger zone.  

Sarah [00:57:21] Well, what I really appreciate in your free speech argument is that you said, look, it is the risk of if we don't do it. That's what we need to focus on. I'm not saying that if we open it all up and there's this marketplace of ideas at best, why is this one will always rise to the top? That's not the point. It's that the danger of restricting free speech is really what we need to keep our eye on, because it does create, like you said, the restriction of ideas, the restriction of conversation, the fear, the punitiveness, the pylons that we've all witnessed, that we all live in fear of. I hear the same thing, "Well, I would never say this publicly." I have said that. As a person who speaks publicly on the Internet, that's not like I've never used that phrase. I have. So I think keeping our eyes on the danger and the way it can spread when we restrict it and not feeling like we have to argue that opening up to everybody will fix all our problems. That's not the point.  

Yascha Mounk [00:58:12] Yeah, and thanks for pointing out the key part of the argument there, which is I love John Stuart Mills on Liberty Chapter two, talking about all the great things we get from having free speech. And that's been sort of general tradition in how philosophers have thought about it. I agree with those. I'm most concerned about the bad things that happen if you don't have free speech. And one of those is that you empower the powerful. That by definition, who's going to have the right to decide who gets shunned, who gets censored. It's not going to be the most marginalized, but it is the most marginalized don't hold power. And I think you observe a fundamental, weird progressive misalignment where because a lot of these conversations used to happen on college campuses or in super progressive organizations, we always assumed that the rules of censorship are going to favor the super progressive against anything we consider offensive. Well, as we've been saying, Donald Trump might be back in the White House in 2024. How much power do you want to give him to determine where the lines of a sailboat do or don't lie? Do you really think that in 25 years the CEO of MasterCard or of whatever financial organization is very likely to have exactly the right kind of enlightened beliefs? Perhaps, but perhaps not. I'd rather not take that risk.  

Beth [00:59:28] Well, we could talk with you for another hour, I'm certain, and not cover everything that was illuminating in the book. To your point about the risks associated with suppressing speech, I did a few times reading your book think, Oh, are people going to be mad at us for reading this book and talking about it? And I'm sure that you feel a certain sense of risk in having written it. So I appreciate that you did anyway. And I especially hope that people will read it because so much of the book is not just critique of these ideas, but a really beautiful defense of universal principles that I know will help me, especially as we go into a new election cycle.  

Sarah [01:00:07] I told Beth the emotion I felt most often while reading your book was just relief. It just felt like, okay, this is what I'm feeling. This is someone articulating it and with a vision for where we're going. I just thought it was so incredibly helpful. Thank you so much.  

Yascha Mounk [01:00:23] Thank you so much.  

Beth [01:00:24] Music Interlude.  

Sarah [01:00:33] Beth, are you playing Connections.  

Beth [01:00:35] I'm playing Connection?  

Sarah [01:00:36] Who isn't playing Connections? Everybody's playing Connections, watching Suits and watching that Blue Zones documentary. We are all doing that simultaneously. That's how it feels.  

Beth [01:00:45] Now, I am not watching Suits, but my parents would like me to get in on that action. So maybe I'll get there.  

Sarah [01:00:50] Connections, though. What a fun game. Okay. Have you played Codenames the game it's based on?  

Beth [01:00:57] A lot of Codenames during the pandemic played here in Silver's house  

Sarah [01:00:59] Loved it.  

Beth [01:01:00] Yes.  

Sarah [01:01:00] The problem with Codenames is you need a big group.  

Beth [01:01:03] You do. We got the version that you can play with two people.  

Sarah [01:01:07] Okay.  

Beth [01:01:08] And it's okay, but it's just not as fun. You do need a group.  

Sarah [01:01:12] But they have found the secret source of Codenames and put it in Connections.  

Beth [01:01:16] I think that's right.  

