America’s rapid transformation from a nation that could laugh at itself to one consumed by judgment and cynicism, threatens the future of democracy itself.
How did America transform from a nation of self-aware optimists to one of angry cynics in less than two decades?
Political scientist Yascha Mounk witnessed this cultural metamorphosis first hand after arriving in the US in 2005; his insights on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast paint a startling picture of how our society has fundamentally changed, and not for the better.
An associate professor at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies, Mounk also hosts The Good Fight podcast and writes the Persuasion substack. In our far-ranging conversation, he traces the cultural swing from an era when commonly held touchstones invited Americans to laugh at themselves, to today’s more censorious landscape where judgment and self-righteousness reign supreme.
This shift, he argues, has had profound and unexpected political consequences that are now reverberating far beyond American shores.
Focusing on the rise of identity politics and a corresponding change in the media industry, Mounk argues that these changes are undermining the very institutions meant to preserve our democratic system. His critique of how major media outlets have become lifestyle brands for coastal elites — rather than trusted news sources — signals an alarming shift in American discourse.
His analysis of how European nations are grappling with similar challenges — and why some are proving more resistant than others based on their historical relationship with “moral purity” — offers fascinating insights into what may lie ahead for America.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We live in a moment when ideas move at the speed of social media, transforming them from academic theories into institutional practices almost overnight. Concepts that once percolated in university corridors for years now reshape boardrooms, classrooms, and the fundamental ways we govern ourselves. Few thinkers have been as prescient or as sharp, and dissecting these transformations as my guest Yascha Mounk. Since arriving in America in 2005, he’s witnessed and analyzed a profound shift in the nation’s character from a culture of optimistic self-awareness to one of deepening cynicism.
He spent years warning about the threats to liberal democracy from the rise of right-wing populism to the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in an increasingly fractured world. His most recent book, The Identity Trap, examines how well-intentioned movements for social justice and identity politics can evolve in unexpected ways that undermine the very social cohesion they seek to achieve.
Through his recent writings, he analyzes everything from what he calls Trump Zero-Sum presidency to the shifting landscape of global power. Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the host of The Good Fight podcast, and the Persuasion Substack brings both intellectual rigor and a deep sense of urgency to these debates.
His conversations with leading thinkers help illuminate the complex interplay between democracy, technology, and social change. While his personal observations chart how America has transformed from a nation defined by its perfectability to one increasingly focused on its divisions. At a time when liberal democracy faces challenges from both within and without, we’ll explore with Yascha Mounk how these forces are reshaping our institutions, our media, and our politics, and whether we can forge a path forward that preserves both democratic vitality and social cohesion. It is my pleasure to welcome Yascha Mounk here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Yascha, thanks so much for joining us.
Yascha Mounk: Thank you so much for having me on, Jeff.
Jeff: A delight to have you here. You and I originally started talking about doing this about six months ago. It was back in August over the summer. And at the time, what inspired me was a column you had written in your substack about how much had changed since you came to America in 2005, that many of the original virtues of the country had fundamentally changed, particularly with respect to how Americans saw themselves. Given what’s transpired in the past six months, how has that change been even more profound?
Yascha: I have had a sense that a lot of American culture has shifted quite radically since 2007 when I really moved to the United States. And it somehow came together for me a little less than a year ago, perhaps, when I was sitting on the New York subway, and I look up and I see a woman sitting opposite me with a baseball cap that reads, “I don’t give a fuck.” And you know there’s 10 million people riding the New York subway every day or something like that, and sometimes it feels like a 10th of them have stupid slogans, some blazing on the cap or the t-shirts.
So I don’t want to over-interpret this one particular thing, but there’s something about that proudly cynical attitude that feels to me like it speaks to this moment. I arrived in the country just as Barack Obama was starting his improbable run for presidency, talking about hope and change. He obviously had come to national attention first a couple of years earlier by saying there’s not a red and a blue America. There’s not Americans split into these different identity groups. That it’s just the United States of America. We’e all our brother’s keeper, our sister’s keeper. We should look out for each other and feel that we stand in solidarity with each other, and together we can accomplish great things.
