Identity Frames, Antisemitism, and Democratic Backsliding — An Interview With Kristen Renwick Monroe

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/18

 Prof. Kristen Renwick Monroe is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine and the founding director of the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. A political psychologist and ethicist, she has authored influential books—including The Heart of Altruism, The Hand of Compassion, and Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide—that explore how identity, not just reason, shapes moral choice. Her scholarship has earned multiple APSA Best Book awards, Pulitzer and National Book Award nods, and prestigious lifetime-achievement honours.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Monroe on identity, moral choice, and antisemitism. Monroe explains how identity frames shape rescuers, bystanders, and perpetrators during the Holocaust, emphasizing that human connection counters dehumanization. She recounts life stories showing how recognition of shared humanity fosters altruism. Monroe warns of rising antisemitism and democratic backsliding, drawing parallels to Weimar Germany and critiquing Trump’s norm erosion and authoritarian tendencies. She highlights the dangers of “us versus them” mentalities and stresses the importance of dialogue programs, shared experiences, and humanizing stories as practical policies to reduce prejudice and sustain democracy.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here once again with the world-renowned political scientist and longtime mentor, Professor Kristen Renwick Monroe, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. You have argued that identity frames constrain people’s experience of the morally possible. How does this lens explain the persistence of antisemitism?

Professor Kristen Renwick Monroe: I have reviewed some of your questions, and I am not sure I can answer them directly, but I will try to provide a general response. One of the things I found when I was studying the Holocaust was that identity tends to constrain the choices that everybody has. People who were rescuers of Jews were guided in their choices by how they saw themselves in relation to others. They saw themselves as connected to everyone through a shared humanity.

The bystanders—people who knew what was happening, maybe felt bad about it, but did nothing—often saw themselves as weak. They were not high on what philosophers call agency; they were not people who thought they could change the world.

Perpetrators, ironically, saw themselves as under siege. They believed they had to protect the “body politic” of the German people from supposed invaders who were trying to defile it. Their attitude toward Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Social Democrats (among others persecuted by the Nazi regime) resembled how one might view a pest invading a home: something to be eradicated.

So how does this relate to antisemitism? What strikes me is that if you see the humanity in another person, it is much more challenging to categorize them as “the other”—as someone different, threatening, subhuman, or attacking you. If you see them as people just like you, it becomes harder to harm them.

In that sense, if you see the humanity in a Jew, for example, or a Palestinian, or any group, you will be more likely to treat them better. Antisemitism, like other prejudices, classifies people as belonging to a group that is different from you. Because they seem different and threatening, you fear them and mistreat them. But when you recognize their humanity, prejudice tends to lessen—not just antisemitism, but also prejudice against Palestinians, Muslims, ethnic minorities, or people with a different skin colour. Seeing others as just like you makes it easier to treat them with decency and harder to mistreat them.

Jacobsen: You wrote about rescuers—those who perceived Jews as “people just like us.” What practices cultivate an altruistic perspective in a technology-heavy society?

Monroe: Again, I am not sure I can answer that question. I do not know if I have any special insight into a highly technological society. What I did find is that rescuers see themselves as very much like other people, and that self-perception shapes their behaviour. For example, if there is a school shooting and you do not have a child in that school, you will be upset and feel bad about it, but your response will not be the same as if you do have a child there.

You’re going to rush to the school, you’re going to try to see what is happening, and you’re likely to take further steps to prevent it from happening again in the future. And so, if you are someone who sees yourself as close to others, you are likely to be upset when people are treated poorly. It does not matter what group they are in.

We have rescuers like Oskar Springer, who was featured in the book The Hand of Compassion. He said, “I did not think it was right to mistreat Jews any more than I thought it was right to mistreat Black people in America in the 1950s when we came here.” So I think that if you feel you have ties to everybody through a common humanity, you are going to treat people better, because they are just like you.

Jacobsen: You interviewed rescuers, bystanders, and Nazi supporters. What specific dehumanization mechanisms emerged from this conversational data? This is hinging on specific dehumanization mechanisms.

Monroe: I think Otto articulated it very clearly for me. Otto saved over 100 Jews. He married a Jewish woman—he was in love with her. It was not a marriage simply to save her, although it did save her. He was eventually arrested and put into a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, which at that time had been annexed by Nazi Germany from Czechoslovakia and incorporated into the Third Reich.

He said that one day he was out walking, and there was a guard with him. A few Jews had escaped, and they were chased down and shot. Otto asked the man, who he described as slow—he said there was a lot of inbreeding in that part of the world, so perhaps the man had some developmental issues. The guard was carrying his big gun, seeing himself as the master of the universe. Otto asked him, “Did you ever have to kill anybody?” The guard said, “Yes, I had to kill three Jews once. When you get an order like that, you have to be hard. They really weren’t human anymore.”