Sarah [01:01:17] So if you have not played Codenames or Connections, they give you 16 words, and you're trying to figure out and put them in groups of four that they are connected by. It can be anything. It could be a movie title. It could be a like blank and they all have the same word after them. Or it could be like they all have silent S's. It could be anything. But you've got to figure out what it is.  

Beth [01:01:43] Now, figuring out I think is a theme of what's going on with Connections right now. It's a little clunky in the app to find it.  

Sarah [01:01:50] That's true. That took them forever to put it in the games tab. And it's still not on the iPad version, guys.  

Beth [01:01:57] The short form of the games tab. It's not there and I think it should be. And also some days it is way too easy and some days it is way too hard. I don't think they have found the sweet spot of like challenging and interesting. But you can still get it because you can only make three mistakes.  

Sarah [01:02:15] Yeah. They take away... 

Beth [01:02:17] If you group four and you don't have it, they take away one of your mistakes and you've got to figure it out rapidly.  

Sarah [01:02:24] But they have figured out that we all love the daily game like the Wordle. We love a Wordle. And they've gotten the sweet spot with Wordle, so I trust them to get there because Wordle is really good right now. Like they're finding the words where you're like, dang, what is this word? Where you're using all your vowels. There's like one vowel, three consonants left, and you got to figure it out. They've hit a really good speed with Wordle. So I trust them to get there with Connections. But, listen, I do like a daily game. It's so nice when you sort of just want a little break on your phone, but you don't want to be on TikTok for three and a half hours. So you're like, I'm just going to play Connections. That's going to be my fun little break. It's a one and done and you get back to your life. It's the daily game. It's nice. Now, if they have too many daily games, I don't know if we still have that benefit.  

Beth [01:03:08] I don't think they can have too many daily games. They probably can, but I don't think so because I have a group of them that I do every morning. The word games. I like to start the day off that way. It's just a good way to wake my brain up. It's so much better than scrolling Instagram or Facebook or something.  

Sarah [01:03:23] Oh my God.  

Beth [01:03:24] I really like I get my phone and I do the little games and I'm awake now. And then I go take my shower and get on with it. Chad and I love doing Spelling Bee together. I think that's so fun. I love the Mini Crossword. I feel like it's in a really good place right now where it's challenging enough but not too hard. And I just started doing Tiles. It took me a while to figure out how to Tiles, but that for me is like a cigarette break. And this is my point about I don't think there are going to be too many games because I like having a daily game to go to instead of social media or some chips or whatever I'll be doing to take that minute.  

Sarah [01:04:00] Well, Spelling Bee I think is a little bit tougher nut. Because you can spend an enormous amount of time on Spelling Bee. Now, Maggie freed me. She said just get the pentagram and then move on with your life. And I was like, Maggie, that is genius. So that's what I do. I get the pentagram, and if I can't, I just move on. I'm like, I don't know what it is today and then I move on. I'm not quite as addicted to Spelling Bee because it can be so expansive. I mean, there are lots of words, but there's a new Spelling Bee buddy where I think they help you. I haven't tried it yet. I just got the email about it.  

Beth [01:04:30] I'm all over this. Listen, Chad and I love this game. We will work on it all day. We want to be geniuses by the end of the day. Doesn't have to be in one sitting, but by the end of the day, we want to be geniuses. Chad's brain is an amazing mystery to me like the ocean and many ways, but especially around Spelling Bee, because I have to look at it to get any words.  

Sarah [01:04:48] Yes! Nicholas can do the same thing.  

Beth [01:04:51] He can let those letters just float around in his brain all day.  

Sarah [01:04:54] I have to see it. He'll be like, "What are the letters?" And I'm like, "I can tell you the letters. And that's going to do literally anything? Are you crazy? Are you a crazy person?"  

Beth [01:05:02] Chad will ask me the letters, he'll leave to go get coffee, to go to the golf course or whatever, he'll text me, "Here's the word." I'm like, "You have got to be kidding me."  

