The once and future liberal After identity politics

STILL GOBSMACKED BY the 2016 election, many liberals may be yearning for a thoughtful, generous and well-informed book to put it all in perspective, a strategic account of where they've been, where they are now and where they ought to go. In "The Once and Future Liberal," Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today's fractured liberals around an agenda "emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us." Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today's campus left. "Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony," he instructs "identity" activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and "get real." The inspiration for this slim volume came from Lilla's November 2016 New York Times article, "The End of Identity Liberalism." That essay argued that "a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity" had turned liberals into navel- gazing do-nothings, "narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups." In order to stop losing elections to the likes of Donald Trump, Lilla proposed, "the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end." As the book's promotional material proudly notes, the piece set off"a firestorm of controversy." In theory, this sort of provocation lends itself nicely to a book-length treatment, allowing an author a chance to summon additional research and bring depth to an otherwise surface argument. With "The Once and Future Liberal," Lilla expands his scope to include the last 80 years of American politics, a period when the liberal "Roosevelt Dispensation" gave way to the conservative "Reagan Dispensation" (with deleterious consequences). He also fleshes out his vision of what should lie ahead - not just "the end of identity liberalism" but the start of a new liberalism focused on citizenship, duty and shared purpose. All too often, however, Lilla opts for attitude over substance. Though he calls for liberals to adopt "a coldly realistic view of how we live now," he spends much of his book jeering from afar at millennial "social justice warriors," whose "resentful, disuniting rhetoric" supposedly destroyed a once-great liberal tradition. Lilla adopts the tone of a long-suffering professor who just wants to discuss Marx and Emerson but finds himself besieged by hybridity and intersectionality. And yet he often fails in some basic professorial imperatives, like familiarizing himself with the relevant literature and providing research and evidence to support his argument. Lilla contends that the New Deal initiated a golden age of liberalism, filled with "confidence, hope, pride and a spirit of selfsacrifice," all but ignoring extensive scholarship on the era's conflicts and structural inequities. His narrative of the modern conservative movement is no more nuanced, depicting the fractious post-1980 Republican Party as "an ideologically unified and electorally potent force that thought and acted like a 'fine-tuned machine.'" This is not, of course, a work of historical scholarship. It is a polemic about the dangers of "identity liberalism," and a critique of the misguided professors and students who seem so enamored of it. Campus movements admittedly make for an easy target, with their self-serious posturing and ever-lengthening strings of abbreviations. But for an intellectual historian, Lilla seems remarkably incurious about what all of this actually means to the people involved. One might suppose that an author taking aim at college activists would interview a few of them - find out what their experiences have been, how they view the world, why they do what they do. Instead Lilla draws on a handful of quotes from the 55-year-old Port Huron Statement, the long-ago manifesto of the white student left, to capture most of what has gone wrong ever since. Lilla's labels can be slippery; he often conflates liberals, leftists and Democrats. By contrast he takes a rather narrow view of "identity politics" as something practiced mainly by left-wing movements and not, say, by the Republican Party. His dislike of this form of activism seems to have something to do with its claim that "the personal is political," that we are all social and political beings even in the most intimate settings. Lilla rejects what most feminists would say about that venerable phrase: that it opened up new areas of life to political analysis and civic action. To the contrary, he sees it as a disastrous turn inward, a rejection of tough-minded electoral warfare in favor of "aimless self-expression." Lilla acknowledges that social movements like feminism and civil rights played important roles in American history, raising questions and insisting on changes that could be secured no other way. At the moment, however, he finds such movements to be counterproductive, sucking energy away from the simple and urgent task of getting more Democrats into office. He disparages Black Lives Matter as "a textbook example of how not to build solidarity," and dismisses "sex relations, the family, the secretarial pool, schools, the grocery store" (read: women's issues) as all but irrelevant to serious politics. This is a shame, because he identifies some truly important questions that liberals and leftists of all stripes will have to face together: How should the Democratic Party balance diversity with a common vision of citizenship? How and where should concerned Americans focus their energies - on social-movement activism, on "resistance," on electoral politics? How should universities preserve free speech in an age of impassioned conflict? How, for that matter, can Democrats start winning a few more local races? Lilla acts as if there are easy answers to these questions. "We need no more marchers," he writes. "We need more mayors." But isn't it possible that we need both? Lilla concedes that many Americans think of themselves at once as members of identity groups and as citizens of a national polity. "Both ideas can be - indeed, are - true." He argues nonetheless that our particular crisis calls for prioritizing one over the other. "What's crucial at this juncture in our history is to concentrate on this shared political status, not on our other manifest differences." Unwittingly, however, "The Once and Future Liberal" provides a case study in just how challenging that may be. Despite his lofty calls for solidarity, Lilla can't seem to get out of his own way - or even to take his own advice. He urges fellow liberals to focus on "the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort," then proceeds to insult his own audience. He denounces the modern university for churning out students "incurious about the world outside their heads," yet fails, in the end, to get much outside of his own. He decries identity types for "delivering sermons to the unwashed from a raised pulpit" while offering up his own elaborate jeremiad. He reminds liberals that "nothing will turn voters offmore surely than being hectored," and then - on the very same page - scolds the "identity conscious" for treating political meetings as "therapy sessions." As it turns out, Lilla himself could have used more rather than less introspection, a healthy dose of examining his own contradictions and biases. He laments that "American liberals have a reputation, as the saying goes, of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity." If so, he has proved his bona fides as a member of the tribe. "The Once and Future Liberal" is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition. 0 Lilla sees a disastrous turn inward in liberal politics, a rejection of tough-minded electoral warfare. BEVERLY GAGE teaches American history at Yale.

This slim polemic excoriates the identity politics of contemporary liberalism and blames it for Donald Trump's victory. In a reasoned analysis of 20th-century American politics, Lilla (The Shipwrecked Mind), a Columbia professor, observes that modern American politics is shaped by the visions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. In the first, "citizens were involved in a collective enterprise" to guard against risk and the denial of fundamental rights. In the second, they were promised a "more individualistic America" that would prosper when liberated from government constraints. He argues that liberals' collective response to the Reagan Dispensation was to lose "themselves in the thickets of identity politics" and essentially abandon fighting the Republican ascendancy at the electoral level. Because he works in broad strokes and makes no secret of his perspective as a "frustrated American liberal," Lilla can get shrill, and he spends too much time on campus politics. Though he sometimes overreaches, he also convincingly argues that a lack of political vision and shared purpose are major reasons why America is now led by an "opportunistic, unprincipled populist." The best liberal response, he argues, is to cultivate "a solidarity that transcends identity attachments." Lilla's analysis is insightful, but more likely to fire up debate in college classrooms than to mobilize the masses. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.