Jack Semancik’s Reviews > The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time > Status Update

Although there are some interesting case studies that Mounk describes, much of this book feels like it’s arguing with a phantom cultural force (especially so after the reelection of Trump, and the popular abandonment of left-leaning cultural ideals on the part of corporations, political parties, and at least a sizeable portion of the wider American electorate).

A lot of this book serves as a reference/framework for understanding identity politics in the United States (which can be helpful in its own right), but it is more polemical than historical. For as long as this book is, it seems like it needs a more comprehensive companion piece to fully drive its assertions home.

Mounk “tracks” the development of what he terms “identity synthesis” (which seems only marginally different from identity politics) as being especially based on the theories of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Edward Said. Although Mounk mentions others (Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, among others), he singles out these four as the remorseful founders of this movement.