The Gray Area with Sean Illing30 Huhti 2018

The age of "mega-identity" politics

Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 years ago, but now that they’re here, they change the way we see each other, the way we engage in politics, and the way politics absorbs other — previously non-political —spheres of our culture. In making her case, Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold. I don’t want to spoil our discussion here, but suffice to say that her recounting of the “minimal group paradigm” experiments is not to be missed. This is the kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world, but how you think about yourself. Mason’s book is, I think, one of the most important published this year, and this conversation gave me a lens on our political discord that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. If you want to understand the kind of identity politics that’s driving America in 2018, you should listen in. Books: Ideology in America by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi The Power by Naomi Alderman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(765)

A new analysis of the pandemic

There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic. Most of them, on some level, are about politics, about decisions that affected people’s lives in different — and very unequal — ways. Cov...

28 Huhti 202547min

Halfway there: a philosopher’s guide to midlife crises

Philosophy often feels like a disconnected discipline, obsessed with tedious and abstract problems. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes philosophical inquiry has a practical purpose outside the c...

21 Huhti 202550min

Whatever this is, it isn’t liberalism

What exactly is the basis for democracy? Arguably Iiberalism, the belief that the government serves the people, is the stone on which modern democracy was founded. That notion is so ingrained in the ...

14 Huhti 202553min

A new way to listen

We have an exciting announcement! Vox Members now get access to ad-free podcasts. If you sign up, you’ll get unlimited access to reporting on vox.com, exclusive newsletters, and all of our podcasts — ...

11 Huhti 20251min

The beliefs AI is built on

There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to artificial intelligence. Technologists love to talk about all the good these tools can do in the world, all the problems they might solve. Yet, many of th...

7 Huhti 202550min

Stop comparing yourself to AI

Why do we keep comparing AI to humans? Jaron Lanier — virtual reality pioneer, digital philosopher, and the author of several best-selling books on technology — thinks that we should stop. In his vie...

31 Maalis 202555min

Democrats need to do something

American government has a speed issue. Both parties are slow to solve problems. Slow to build new things. Slow to make any change at all. Until now. The Trump administration is pushing through sweepi...

24 Maalis 202550min

How to live in uncertain times

Humans hate uncertainty. It makes us feel unsafe and uneasy. We often organize our lives to avoid it. When it's foisted upon us, we don’t always know how to act. But writer and journalist Maggie Jacks...

17 Maalis 202548min