And Otto said that was the critical factor. Once you distance yourself and dehumanize, you can do whatever you want to people, because they are no longer like you. They are someone else. They are the other. They are different, frightening people who are going to hurt you.

I think that is the root of most prejudice—that you begin to think in terms of “us versus them.” That is one of the most troubling things happening in many parts of the world today. I am not sure whether to call it populism or white Christian nationalism, but it reflects a mentality of separation: we are “us” and they are “them.” Once you do that, the process of distancing begins.

We saw this here on the campuses of the University of California, Irvine, in 2024, when protests broke out over Gaza and Israel. Some students, including Jewish students, expressed concerns about how Israel was treating Gazans. Many Jews also spoke out forcefully. At one point, the students occupied a building they were not supposed to enter. The chancellor called the police, and suddenly, there were police everywhere. Students were arrested, and some were mistreated. A couple of faculty members who were trying to help the students were slammed to the ground and mistreated as well.

I was thinking about this, and I recalled my time in graduate school at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, when anti-war issues were still very much alive and Nixon was president. A man I was very close to, Joseph Cropsey—I had never taken a course with him, but his office was next to mine and we spoke often—was one of the many academics who signed a full-page ad called Academics for Nixon.

I stormed into his office and said, “Mr. Cropsey, what is wrong with you? How could you possibly have signed this? Youcannot support Nixon—he’s horrible!” And instead of saying to me, “You’re out of line, young lady. Get out of myoffice,”—which I was, since I was calling him on the carpet—he said, “Sit down, and let me explain why I did what I did.”

He treated me as someone who was a valued member of the community, who might have misunderstood what he was saying, but who was nevertheless worth saving and worth talking with.

I thought about that in contrast with the attitude the chancellor here at Irvine had toward the students. He saw them as “the other.” They were people disrupting the peace, people who could harm the university and damage his standing. And so he took one course of action.

I believe that how you perceive people, especially in relation to yourself, has a profound influence on how you treat them. If we are interested in antisemitism, we can look at Jews—especially some of the more religious Jews whose clothing is different from what you and I wear. For example, women may wear wigs; there are practices like the mikveh; the lifestyle can look very different.

You can see these differences as threatening, or you can see them as simply interesting and distinctive. And I think howyou perceive such differences will directly affect how you treat people.

Jacobsen: You emphasize moral salience. What are the relevant metrics to see changes in moral salience toward Jews over time?

Monroe: That is an interesting question. Again, I do not like framing it just in terms of antisemitism. I think it is a broader question that applies to any group against which prejudice is directed.

Think about it: why should we care how people worship God in the privacy of their own hearts? What difference does it make to me? Why should I care if your skin is darker than mine?

You might notice I have a bandage on my nose right now from having a basal cell carcinoma removed. I have light skin. You have light skin. In our culture, light skin is often perceived as a sign of “good skin.” We are not prejudiced against people with light skin; we are prejudiced against people with dark skin. Why? What difference does it make? In some ways, people with darker skin do not face the same problems I do. Maybe their skin is superior to mine. I wish I had more pigment so I would not keep developing basal cell cancers.

So the question of why a society chooses to discriminate against one group versus another is critical. I do not think anybody really knows. For example, in ancient Egyptian society, the rulers often married their brothers and sisters to keep power within the family. We now know, genetically, that this is not the healthiest way to ensure vigorous offspring.

Today, we have laws against incest, and psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown that people often find the idea “icky.” They are not comfortable with it. But in that society, it was acceptable. Cleopatra, for example, is believed to have married her brother at one point.

I don’t know much about Cleopatra. But the larger question of how we accord moral salience—why we assign specific differences political or moral significance—is, I think, the critical issue here. I do not think we really understand it.

It tends to be imposed by the dominant group that holds the most power. For example, Europeans, who were more advanced in terms of military technology, went into Africa, conquered territories, and took slaves. Dark skin became the justification for what they were doing—because slavery, in itself, is wrong, they needed a rationale.

Slavery has existed since antiquity, but it was not the same as the chattel slavery practiced in the United States and the British Empire. Traditionally, it was tied to war. You took prisoners of war, regardless of who they were. You might kill the king, but you would often take the queen and the subjects as slaves. That form of slavery was justified simply by military might.

