Liberals addicted to identity politics

Since the ignominious failure of the 2016 election, the Democrats have been searching their souls. How could a oncegreat party have fallen so low? Was it the lacklustre campaign of their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton? Was it the failure of the Democrats to grasp Donald Trump’s vote-getting power? Was it a complete breakdown of the party’s national machine?

Mark Lilla, a widely praised social critic and Columbia professor, believes he has the answer. He delivers it in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper/Collins), a sharply intelligent and highly persuasive book.

He deals with American politics, but his perceptions also apply to Canada. A large part of our public life is conducted through identity politics. Canadians anxious to better the lives of Indigenous people, for example, increasingly tend to express themselves in issue-specific organizations rather than through political parties.

A longtime leftist, Lilla claims that the Democrats have become addicted to pressure groups that slice the public into ethnic, national and sexual elements. These slices have together overwhelmed the Democratic Party itself and rendered it irrelevant. The left has now balkanized the electorate and invested its energies in social movements rather than party politics.

Lilla yearns for the bigtent appeal of the old Democrats. He looks back in history to Roosevelt’s New Deal as a golden age of liberalism. He wants public life to emphasize “what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.” He calls for an end to movement politics. “We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress.” He imagines a healthier form of politics that transcends identity attachments.

Organizations claiming to speak for repressed Americans are usually given the benefit of the doubt by the public. Lilla isn’t so generous. A few days after the 2016 election he wrote in a New York Times article that “Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”

Born in 1956, Lilla grounds his account of identity politics in what he knows of the 1960s and its effects. From 1965 or so, war and the rise of feminism together left many of the young dissatisfied with conventional politics. To side with the Democrats was to embrace Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy. That was okay for parents, but the furious young needed something different.

In the early stages of revived, second-generation feminism, women with leftish inclinations wanted a more specific approach. In 1970 a slogan arose, “the personal is political.” It raced through women’s discussions and found a permanent place in the rhetoric of feminism. It was a time when women met in groups for “consciousness-raising,” which meant sharing various forms of dissatisfaction with their condition as women.

Encouraged to confess or complain, women turned their meetings into variations of therapy groups or prayer meetings. They expressed themselves (as the literature on the subject demonstrates) in purely personal terms. In trying to research the subject, they turned inward, examining their own feelings. A sense of identity took hold, setting the pattern for scores of later movements, fundamentally altering the structure of liberal politics.

As Lilla says, a young woman of today “may come from a comfortable, middleclass background” but “her identity confers on her the status of one of history’s victims.” Now she has claims to make — not claims for the whole of society but claims for her particular slice.

Her politics will be based on this self-definition. If she’s in college she may join a women’s organization. Soon her views on women’s issues become non-negotiable. Her teachers, always ready to identify and endorse popular new ideas, become willing mentors.

As if anticipating Lilla’s criticism, academics adopted a less exclusive kind of identity politics, with a new name — “intersectionality.” It means that categories such as race, class, and sex face overlapping systems of discrimination. A black lesbian, for example, might be disadvantaged in two ways at once. Those advocating this approach developed an explanation of the term: “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us.”

But multiple identities are still a means to focus on certain complaints and victimization. A resentful, disuniting rhetoric still selfrighteously claims the spotlight. And academics can ponder the difficulties in making “multi-dimensional conceptualizations.” They spend their time worrying about how categories of differentiation interact.

Lilla’s criticism annoys people accustomed to identity politics. One online comment condemned his “reductionist, immature hostility.” The New York Times reviewer called his book amateurish. Neither amateurish nor hostile, Lilla is a serious critic whose ideas deserve a hearing. He’s opened a new way of understanding public life.