My monthly book blog: Identity politics, American-style

Donald Trump returns to the White House this month, thanks in part to his understanding of identity politics — and especially the role of free speech in how Americans see themselves.?

To understand more about American-style identity politics, I picked up a copy of The Coddling of the American Mind, one of the groundbreaking, and controversial, books from the Trump 45 years.?

The 2018 bestseller, by a Stanford-educated legal authority and an Ivy League-educated social psychologist, expanded on their Atlantic magazine article of the same title, exploring what they saw as a surge in constraints to free speech on American campuses.?

At the time, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book was a broadside against extreme wokism — less from a political viewpoint than from a social psychology perspective of the damage that campus politics was doing to a generation of American youth and their ability to develop critical thinking.?

As they argue throughout the book, universities should be about — if nothing else — the open and vigorous competition of ideas, especially ones that make students (and perhaps their teachers) uncomfortable. Their greatest screed is against what they label “safetyism,” the unwritten social structures that wall off young minds from ideas (and even facts) that might threaten them (or to use a hot word of the time, trigger them). Their sub-title: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”

The examples cited by Lukianoff and Haidt were once the stuff of Fox and Breitbart News, and the lifeblood of Republican campaigns focused on identity politics. But?Coddling shows why so many Americans, including university-educated ones (who tend to vote Democrat), have been turned off by campus politics — especially the inflammatory kind that go viral.?

A half decade later, if we see a return to the culture wars of Trump 45 — remember Charlottesville? — it will likely start on campuses. But have those campuses, perhaps like middle America, changed in the 2020s? We may soon see.

Coddling is more than a polemic about free speech. It explores the psychological consequences of the limits to debate and discourse. When we don’t develop the cognitive skills to receive, analyze and refute ideas, we put ourselves at risk of being intellectually defenceless through our lives.?

Think of critical thinking and cognitive behaviour as a kind of immune system, be it in the classroom or on the campaign trail or at the kitchen table. To illustrate that, the authors draw on the following elements from cognitive behaviour therapy, or CBT:

1. Too many young people, in the book’s view, are prone to “emotional reasoning” — allowing their thinking to be geared by their emotions. (“I feel depressed, therefore I am depressed.”) The same can be seen in politics, where emotion triumphs regularly over reason.?

2. “Catastrophizing” — speculating that a bad situation will lead to the worst possible outcome. Both presidential candidates in 2024 said the policies of the other would lead to the ruination of America. That’s catastrophizing.

3. “Labelling” — or what we used to call name calling. Trump is the master of diminishing and dismissing opponents with names, rather than critiques. It’s part of what Lukianoff and Haidt describe as the new tribalism, of building alliances by alienating others.

4. “Mind reading” ?— the common tact of claiming to know what others are thinking, planning and intending. Sadly, we rarely ask, “how do we know that to be true?”

5. Perhaps the worst phenomenon, in both campus and Capitol Hill politics, is “dichotomous thinking” — the view that if you don’t agree with one position, you must be aligned with the polar opposite view.

None of this is new, or attributable to Trump. As the book explains, polarization has been on the rise in the U.S. since the 1980s. Moreover, the forces of polarization have been growing more on the left than the right. This is especially true on campuses, which have become more progressive through those decades.?

The authors don’t place blame fully at the feet of colleges and universities. Helicopter parenting, media biases and — special warning — the iPhone are, at once, overexposing and overprotecting each new generation from ideas, including threatening ones.?

More broadly, they make the case that in this age of insecurity, we will all need more wisdom. The book’s conclusion is that America will be stronger, richer and safer if it’s also wiser. And that’s only possible if we have a society of wise minds. ?