Sarah [01:05:11] Yes. Nicholas does the same thing and I don't like it. I think it's a weird superpower. It makes me uncomfortable. But, listen, you're just a word person or not. My sister-in-law has a freakish talent for Boggle. Like I'm sure she's run in Spelling Bee. It's insane. I'm like, "You need to find a way to monetize that shit right there."  

Beth [01:05:29] Well, I want to say this about the Spelling Bee buddy, because I think this is key to a lot of what's going on with these New York Times games. So with the Bee Buddy, they are in real time saying good job finding words that begin with C. Keep looking. There are more. And then you see a little chart of the two letter combinations and how many CL words you have left or how many CR words you have left.  

Sarah [01:05:52] Oh, I would like that because I checked that hint tab a million times.  

Beth [01:05:55] It's a more user friendly version of the hint tab.  

Sarah [01:05:59] Okay.  

Beth [01:06:00] And the reason I think it's so interesting, I think this is how they've gotten Wordle so good. They are getting so much data from all of this and they are constantly looking at that data. So you know that they've got like a target of what percentage of people they want to solve this thing in four tries versus three, versus five, whatever. And I think connections will get better because they're going to take that data and figure out we want the average person to have one mistake or whatever.  

Sarah [01:06:27] Yeah. And I like the history game that they promised us and it never shows up again. Did you remember the history game they gave us?  

Beth [01:06:34] I didn't do the history game. No.  

Sarah [01:06:35] The history game was so fun. It came out in the morning newsletter, which is where they're starting to promote these and they give you one event in time and then they start dropping down historical events and you have to place them in the timeline. It's so fun, but I think it's only once a week, which is a problem. And then I can never find it. I have to like remember that it's only once a week and then go find it. And I don't think they're consistently doing it once a week, even though I really, really liked it.  

Beth [01:07:01] That sounds really fun and I would enjoy that. Listen, keep adding to my pack of cigarettes. This is what I need. I need good quick little games that are a break. I also would just like to say to the New York Times, since we talk about you all the time, I am working my way through New York Times cooking right now. We would be happy for you to be like a podcast sponsor or something because we've been doing the work here.  

Sarah [01:07:21] Yeah, podcast sponsor. We really do. Between the Ezra Klein Show, and the games and I've been reading the print New York Times, which is just the absolute best practice. I love it so much. I cannot say enough. Even though I get it like a week later, it doesn't even matter. There's nothing in the Sunday New York Times. These are always like big, longer, juicy articles about something that's happening in the world. And I've gotten, I think, three or four so far and never do I hit something and I'm like, "Oh, that's old news." They're always still applicable. Or the most interesting article about Bangladesh. I learned so much about the negotiations between the UAW and the car manufacturers. I just I love it so much.  

Beth [01:08:03] You know what I have mentioned [inaudible] about right now is the podcast Hard Fork. I cannot not stop talking about hard work. I love that show. Anyway, they're doing good work over there. I know connecting this back to our conversation with Yascha that it is quite fashionable to be mad at the New York Times all the time about something, they got a lot of good products out there that make my life better.  

Sarah [01:08:22] And they're making money, which is what I want newspapers to do so they continue to exist. So I'm not mad at them. All right. Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics. We can't wait to hear y'all reactions and responses to our conversation with Yascha Mounk. And also, don't forget to reach out if you're interested in having us come to speak to your community, your organization. Reverend Alison Drake of East Dallas Christian Church said that this is such a divided time and that Beth and I were able to offer grace and healing to everyone who attended. She said we brought hope to all who attended, which is exactly what we love to hear after an event. And we love to bring hope to your community as well. Check out our website, pantsuitpoliticsshow.com for more information or email Alise at pantsuitpoliticsshow.com. We will be back in your ears on Friday. And until then, keep it nuanced y'all.  

[01:09:08] Music Interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. The Lebo Family. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.

Maggie PentonComment