If you had the power, you could dominate others, and you justified it based on whatever difference you considered relevant. In the case of European colonialism, skin colour became that marker. Europeans had lighter skin and more advanced military technology, and so dark skin was often framed as inferior to justify conquest.

Now, I do not know if that is the full explanation—I am not a scholar of slavery—but that is my best interpretation.

Jacobsen: The Koreans have the most extended continuous history of slavery of any civilization. Again, I am not a scholar on that. That is why I have conversations with experts. All right then: why are life story interviews uniquely suited to understanding antisemitism’s effects on moral choice?

Monroe: I think life stories are important because they reveal the essence of a human being. You have to see the humanity in the other person. There is a great deal of work in social psychology that demonstrates this.

For example, Daniel Bar-Tal, a distinguished Israeli scholar, wrote extensively about how people perceive “the other.” One story he recounted was of an assailant entering a school intending to kill. The teacher engaged him, looked into his eyes, and kept repeating, “You are just like us. Why do you want to do this?” Eventually, he did not carry out the killings. Establishing a human connection made violence less likely.

I had a friend in graduate school, Ben Ginsberg, whose father was a soccer player in the Soviet Union. He had played against a German player when he was in high school. Years later, as a Jew being marched along by the Nazis, he happened to be recognized by that same German. The soldier moved him to the end of the line and, when they turned a corner, told him to get out. That shared bond of soccer, remembered across years and war, was enough to save his life.

It is a small thing, and one might ask, why would that matter? But it did. That is the power of human connection. If, for some reason, you can see that others are just like you, or that you share something in common, you are less likely to mistreat them.

Life stories are the best way to convey that. They communicate who the person is, and they make you feel something about them—something that reminds you that they are, in fact, just like you.

Jacobsen: If identity, rather than abstract reason, guides moral action, which policies realistically reduce antisemitism?

Monroe: I think it comes down to humanizing stories—anything that helps you see the other person as a human being.

We had a program here for many years called the Olive Tree Initiative. The olive tree, of course, is a symbol of peace. The program brought together Arab Muslim students and Jewish students at UC Irvine. They would meet regularly—once a week or so—to talk about prejudice. Then they travelled to Israel and Palestine, visiting Muslim communities and Israeli Jewish communities. The goal was to help them see their common humanity.

It was modelled on programs in Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics had conflicted for centuries. Both groups were Christian, but their religious division—Protestant versus Catholic—had fueled violence for over 500 years. In those programs, students spent a year preparing, and then they were hosted in the United States by families that modelled peaceful coexistence.

One example I recall is a Catholic girl from Northern Ireland who stayed with a couple named Bruce and Rita. Bruce was Protestant, Rita was Catholic. When they married, Bruce even offered to convert to Catholicism for her, though she never asked him to. They were not especially religious, but they lived together in peace.

The girl staying with them was baffled by two things. First, she could not understand why Bruce went to work every day. She called him a “dirty old man” because, in her experience, most men she knew were unemployed and living on government support. Second, she could not grasp how Bruce’s brothers remained Protestant while Bruce himself identified with Catholicism after marriage—and yet the family lived harmoniously without conflict. That confused her sense of identity boundaries.

The same dynamic exists elsewhere. In Rwanda, for instance, there were many marriages between Tutsis and Hutus. Their children could not easily be categorized as one or the other. In the film Hotel Rwanda, the central figure, Paul Rusesabagina, was a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman. Their relationship showed how identities can intertwine across supposed divides.

So when people are placed in situations where they see a peaceful coexistence modelled—whether Protestant and Catholic, Hutu and Tutsi, or Jewish and Muslim—it provides them with a roadmap, they begin to see that it is possible, that it is not such a big deal, and that people can, in fact, live together in peace.

That is the kind of policy that works. Structured programs that encourage dialogue and shared experiences are helpful. But it also requires an internal shift. At first, you may simply wonder: “Why are these people able to live together in peace without conflict?” Then, gradually, you recognize that it is possible for you, too.

Jacobsen: Side note: I was invited to the Rebuilding Ukraine conference. Many prominent figures were there, and one of the keynote speakers was Romeo Dallaire.

Monroe: He’s an interesting person. After the Rwandan genocide, he attempted suicide—it was so difficult for him to live with what he had witnessed. If you look at the film Hotel Rwanda, there’s a powerful and gruesome scene. The character modelled on Dallaire, played by Nick Nolte, says to Paul Rusesabagina, “You’re nothing. You’re not even human. You’reAfrican, and the Europeans don’t care about you.”