It feels to me that on the right, but also on the left, that feeling has given away to one of deep division, to one which vilifies people who have different political opinions to this perhaps, especially on the left, a deeply identitarian view of a world in which the fundamental fact about you is much as whether you’re from Red America or from Blue America, but whether you are born to this ethnic group, or to that ethnic group, and hand-in-hand with this great pessimism about the future, and a proud cynicism.
That has one incarnation in the world in which I’m more familiar in America, of progressives who think that our society is fundamentally racist and sexist and corrupt, that we have not been able to make any progress on “social justice” over the course of the last 50 or 100 years. But in a different way, as you’re seeing the Trump administration with a complete disdain for political norms for existing institutions with a proud trolling attitude that I think is born of a cynicism of its own. And so I’m just struck by that change in mood over the course of 15, 20 years.
Jeff: And in so many ways, we talk about this today in terms of the way our politics has changed, but in fact, I would argue that it’s really more the culture that’s changed, and politics is simply downstream from culture.
Yascha: I think that’s right. One thing that I’m struck by is, what we are the most dominant cultural products at the time when I came to the United States. One of the biggest sitcoms that had just started around that time was 30 Rock. The biggest show on broadway around that time was The Book of Mormon. I could come up with other examples. And those were all quite progressive actually, but all I think had quite clearly left in politics. But they were able to laugh at themselves. They were self-ironic. They knew the shortcomings of their own social and political milieu. They had a facility of irony and gave you a sense that nothing is quite off limits in terms of what you can joke about.
And that of course, feels very different from the culture that has dominated in the last 5 or 10 years. One that has been much more censorious, much more earnest in certain kinds of ways, but also much more cynical about what people are like. Perhaps, the last great television show that got a lot of buzz and was widely acclaimed is Succession, which I did watch and there was part of it I enjoyed. But I was struck by the basic worldview of everybody fundamentally being a bad person. And I think part of the enjoyment of watching that show was supposed to be to think, “Oh, look at these terrible people. Thank God I’m not like them.”
That’s very different even from a show like The Wire, which was the most veneered show when I came to the United States, which obviously showed a lot of violent crime, a lot of the drug trade, a lot of really horrible and difficult things. But I was quite cynical, perhaps, about the structures of American life, but which strangely enough included many more inspiring characters, many more characters who were good people, many more characters who in some kinds of ways you might even wish to emulate, even for it was set in this very violent milieu than a show like Succession.
Jeff: And yet Succession comes at the end of a long line of shows that in many ways seems like it set the bar for where we are now, whether it was Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper, and we could go on coupled with reality television that these people that really had very little in terms of redeeming values, we invited into our living room week after week after week.
Yascha: Jeff, I guess I would say that there is a difference between those different characters. Tony Soprano and Walter White, as well as many of the protagonists in The Wire are doing things that are obviously and objectively, morally bad. The mobsters, the drug dealers, and yet those shows with the sensible instinct of good literature, were trying to complicate those moral narratives and trying to get us to see that perhaps those things to simplifies with even in an Italian mobster in New Jersey perhaps even this self-made drug king in New Mexico was somebody whose motivations we could in some ways understand and who we could in certain respects regard as our hero.
They were characters, which in the famous line from literature, 55% bad, but 45% good. You watch Succession which shows people who whatever you think about high finance and the upper ends of a capitalist world are much less obviously doing horrible things. They’re not killing and murdering people in nearly the same way as those other characters. But they’re much worse. They’re 90% bad and perhaps 10% good. And that shows I think, a much more cynical worldview.
Jeff: And to what extent do you think that that change in culture, these kind of shows, all the things that you’re talking about, really set the stage for Trump and where we are today?
Yascha: Well, in two ways. The first is that I think somebody like Barack Obama was only possible in a culture that didn’t take itself too seriously. I think the fact that it was a time in which liberals and progressives could laugh at themselves, made the country much more receptive to someone with idealism about the future of optimism, about the future. Because we didn’t think we were going to be lectured all the time. We didn’t think we were going to be judged all the time.
