Last November, Columbia University historian Mark Lilla published a comment piece in the New York Times, entitled The End of Identity Liberalism. Numbed by Trump’s election victory, Lilla placed the blame largely at the door of “identity politics”, which, he argued, had atomised American politics, undermined civic culture and destroyed the Democrats’ electoral chances. Liberalism, he wrote, “has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing”.
Now Lilla’s op-ed has become a book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Its publication has reignited the debate over the politics of identity. According to Lilla, the high point of American liberalism came with Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, which focused not on individual needs but on the collective good. To regain power, Lilla argues, the liberal left needs to rediscover that notion of the common good by adopting a pragmatic form of politics. He is particularly caustic about protest movements such as Black Lives Matter. “We need no more marchers,” he writes. “We need more mayor
Between them, Lilla and his critics sum up well the impasse of contemporary politics on the left. Many of his critics cannot see that the politics of identity, far from defending the marginalised and the powerless, fragments the possibilities of meaningful social change. Lilla cannot see that the self-proclaimed “liberal centrist” politics he espouses has helped create the fragmentation of which he despairs. In Europe, too, debates about immigration and multiculturalism, about nationalism and federalism, expose a similar kind of deadlock. The roots of contemporary identity politics lie in the new social movements that emerged in the 1960s to challenge the failure of the left to take seriously the issues of racism, homophobia and women’s rights. The struggle for black rights in America, in particular, was highly influential in providing a template for many other groups to develop concepts of identity and self-organisation. Squeezed between an intensely racist society, on the one hand, and a left often indifferent to their plight, many black activists ceded from civil rights organisations and set up separate black groups.
That hollowing out has been exacerbated by the narrowing of the political sphere, by politics that has self-consciously become less ideological, more technocratic. The Democrats in America have discarded much of their old ideological attachments as well as their links to their old social constituencies. Dick Morris, former chief political adviser to the then president Bill Clinton, whom Lilla lauds, called this the process of “triangulation” – the left stealing the right’s clothes, so that it can appear to be above ideological politics. It was an approach appropriated by Tony Blair for New Labour; many see in Emmanuel Macron’s policies an attempt to fashion a new Gallic version of the same.
One of the consequences of the mainstreaming of identity politics is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, racism is becoming rebranded as white identity politics.
Now Lilla’s op-ed has become a book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Its publication has reignited the debate over the politics of identity. According to Lilla, the high point of American liberalism came with Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, which focused not on individual needs but on the collective good. To regain power, Lilla argues, the liberal left needs to rediscover that notion of the common good by adopting a pragmatic form of politics. He is particularly caustic about protest movements such as Black Lives Matter. “We need no more marchers,” he writes. “We need more mayor
Between them, Lilla and his critics sum up well the impasse of contemporary politics on the left. Many of his critics cannot see that the politics of identity, far from defending the marginalised and the powerless, fragments the possibilities of meaningful social change. Lilla cannot see that the self-proclaimed “liberal centrist” politics he espouses has helped create the fragmentation of which he despairs. In Europe, too, debates about immigration and multiculturalism, about nationalism and federalism, expose a similar kind of deadlock. The roots of contemporary identity politics lie in the new social movements that emerged in the 1960s to challenge the failure of the left to take seriously the issues of racism, homophobia and women’s rights. The struggle for black rights in America, in particular, was highly influential in providing a template for many other groups to develop concepts of identity and self-organisation. Squeezed between an intensely racist society, on the one hand, and a left often indifferent to their plight, many black activists ceded from civil rights organisations and set up separate black groups.
That hollowing out has been exacerbated by the narrowing of the political sphere, by politics that has self-consciously become less ideological, more technocratic. The Democrats in America have discarded much of their old ideological attachments as well as their links to their old social constituencies. Dick Morris, former chief political adviser to the then president Bill Clinton, whom Lilla lauds, called this the process of “triangulation” – the left stealing the right’s clothes, so that it can appear to be above ideological politics. It was an approach appropriated by Tony Blair for New Labour; many see in Emmanuel Macron’s policies an attempt to fashion a new Gallic version of the same.
One of the consequences of the mainstreaming of identity politics is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, racism is becoming rebranded as white identity politics.
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