What Paul then does is have everyone call anyone they can to say goodbye and ask for help. One of those calls connects him to the head of Sabena Airlines, who tells him, “What are you talking about? They’re going to kill you.” That contact jolts action into place. It was a human connection that shifted the situation—emotional bonds, not abstract reason. That’swhat put pressure on people. It’s a powerful movie. Dallaire is a fantastic person. Yes, he is still alive.

Jacobsen: What is a common term or conceptual schema people use when they describe that moment of moral switch—whether it happens over time or in a sudden window?

Monroe: That’s an interesting question—what happens when people suddenly see.

Take the film Schindler’s List. It is shot in black and white, except for two key moments. One occurs as Oskar Schindler is riding near the cliffs in Kraków, overlooking the ghetto clearance. Amidst the chaos—people being rounded up, violence everywhere—there is a single child in a bright red coat. That splash of colour draws his eye. It becomes the moment when he perceives the humanity of the victims, when he realizes there is something he could do.

At the end of the film, after liberation by the Soviet army, the story transitions from black and white to colour. Survivors walk to Schindler’s grave and place stones upon it. Each actor is paired with the real person they portrayed, if still alive. I watched this with my son, who was twelve at the time. He had watched the entire movie without much reaction. But when he saw that final sequence, he turned to me and asked, “Is this a true story?” I said yes, and he broke down. He had endured the film, but the realization that it was true overwhelmed him.

Cognitive psychologists have noted that when a single bright azalea is placed in the middle of a beige room, your eyes are immediately drawn to it. That is what Spielberg was doing with the girl in the red coat: creating that jarring moment of recognition that pierces abstraction and forces you to see.

I think there are moments when something suddenly happens, and you see things in a different light. It’s like the paradigm you’ve been living with cracks open. Suddenly, you realize there is another way of doing things.

Those are the moments that cause people to change. It’s hard to know what triggers them—it could be any number of things, and sometimes you only understand them in retrospect.

I interviewed a Dutch woman who later became a psychoanalyst. At the time of the war, she was about 19 or 20 and training as a social worker. One day, she came out of class and saw the Gestapo seizing children from a Jewish orphanage, throwing them into a truck. Some Dutch women tried to stop them, and they too were thrown into the truck.

She said it happened so fast that she froze. She stood paralyzed, wondering what was happening, and only gradually came to realize the truth. Years later, she told me, “We all have memories of times when we should have done something, and we didn’t. Those memories burden us for the rest of our lives.” That day marked her decision to dedicate herself to helping people.

Sometimes the trigger is precisely that: a moment when you realize, I should have acted, and I didn’t. You don’t want to live with that version of yourself, so you change. These moments can come in many forms, but they all involve a sudden shift in how you see the world.

Jacobsen: Your recent work engages with democratic backsliding in the United States and, I presume, Germany. What parallels to Weimar-era dynamics matter most for understanding today’s antisemitism?

Monroe: Too many—and that is the frightening part. When I began a book project with students at the Ethics Center, I would read the day’s newspapers and think: Am I reading current events, or am I reading my research on Weimar Germany? The parallels are striking.

Weimar was a functioning democracy—fragile, young, but real. And then things began to unravel. Hitler rose to power, and small shifts accumulated into a catastrophe.

There’s now an entire literature—almost a separate field—on how democracies die. The patterns are remarkably consistent. Strongmen—whether autocrats or would-be dictators—tend to:

• Attack the press, undermining independent journalism (something Trump has explicitly done).
• Stack the courts with loyalists.
• Divide society into “us versus them.”
• Legitimize conduct that previously would have been unthinkable in public life.

Not long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a presidential candidate in the United States telling a rally crowd to “throw the bum out” or calling an opponent a “whore.” That erosion of norms is precisely the kind of cultural shift that opens the door to antisemitism and other forms of dehumanization. Trump once called Kamala Harris a whore. He bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” This is a coarsening of public discourse to its lowest level.

There is also a total disregard for truth. Trump simply invents things without concern for accuracy. Look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric on vaccines—there is no respect for evidence. The scientific data on vaccines is overwhelming, just as it is on climate change. It is not that climate scientists are evenly divided. Roughly 99 percent agree that anthropogenic climate change is happening. Yet Trump dismisses this consensus and substitutes his own narrative.

These are classic warning signs of authoritarianism. Dictators and strongmen constantly erode truth first, because once truth is gone, power can be anything they declare it to be.

The parallels to Weimar are, again, too many. And the most troubling part, to me, is that Americans often assume, “Once Trump is gone, things will return to normal.” That will not happen.

There is a powerful line in the German television series Line of Separation, which dramatizes how norms collapse in stages. We have already shifted our baseline of what counts as normal political behaviour.