Whereas I think the much more, to call it by its name, woke culture of the last 5 or 10 years, made people really tired. Make people feel like if I’m not on board with every single one of your opinions and every single one of your attitudes, you think I’m a bad person. You think I’m beyond the pale. And so do I want to vote for somebody who’s going to judge me even more? Perhaps I’ll vote for the person who’s willing to say horrible things, willing to say offensive things, but he wouldn’t judge me, who’s going to relieve me of that fear of being judged.
And obviously some of the actual excesses of that culture, even in terms of social practices, institutional rules, missteps in terms of bigger political questions like immigration, is a lot of what Donald Trump exploited in order to win voters. Many of whom were the kinds of voters who were always supposed to vote for Democrats. Many of whom were Latinos, for example, who on this very simplistic identitarian worldview of Democratic Party strategists for the last 20 years, are always going to vote for Democrats because they’re people of color while it turns out that they see themselves quite differently and they think about politics quite differently from how they were expected to.
Jeff: And again, this comes back to the idea of politics being downstream of culture. And it’s some of what you talked about in the identity trap and the inherent problems with this kind of woke identity politics.
Yascha: Yes, absolutely right. My last book is trying to take seriously this body of ideas that started in intellectual circles and some university campuses, perhaps started to bleed out a little bit to certain activist groups, but felt very marginal to our politics and our culture as a whole. And then over the course of a surprisingly short span of time, really become dominant, at least for a while. Really became the culture of the American mainstream.
And these ideas, which you can call woke, if you like, I’ll refer to them as the identity synthesis of the woke, started in a sense from a sensible point of departure, which was that we want to overcome injustices and disparities, but are very real. But obviously in the history of the United States and of other countries, we have marginalized and discriminated and excluded members of minority groups in very real way. That it advocated for a solution to those problems, which really rejected any universalist moral conception, really rejected some of the fundamental basis of philosophical liberalism and on the constitutional tradition of the United States.
And that envisaged a world in which, as with Obama in 2008, we might to some extent overcome the deep dividing lines that have tragically shaped American history, but rather one in which they remain forever present and perhaps more present in our minds. One in which the way I speak to you should really be deeply influenced and inflected by what your ethnicity is, what your sexuality is, what your belonging in various identity groups might be. One which we should be afraid of being inspired by the cultures of our fellow citizens.
Seeing things like fusion cuisine from a very critical point of view. And one in which the way we’re going to be treated by institutions to which we apply, by medical authorities, perhaps even by the state in granting basic rights and duties differently depending on the identity group to which we belong. Well, the point of departure is in some ways understandable and even sounds noble is actually an incredibly pessimistic view of a kind of society which we might end up.
Jeff: And one where we’re potentially heading. Talk a little bit about what you see and the way in which this is taking hold seemingly in Europe today.
Yascha: Yes. So I think what we’re seeing is that many of these ideas spread and perhaps it was inevitable. One way of thinking about European culture since the end of World War II is simply as n plus five, which is to say, American culture plus 5 or 10 years. Italians and French fought for a while where they would resist the import of McDonald’s, and I’m sure there’s many fewer branches of McDonald’s per capita in Italy and France today than the United States but there’s plenty of branches of McDonald’s in those places as well. So to some extent, this is a question of just cultural influence expanding particularly to the Anglosphere to Canada and Australia and the United Kingdom, but also to places in continental Europe.
The extent to which those ideas have spread varies a little bit from place to place, and I think there’s a little bit of a religious dimension to that as well. While I don’t agree with the brilliant writer, and my friend, John McWhorter, that we should think of wokeness as quintessentially a religion, I do think that it’s filling a religion-shaped hole for many people and in our public life.
And perhaps, Protestant cultures and particularly Puritan cultures are more conducive to that religion-shaped hole being filled with a form of purity politics. The sets of things that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believe today is very different from what we believed 300 years ago, but the idea of a moral community as one that needs to be pure and protected from wrong thing, and which must expel anybody who violates its strictures, is I think, one that stands in great continuity to its own past.
