Lilla:
Liberals should reject the divisive, zero-sum politics of identity and find their way back to a unifying vision of the common good
Donald
Trump’s surprise victory in last year’s presidential election has finally energized
my fellow liberals, who are networking, marching and showing up at town-hall
meetings across the country. There is excited talk about winning back the White
House in 2020 and maybe even the House of Representatives in the interim.
But we
are way ahead of ourselves—dangerously so. For a start, the presidency just
isn’t what it used to be, certainly not for Democrats. In the last generation,
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won the office with comfortable margins, but they
were repeatedly stymied by assertive Republicans in Congress, a right-leaning
Supreme Court and—what should be the most worrisome development for Democrats—a
steadily growing majority of state governments in Republican hands.
What’s
more, nothing those presidents did while in office did much to reverse the
rightward drift of American public opinion. Even when they vote for Democrats
or support some of their policies, most Americans—including young people, women
and minorities—reject the term “liberal.” And it isn’t hard to see why. They
see us as aloof, elitist, out of touch.
It is
time to admit that American liberalism is in deep crisis: a crisis of
imagination and ambition on our side, a crisis of attachment and trust on the
side of the wider public. The question is, why? Why would those who claim to
speak for and defend the great American demos
be so indifferent to stirring its feelings and gaining its trust? Why, in the
contest for the American imagination, have liberals simply abdicated?
Ronald
Reagan almost single-handedly destroyed the New Deal vision of America that
used to guide us. Franklin Roosevelt had pictured a place where citizens were
joined in a collective enterprise to build a strong nation and protect each
other. The watchwords of that effort were solidarity, opportunity and public
duty. Reagan pictured a more individualistic America where everyone would
flourish once freed from the shackles of the state, and so the watchwords
became self-reliance and small government.
To meet
the Reagan challenge, we liberals needed to develop an ambitious new vision of
America and its future that would again inspire people of every walk of life
and in every region of the country to come together as citizens. Instead we got
tangled up in the divisive, zero-sum world of identity politics, losing a sense
of what binds us together as a nation. What went missing in the Reagan years
was the great liberal-democratic We.
Little wonder that so few now wish to join us.
There
is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a once-successful
liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal politics of “difference”
is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.
This
phrase was coined by feminists in the 1960s and captured perfectly the mind-set
of the New Left at the time. Originally, it was interpreted to mean that
everything that seems strictly private—sexuality, the family, the workplace—is
in fact political and that there are no spheres of life exempt from the struggle
for power. That is what made it so radical, electrifying sympathizers and
disturbing everyone else.
But the
phrase could also be taken in a more romantic sense: that what we think of as
political action is in fact nothing but personal activity, an expression of me
and how I define myself. As we would put it today, my political life is a
reflection of my identity.
Over
time, the romantic view won out over the radical one, and the idea got rooted
on the left that, to reverse the formula, the
political is the personal. Liberals and progressives continued to fight for
social justice out in the world. But now they also wanted there to be no space
between what they felt inside and what they did in that world. They wanted
their political engagements to mirror how they understood and defined
themselves as individuals. And they wanted their self-definition to be
recognized.
This
was an innovation on the left. Socialism had no time for individual
recognition. Rushing toward the revolution, it divided the world into
exploiting capitalists and exploited workers of every background. New Deal
liberals were just as indifferent to individual identity; they thought and
spoke in terms of equal rights and equal social protections for all. Even the
early movements of the 1950s and ’60s to secure the rights of African-Americans,
women and gays appealed to our shared humanity and citizenship, not our
differences. They drew people together rather than setting them against each
other.
All
that began to change when the New Left shattered in the 1970s, in no small part
due to identity issues. Blacks complained that white movement leaders were
racist, feminists complained that they were sexist, and lesbians complained
that straight feminists were homophobic. The main enemies were no longer
capitalism and the military-industrial complex; they were fellow movement
members who were not, as we would say today, sufficiently “woke.”
It was
then that less radical liberal and progressive activists also began redirecting
their energies away from party politics and toward a wide range of single-issue
social movements. The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal;
they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals
and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least to speak, about the
common good.
In
movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into
smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals
of ideological one-upmanship. Symbols take on outsize significance, especially
in identity-based movements.
The
results of this shift are now plain to see. The classic Democratic goal of bringing
people from different backgrounds together for a single common project has
given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and
exclusionary self-definition. And what keeps this approach to politics alive is
that it is cultivated in the colleges and universities where liberal elites are
formed. Here again, we must look to the history of the New Left to understand
how this happened.
After
Reagan’s election in 1980, conservative activists hit the road to spread the
new individualist gospel of small government and free markets and poured their
energies into winning out-of-the-way county, state and congressional elections.
Also on the road, though taking a different exit on the interstate, were former
New Left activists heading for college towns all over America.
Conservatives
concentrated on attracting working people once attached to the Democratic
Party—a populist, bottom-up strategy. The left concentrated on transforming the
outlook of professional and party elites—a top-down strategy. Both groups were
successful, and both left their mark on the country.
Up
until the 1960s, those active in the Democratic Party were largely drawn from
the working class or farm communities and were formed in local political clubs
or on union-dominated shop floors. That world is gone. Today they are formed
primarily in our colleges and universities, as are members of the
overwhelmingly liberal-dominated professions of law, journalism and education.
Liberal
political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far
removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and
particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the
Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical
artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation
than the realities of power politics today.
The
experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that
movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things;
the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the
self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.
These
lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is
that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that
keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate
is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society
that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice,
individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.
It is
little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to courses focused on
their identities and movements related to them. Nor is it surprising that many
join campus groups that engage in identity movement work. But the costs need to
be tallied.
For
those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line
between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political
commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their
self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming
importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be
absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities
or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal
ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for
them.
As a
teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and
progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far
more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and
principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they
are engaged in politics as an X,
concerned about other Xs and those
issues touching on X-ness. And they
are less and less comfortable with debate.
Over
the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our
universities into the media mainstream: Speaking
as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any
questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once
might have begun, I think A, and here is
my argument, now take the form, Speaking
as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are
taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
Conservatives
complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who
should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn
millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is
that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that,
by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less
engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.
There
is a great irony in this. The supposedly bland, conventional universities of
the 1950s and early ’60s incubated the most radical generation of American
citizens perhaps since our founding. Young people were incensed by the denial
of voting rights out there, the Vietnam War out there, nuclear proliferation
out there, capitalism out there, colonialism out there. Yet once that
generation took power in the universities, it proceeded to depoliticize the
liberal elite, rendering its members unprepared to think about the common good
and what must be done practically to secure it—especially the hard and
unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a
common effort.
Every
advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of liberal
political consciousness. There can be no liberal politics without a sense of We—of what we are as citizens and what
we owe each other. If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and
become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the
Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must
offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of
every background, share.
And
that is citizenship. We must relearn how to speak to citizens as citizens and
to frame our appeals for solidarity—including ones to benefit particular
groups—in terms of principles that everyone can affirm.
Black
Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. By
publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans, the
movement delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But its
decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American
society and demand a confession of white sins and public penitence only played
into the hands of the Republican right.
I am
not a black male motorist and will never know what it is like to be one. If I
am going to be affected by his experience, I need some way to identify with
him, and citizenship is the only thing I know that we share. The more the
differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel
outrage at his mistreatment.
The
politics of identity has done nothing but strengthen the grip of the American
right on our institutions. It is the gift that keeps on taking. Now is the time
for liberals to do an immediate about-face and return to articulating their
core principles of solidarity and equal protection for all. Never has the
country needed it more.
