Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:
Yascha Mounk: I’ve read a lot of your work and have been in conversation with you for a long time. You’re somebody who approaches the growth and influence of what some people call wokeness, what I call the identity synthesis, what you and your recent work have called the Third Awokening, from a social scientific perspective.
Where do these ideas come from? How did they gain so much currency and why are you concerned about them?
Eric Kaufmann: Obviously you in your book, The Identity Trap, give a pretty good account of one route, I think, towards this, which is sort of the whole idea of strategic essentialism that came out of left-wing intellectual thought. I know yourself and Francis Fukuyama and Chris Rufo and others have sketched out its development out of essentially the post-Marxist left. What I try to do in my book, The Third Awokening, is to look at the more liberal humanitarian, if you like, prong of this, which runs through psychotherapy and gets us towards a kind of humanitarian extremism. And so I put a lot of emphasis on this idea of cranking the dial of humanitarianism.
More here.
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