In Catholic countries like Italy or Spain, that have always had a very different way of thinking about moral community in which the inevitability of sin and the importance of reintegrating people once they have gone through the private forms of confession and regret, I think make it less easy for this form of purity politics to take shape today.
So you end up with countries like Sweden that speak accent English, are quite integrated into the Anglosphere and have a Protestant background culture, being more influenced by these ideas when a country like Italy where people speak less English, where the society is a little bit more divorced from England and might have its Catholic inheritance, but leads, I think to quite a different way of thinking about the nature and shape of moral community.
Jeff: To the extent that it is taken on that moral aspect and that puritanism that you talk about, one wonders here, how this will play out as more and more of this wokism or whatever we want to call it, is taken away, is pulled out by its roots just by virtue of what we’re seeing Trump do at the present. What fills that hole?
Yascha: And I think we’re going to see a pretty interesting clash of different instincts here. One of the things that allowed these ideas to become so dominant in big parts of the left and the mainstream in the middle of the 2010s was that Donald Trump’s victory made it impossible to criticize any of those ideas while being accused in certain circles of secretly supporting Donald Trump or something like that. So even though the form of right-wing populism of Donald Trump and this form of left-wing identity politics seem dramatically opposed, I think historically they’ve actually helped and served each other.
And I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence, but after the real peak of the influence of these ideas, the uncontestability of these ideas in the summer of 2020, once Joe Biden was in office, that space for criticizing these ideas in a serious way opened up within the mainstream and the central lab to some extent, at least.
So now that Trump is back in office, I think we’re going to see two very different trends. One of them is that his administration is taking very active steps to combat these ideas. Some of them in ways that might in fact be justified, others in ways that both go well beyond the appropriate pushback from the baby out with the bath water and may themselves be a liberal because they use coercive state power to meddle with decisions of institutions that should remain independent.
But all of that will weaken the power of this ideology. At the same time, I could also easily imagine the same dynamic that was present during his first term reasserting itself in many activist organizations, NGOs, schools, universities, in which it’ll become very tempting to embrace those ideas or parts of them as a form of resistance against Trump. And anybody who dares to criticize those ideas is, once again, going to be tarnished as just secretly doing the bidding of Donald Trump.
So it’s very hard, I think, to foresee at this stage, at this juncture, what power these ideas will or won’t have in four years’ time. It may be that it feels like we’ve moved on from them, but given how easily American society polarizes and how culture and society often moves in the opposite direction of political power, I wouldn’t want to draw that conclusion in a precipitative manner.
Jeff: One of the things you’ve written about is how not to resist what we’re going through now both in terms of individuals but also with respect to journalism and journalism taking an advocacy position in many cases. Talk a little bit about that in the time we have left.
Yascha: So I would say two things. The first is that journalists, for a long time, had a self-conception, first of all, as a kind of workaday job. I’m just a reporter, obviously quite a working-class profession, trying to tell you things as they are, tell you what’s going on in the world. And what often went along with that is a professional skepticism. Not a cynicism as I was evoking earlier, but a skepticism saying, look, people all have their own interests. They all spin stories in their own benefit. People with power always have something to hide. And so, whoever I talk to, I should be a little bit of skeptical of them. I should keep some distance from power. I should be the one who doesn’t quite buy anything anybody says fully.
And I think around 20– Well, I think there’s been two transformations of that. One is more longstanding, where journalism became, even as often as renumeration decreased the kind of more prestigious profession. One that is particularly desirable to some of the fanciest people in society. It’s very striking when you look at about half of journalists at The New York Times having gone to top elite colleges, particularly Ivy League universities, and about two-thirds of young journalists at places like The New Republic and other kind of left-leaning magazines. It’s really quite striking to what extent they’re now recruited from a very elite of society.
And then around 2016, 2017, when Trump rose to power, there was also the self-conscious transformation of the role that journalists have as defenders of democracy, as people who should self-consciously try and think about how it is that they can use their profession to save democratic institutions. Now, I take seriously the risk to democratic institutions that comes from some of these authoritarian movements. I think it’s perfectly appropriate in your private life as a citizen to think that you have an obligation to try and preserve democracy.
