The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free
About this audiobook
The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.
The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.
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About the author
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy in Washington, DC, where he writes on critical race theory, national identity, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation, and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to twenty years as a journalist, fifteen of them writing from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He left journalism to join the Bush administration, serving as a speechwriter for Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau, where he wrote speeches and op-eds.