Think about Mitt Romney. He faced public backlash for strapping his dog to the roof of his car—a minor lapse compared to today’s political outrages. Romney was, by all accounts, a fundamentally decent person, yet he was sharply criticized. Trump, by contrast, has committed countless violations of decency and democratic norms, and instead of being universally condemned, he continues to command loyalty.

Miles Taylor, the former DHS official who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in September 2018 (“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”), later said something chilling: the worst thing is not what Trump did to democracy, but what he enabled Americans to do to themselves.

That, I think, is the tragedy. The American public has become overwhelmed. It is like a child running through a house, knocking over everything in sight—by the time you clean up one mess in the living room, the child is already destroying the kitchen. The pace and chaos leave people exhausted, disoriented, and unable to keep up.

There were “grown-ups in the room” trying to control Trump. The worst thing is not what he did to democracy, but what he allowed us to do to ourselves.

That is the tragedy: the American public is overwhelmed. There is so much chaos, so much scattershot action. It is like a child running through a house, knocking things over—by the time you clean up the mess in the living room, the child is already tearing apart the kitchen. People cannot keep up.

We don’t know where to turn. He has “flooded the zone.” And that is not accidental—it is a deliberate strategy articulated by Steve Bannon. Trump himself may not be fully aware of the tactic; he often lacks knowledge of the history or the tools he’s using. For example, someone had to explain to him the War Powers Act of 1973, and he had no idea what it was. He certainly did not know the Latin concept of comitas (reciprocal respect among nations). Trump is not well-educated, despite his claims about attending Penn. Reports suggest he even paid others to take his exams.

The point is that he has created such an overwhelming stream of crises that the opposition cannot decide where to focus. And unless they figure this out before the 2026 elections—if they go in thinking, “All we have to do is beat Trump”—they will be stunned.

Because Trump has supporters who genuinely like what he is doing, I have good friends who say, “At least he’s doing something.” One of my own sons once supported Bernie Sanders, but after Sanders lost, he voted for Trump because he felt the Democrats had abandoned the working class. It was his way of punishing them. Now he will not even speak to meabout politics, and maybe about other things as well. That estrangement is painful.

But the bigger picture is this: we are in a dangerous situation. More than 70 million people voted for Trump. That was not an accident or a fluke. It represents a broad current in American society. And when you look at what’s happening in states like Florida—rolling back vaccines, restricting abortion rights—you see the downstream effects.

Republican-controlled states are doing all kinds of things Trump wants them to do. Hardly anyone in the party is challenging him. A few have tried, but they’ve been driven out.

One of my former interns, now at Stanford, worked on the House Oversight Committee this past summer. He told me that even Republican members who personally dislike Trump admit they call him whenever they face political trouble. A senator from Missouri said as much: Trump will pick up the phone and threaten, “I’ll primary you from the right.” That’sall it takes—people fall into line.

Look at Susan Collins. She claims to disapprove of Trump, but she consistently votes with him. Jacobsen: And then there’s J.D. Vance, now Trump’s vice president. Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s number two.

Monroe: Vance is, in my view, a total opportunist. At first, he seemed cynical, but now he appears to be a true believer. He has embraced white Christian nationalism. That’s striking because his wife is not white—she’s Indian-American, a brilliant woman who graduated from Yale Law and clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices. You would think that kind of background would temper such ideology. Instead, they’re pushing a vision that echoes the old Nazi slogan of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”—children, kitchen, and church. In plain terms: women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

It’s strange, but many people see this as “traditional” and comforting. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, captured this paradox perfectly. When she was asked about the older women in her story who enforce patriarchal rules, she explained that even enforcers gain a measure of power they would not otherwise have in a repressive system. So, in practice, it becomes a “for thee, not for me” dynamic. They enforce oppression but carve out authority for themselves within it.

Monroe: The Handmaid’s Tale is frightening to read now. It was always a frightening book, but today it feels closer to reality. 

Jacobsen: Margaret Atwood once joked, “We didn’t change the picture, we changed the frame.” And that’s the point—if you shift the frame, the story itself changes. 

Monroe: That is what worries me most: they are changing what counts as usual. Take this idea that America could annex Canada as the 51st state. Where does that come from? Yet some people like it. They say, “That’s a good idea, the Canadians would be happy.” 

Jacobsen: There’s a kind of imperial fantasy at work: retract U.S. influence abroad while extending it across the Americas, creating a “Gulf of America.” It’s a bizarre and illegitimate notion, but you can see how it fits into a Trumpian legacy of empire.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time again, Kristen. 

Monroe: Good seeing you—good to talk with you.

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