The Equity Trap

Pt. 1: The Political Failure of Wokeism

Introduction

“Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.”

That ad followed me everywhere in North Carolina. Because I had relocated to Charlotte for the 2024 general election, I met, for the first time, the onslaught of political advertising wrought by a presidential race. None appeared more often than the infamous they/them ad.

It bothered me for many reasons, the most important being that it was a great ad. Polling done by Blue Rose Research (a prominent Dem polling firm) found that this ad was effective, though not exceedingly so, at persuading voters—roughly in the 75% percentile of Trump ads. Its import, however, exceeds its voter persuasion efficacy. The they/them ad encapsulated the ideological hollowness of the Democratic Party.

There has been plenty of handwringing by smarter and more informed pundits about the role of the Culture Wars in the rise of Trump and the fecklessness of the woke mob #resistance. I will try to avoid rehashing those points. Instead, I want to problematize our understanding of Wokeism, a term which I identify as a set of social stances that:

a) intend to ameliorate inequality caused by oppressive social hierarchies,

b) seek redress through symbolic reforms, and,

c) discomfort many, perhaps a majority of, Americans

Wokeism did not doom Dems at the ballot box. Many woke stances—e.g. defund the police—have alienated ordinary (politically inarticulate¹) Americans and discouraged them from voting for Democrats. However, had the Harris campaign stripped itself of all Wokeism and even retroactively removed material that could have been used by Trump ads (like the ACLU questionnaire response from 2020 highlighted in the infamous they/them ad), they still would have lost. It was the alleged prioritization of niche social issues over urgent economic issues that repulsed voters. Trump is many things: demagogue, xenophobe, vacuous “strongman”, pathological narcissist, etc., etc., but chief among them, he is a complainer. He capitalized on the surge of discontent driven by neoliberal economic disenfranchisement because his grievances overlapped with issues that felt urgent to voters. Whether he did so by accident or conniving calculation is beside the point.

This analysis is not new, and the critique of identitarian politics hindering more meaningful reform had been made long before the 2024 election. During my political sociology master’s program, I thought a lot about Democratic political ideology and dug into those critiques. I grew skeptical of identitarian rhetoric and symbolic inclusion, viewing them as distractions from the economic reform working class Americans needed to obtain real equity. Liberalism, I started to believe, was not up to the task of fixing the wrongs in our society. When I explained my thinking to my advisor, he recommended I read The Identity Trap, by Yascha Mounk.

I did not like it. Somehow, Mounk managed to remind me of the redeeming values undergirding wokeism. Though co-opted and therefore toothless, wokeism represents an attempt at implementing true Liberal reform. Over a series of essays, I will meander through explaining the inadequacy of wokeism as a political practice, synthesizing and critiquing recent criticisms of wokeism (including Mounk’s), identifying the role of elites in liberal politics, and proposing a materialist liberalism that could realize liberal egalitarian political outcomes.

Mounk on Liberalism

Mounk advocates for a political liberalism that is universalist, multicultural, and steadfast on foundational rights like freedom of speech. This liberal political tradition is persuasively explained in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice² (1973). Rawls’s theory explains liberal egalitarian political philosophy as the belief in “justice as fairness.” Liberal egalitarianism, or capital-L Liberalism as I will refer to it going forward, establishes an “original position” of universal human rights (right to democratically elect leaders, freedom of speech, impartial judiciary, etc.), then allows for some measure of material inequality provided the distribution of resources adheres to the Difference Principle. This principle dictates that “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are...to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.” In other words, the existence of inequality is fair as long as it benefits those with the least. There is no inherent limit to the scope of inequality. For example, an economic design that creates massive income inequality but lifts the wages of the lowest-paid is acceptable. Provided, of course, that it does not impinge on those bedrock universal rights. It is against this widely held understanding of liberal egalitarian political philosophy that I judge Mounk’s work.

To quickly recap Mounk’s argument, he describes wokeism as the outgrowth of the “identity synthesis” belief system. The three logics of this system are:

1. The key to understanding the world is to examine it through the prism of group identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

2. Supposedly universal values and neutral rules merely serve to obscure the ways in which privileged groups dominate those that are marginalized.

3. To build a just world, we must adopt norms and laws that explicitly make the way the state treats each citizen—and how citizens treat each other—depend on the identity group to which they belong.

I mostly agree with his description. Wokeism does conspicuously avoid the role of socioeconomic class. It does seek to expose alleged universalism as a front for the reproduction of systemic oppression.

He prescribes an antidote to this failed wokeism:

1. To understand the world, we must pay attention to a broad set of categories, including—but not limited to—forms of group identity like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

So far, so good.

2. In practice, universal values and neutral rules do often exclude people in unjust ways. But an aspiration for societies to live up to the standards they profess can allow them to make genuine progress in treating their members fairly.

Agreed. This point hews closely to what adopters of the “identity synthesis” advocate in practice.

3. To build a more just world, societies should strive to live up to their universalist aspirations instead of abandoning them.

Here we reach the crux of my issue with this argument. How can a society meet a universalist aspiration without tailoring its approach to the injustices it has perpetrated on its own people? Universalism does not mean everyone gets treated the same today; it means everyone gets treated the same always. Treating some people differently today because of centuries of oppression is closer to universalism than arbitrarily starting late and ignoring the past. Mounk claims liberalism is more ambitious than the identity synthesis. But what he calls the identity synthesis aspires to a multi-century reconciliation that has never been accomplished. Isn’t that more ambitious than accepting entrenched unfairness?