I think those are positive things. But when a reporter is framing every single news story with a background view as to how to save democracy, and assuming, of course, that if a Democrat gets elected, that’s good for democracy, and if a Republican gets elected, that’s bad for democracy, all you’re doing is to transform institutions that once used to have some amount of bipartisan trust into partisan institutions.
And journalists overestimate how much influence and power they have on their own readers. They think, “This is going to make my readers vote the right way.” But what actually happens is that those readers smell that they’re being lied to, that they’re being managed, that journalists are making an effort to make them come to the right conclusion. And what they actually do is either be stubborn and go in the opposite direction, reach the opposite conclusion, or simply switch off and consume other kinds of news sources. So I think this has been a big own goal by journalists.
Jeff: Or they develop an audience and subscribers or what have you that are there for the confirmation bias.
Yascha: Yes, absolutely. The model of advertising had some bad incentives as well, but the model of really making your money from subscribers can have risks as well when you get captured by that audience. The New York Times, which continues to have some great content and is beaten up to somewhat too readily sometimes, has really become a lifestyle brand that tells upper-middle-class, coastal, highly educated Americans what political opinions to have, but also which pasta to cook and what cushion to buy for the bed. It’s really become a kind of all-purpose lifestyle guide for a very particular political cultural set of people.
Jeff: And what negative effects does that have, as you see it then, on the discussion of politics?
Yascha: One of the negative effects is that it keeps the Left and Democrats from seeing the world for what it is. It allows them to think that America is fundamentally divided into whites and people of color, and therefore to miss that a lot of Latinos are deeply unhappy with the policies they pursue and have been moving very rapidly into the Republican column and supporting Donald Trump. It’s made it hard for democratic decision-makers to recognize just how extensive the mental decline of Joe Biden was and how costly that would be in electoral terms. So often, it actually ends up being counterproductive.
And of course, it also radicalizes the Right, because even for American conservatives have mistrusted The New York Times for many decades at this point, they would still read it. And because The New York Times does have some good reporting, that tethered them to reality in some important ways. Elon Musk doesn’t read The New York Times or anything else like that. He gets his information from the platform he owns, X. And that has radicalized him and allowed him to just really be misinformed.
And I don’t like that word, “misinformation”, but in this case, I think it applies. It’s just to be wrong about a lot of important things in the world where he buys the unreported, unsupported assertion of some random Twitter account, rather than, as might have been the case if mainstream media outlets hadn’t lost their credibility so completely on the right, from an article that for all of its potential biases is actually deeply reported.
Jeff: And finally, Yascha, talk about what you’re looking at now. You’ve written about so many things. You talk about and write about so much. What keeps you up at night? What are you most worried about right now? What are you most looking at and looking to write about?
Yascha: So one of the things that I’ve been loving and writing a lot, my own substack, which all of your listeners can subscribe to at the yaschamounk.substack.com, is my liberty to write about whatever I wish at the moment. And I wrote an article last week with observations about artificial intelligence. I spent some time in France in the fall and wrote about what I saw there. And obviously, I write a lot more political things, about the zero-sum approach to politics that I see from the Trump administration, for example, this week. And I’m going to continue following the very rather turbulent political events that we likely have ahead of ourselves as well.
Look, I do worry that we have seen the rise of a set of anti-establishment politicians who don’t have a deep commitment to the constitutional order, who don’t have a deep commitment to the rule of law, and who don’t want to recognize legitimate limits on their power because they feel that they and they alone truly represent the people.
And then on the other side, we have a political force that clearly is not capable of capturing with zeitgeist, of actually speaking to a majority of fellow citizens, of actually putting forward a convincing or optimistic vision about what kind of future they want, and that therefore is defaulting increasingly to total opposition and to name-calling and to fancying itself as some kind of rerun of the hashtag resistance to Nazism or fascism or something like that. And I worry about the kind of political dynamic that that combination of forces is likely to entail, not just in the next 4 years, which I’m concerned about, but in the next 10 or 20 years.
Jeff: Yascha Mounk, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Yascha: Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
