Mark Lilla portrays America’s colleges (he is professor of humanities at Columbia University) as dark, suspicious places where debate has been smothered by political correctness and use of the pronoun ‘we’ is anathematised. 

The great movements for justice in America’s past, in civil rights and gay rights and feminism, he says, worked through political institutions to right wrongs. They sought equality in citizenship. Those who joined them wanted to be part of things, to have the same opportunities and freedoms as straight white men. 

But during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular identity, whether related to gender, or sexual orientation, or ethnicity, or body type, or disability, or chronic medical condition:

What’s extraordinary – and appalling – about the past four decades of our history is that our politics have been dominated by two ideologies that encourage and even celebrate the unmaking of citizens. On the right, an ideology that questions the existence of a common good and denies our obligation to help fellow citizens, through government action if necessary.

On the left, an ideology institutionalised in colleges and universities that fetishises our individual and group attachments, applauds self-absorption, and casts a shadow of suspicion over any invocation of a universal democratic we

source:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n23/james-meek/against-passion

• The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla
  Harper, 160 pp, £19.00, August 2017, ISBN 978 0 06 269743 1