The Once And Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

First posted Oct 14, 2017

In November 2016, Mark Lilla a professor of Humanities at Columbia University, wrote an essay for the New York Times trying to explain how Donald Trump could have been elected President.  Professor Lilla has now expanded his essay into a book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (published in 2017).  It's one of a number of books this season that seeks to understand how someone as unqualified and unprincipled as Trump could be sitting in the Oval Office.  Lilla acknowledges that there are many reasons for this but as a self described "frustrated American liberal" he is interested in focusing on how Liberalism and the Democratic Party lost it's way.  He points the blame at the rise of identity politics on college campuses and social justice movements in general.  He writes:

"Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people -- African Americans, women seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights.  But by the 1980's it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and an increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities.  

Professor Lilla notes that going forward the only way Democrats can protect the rights of the citizenry is by getting their fellow Democrats and Liberals to the voting booth.  Lilla points out there was a time when Democrats understood this.  Unions for example knew their members, knew their districts and how to get their friends and neighbors to the polls and they had a coherent message that everyone could rally around.  But Professor Lilla argues rhat identity politics have to a certain extent supplanted unions in today's Democratic Party and that they have become more concerned with group think, preaching to the converted, banning speakers they disagree with from colleges etc.  And many don't believe in voting at all unless their dream candidate is on the ballet.

Mark Lilla sees a grim future if the Democratic Party and Liberalism doesn't change.  He points out that right now Republicans control tne Presidency, both Houses of Congress and in the past couple of years Democrats have lost over 900 seats in state legislatures across the country.  Lilla writes that we can wait for the Trump Administration to implode but:

"it is easy to imagine that until liberals succeed in recapturing the country's imagination, a new class of populist demagogues drawing selectively from the Reagan catechism and even radicalizing some of its dogmas will still be able to stir up and exploit public anger.  They already are".  

The Once and Future Liberal is a slim book, 160 pages, and Professor Lilla makes many insightful observatuons about the current state we find ourselves in.  He has solutions as well and one of those solutions is that the politics of identity has to end By that he doesn't mean that groups dedicated to fighting for women's rights, minority rights, immigrants rights, gay and lesbian rights should disband.  Quite the contrary but he does mean that the identity politics mindset has to end.  A mindset where the mood is anti-political, conspiratorial and where registering voters, volunteering for a Democratic candidate in your district, knocking on doors to talk to people outside your comfort zone is considered a waste of time because everything is rigged anyway.  As Lilla points out the same distrust of government exists in many left/liberal movements as exists on the right but the difference is the right didn't split their vote on election day in 2016, nor did they stay home.

Mark Lilla as he states in the Introduction has only tackled one aspect of why Trump won.  There is blame to go around on both sides of the political aisle (and let's not forget Putin's part in this).  More books will be coming out in the months and years ahead and I will be interested to read some of them but until then The Once and Future Liberal has some valuable observations and so it's worth the read.