Liberalism—or liberal democracy, more specifically—has exceeded the feudalism and monarchy preceding it in terms of progress towards peace, equality, and opportunity for citizens. Yet Liberalism has allowed, or justified, mass violence and extreme inequality to achieve this progress. Mounk credits Liberalism with making countries happier, wealthier, safer, and more desirable. Like his critique of wokeism, this position sounds good but lacks depth. First, where is the causality? If the majority of the 30 most developed³ countries are Liberal, as he claims, does that automatically prove Liberalism generates material prosperity? Might wealth make it easier to adopt Liberalism?

Second, the Liberal exemplars Mounk uses—France, Canada, the UK, the US, Australia—share a conspicuous aspect of their history. They all owe their economic development in large part to colonial exploitation. France, the UK, and the US still lean heavily on neocolonial exploitation of former colonies. When has Liberalism won prosperity without colonialism?

According to Mounk, “Liberal institutions have helped sustain peace and affluence” (263). There is a gaping chasm between sustaining and creating. Liberal societies did not gain their affluence through practicing the Liberalism—with all its universal values and Difference Principle—that Mounk espouses.

The “woke” left is Illiberal not because its reforms are so radical that they harm Liberal values, but because its reforms are so superficial as to leave our contemporary Illiberal society intact. The real objects of Mounk’s criticism should be the performative (materially unimpactful) repertoires of wokeists, not his so-called identity synthesis.

Wokeism and Equity

Mounk does well to address a foundational issue in the debate over wokeness. He explains that wokeism takes the view that “any principles and rules that failed to distinguish between the historically dominant and the historically dominated are inherently suspect... governments should explicitly start to treat citizens differently, depending on the group of which they are a part.” (70) I agree with this take. Mounk criticizes it as the original sin of wokeism. Truly Liberal policy, he argues, must not differentiate among citizens so that it can be universal. This criticism misses the entire point of differentiation.

“Woke” policies that explicitly discriminate do not, in practice, discriminate more than the policies that preceded them. They simply make visible the differentiation. Prior to affirmative action, the law did not require universities and employers to prefer White men candidates. However, they did. This legal intervention resulted in a society closer to embodying universalist Liberal values. Any universalist future—Mounk’s ardent hope—requires equitable intervention.

In addition to the usual right-wing provocateurs, well-intentioned pundits, like Mounk, often trip over equity. They misinterpret equity as guaranteed equality of outcome, and they admonish it as unfair if not authoritarian. Equity is generally understood as equal access to opportunity. Awareness of an opportunity does not magically make it accessible, of course. It’s one thing to get your college application fee waived; it is another entirely to have a college counselor explain to you how your essays must comprise a coherent narrative that “tells your story” in the style preferred by elite colleges. Equity might gain purchase with Liberals if tethered to the Difference Principle. A second definition:

Equity is the level of inequality allowed by the Difference Principle.

This explicit attachment to Liberalism demonstrates that the pursuit of equity is merely a new formulation of the same Liberal project. Achieving equity would not flatten all inequalities; instead, it would constrain the creation and reproduction of inequalities to an extent in which they benefit all of society.

This new definition—equity as fair inequality—works well in theory. But we have seen in American history that legally established rights attenuate without corresponding political power. Black Southerners were constitutionally endowed with the right to vote following the Civil War. The Jim Crow Era on its face met the Difference Principle—think “separate but equal.” Had Black people possessed something approximating a fair share of political power, they would have demonstrated the obvious capriciousness of the legal status quo. But they had little, if any, recourse without representatives accountable to them. So, equity must go a step further than material distribution that meets the Difference Principle. A Liberal conception of equity requires a third definition:

Equity is the distribution of political power that observes the Difference Principle.

An unequal distribution of political power is acceptable as long as it serves those with the least political power. This type of equity is foreign to American history.

MALA

Mounk argues from a false premise. He wants to return the U.S. to a place we have never been. He is team MALA: Make America Liberal Again.

Even if woke policies do not realize equity, a retreat to the prior ideology of the Democratic Party will not take us closer to liberal egalitarian ends. Let’s end with another popular phrase that epitomized the 2024 election: “We’re not going back.” The Harris campaign meant it to be the clarion call against Trump and a creative inversion of MAGA’s historical revisionism. Yet the vision for the country outlined by the Harris campaign was going back. Back to the neoliberal (and not Liberal) consensus that had dominated American politics for fifty years. Despite Trump’s literally being the past, Trump campaign messaging sounded more like change. Harris was MALA, pun unintended. Had her governing vision lived up to that fun campaign chant–had her campaign advocated for a Liberal redistribution of power instead of woke performance–she might have won.

Terms

Wokeism: a set of beliefs that

a) attribute inequality to oppressive social hierarchies,

b) seek redress through symbolic reforms, and

c) offend many, perhaps a majority of, Americans

Liberalism: liberal egalitarian political philosophy (Rawls 1973); justice as fairness; universal human rights with acceptable material inequality per the Difference Principle

Difference Principle: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are...to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.” (Rawls 1973, A Theory of Justice)

- The existence of inequality must benefit those with the least to be fair; there is no inherent limit to the scope of inequality

Equity (1st try): equal access to opportunity resulting in fair (not necessarily equal) outcomes

Equity (2nd try): a distribution of resources that is acceptable under liberal egalitarianism per Rawls’ Difference Principle

Equity (3rd try): a distribution of power that itself observes the Difference Principle

1. The term “articulation” carries wildly different meanings in social science and public discourse. I use it here to mean one’s knowledge of their self-interest and discernment of which policies or politicians are best oriented towards fulfilling that self-interest. It is in no way a judgment of one’s verbal or written articulation skills, although more extensive formal education correlates positively with both. More on this term in another post.

2. This book is a classic. Readable, concise, and imaginative—I highly recommend it.

3. Never mind that the conception of “developed vs. undeveloped” is itself an idea used to justify colonization.