The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla. 

5/5 rating. 

Book #144 of 2019. Read December 18, 2019.

Wow, I absolutely loved this book! Mark talks about what Liberalism and the left once stood for: especially in Roosevelt’s time. He then illustrates how much this has changed and what needs to be done to remedy these changes.

As is so apparent from most people’s apathy and disengagement from civic life, politics has lost any semblance of motivating goals. Mark specifically talks about the lack of unification by the left. As Democrats have become more and more focused on identity, and identity politics, they have completely forgotten that the whole reason to help disadvantaged groups is to lift them up and include them in “We, the people,” not to set apart individual factions. Mark describes in many different ways how this turning into one’s self (and one’s identity), and disregarding a goal for active and equal citizens has fractured the party at a time when unification could be so powerful.

America does not need another self-interest group who won’t listen to anything that other groups put forth (we already apparently have Congress doing their damnedest to not compromise or put forth anything worthwhile). 

What would begin to fix our country, is to bring back something akin to FDR’s powerful ideas for ONE people who will draw off of other’s strengths and lift up others when they fall:

“In Roosevelt’s vision, four universal freedoms were declared and accepted as obvious by most people: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This vision filled three generations of liberals with confidence, hope, pride, and a spirit of self-sacrifice. And patriotism. They had no problem standing for the national anthem.” 

I hope that all Democrats read this, and I think it would be worthwhile for every US citizen to take its ideas to heart.

Quotes from The Once and Future Liberal:

“Contrary to what the centrist coroners of the 2016 election will be saying, the reason the Democrats are losing ground is not that they have drifted too far to the left. Nor, as the progressives are already insisting, is that they have drifted too far to the right, especially on economic issues. They are losing because they have retreated into caves they have carved for themselves in the side of what once was a great mountain.”

“At the moment I’m writing, the homepage of the Republican site prominently features a document titled ‘Principles for American Renewal,’ which is a statement of positions on eleven different broad political issues. The list begins with the Constitution (‘Our Constitution should be preserved, valued, and honored’) and ends with immigration (‘We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the law, and boosts our economy’). There is no such document to be found on the Democrats’ homepage. Instead, when you scroll to the bottom of it you find a list of links titled ‘People.’ And each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity: women, Hispanics, ‘ethnic Americans,’ the LGBT community, Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders…There are seventeen such groups, and seventeen separate messages. You might think that, by some mistake, you have landed on the website of the Lebanese government – not that of a party with a vision of America’s future.”

“The paradox of identity liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to think and act in a way that would actually accomplish the things it professes to want. It is mesmerized by symbols: achieving superficial diversity in organizations, retelling history to focus on marginal and often minuscule groups, concocting inoffensive euphemisms to describe social reality, protecting young ears and eyes already accustomed to slasher films from any disturbing encounter with alternative viewpoints.”

“In Roosevelt’s vision, four universal freedoms were declared and accepted as obvious by most people: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This vision filled three generations of liberals with confidence, hope, pride, and a spirit of self-sacrifice. And patriotism. They had no problem standing for the national anthem.”

“To the principle that collective action to serve the public good was legitimate, it added the profession of faith that taxes, spending, regulations, and court decisions were always the best way to accomplish this. By the 1980s there were countless reasons to question the assumption that government knew what it was doing and could be trusted to do it – Vietnam, Watergate, impotence in the face of stagflation, and more.”

“The word government took on a weird echo during the Reagan Dispensation, as it has periodically in American history. When Republicans uttered it, listeners had conjured in their minds the image of an alien spaceship descending on the happy residents of Middlesuburb, U.S.A., sucking up into itself all the resources, corrupting the children, and enslaving the population. You would never think to listen to them that we live in a democratic system where we get to elect representatives, toss them out if we aren’t happy with them, speak up at town meetings, and appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if we feel our rights have been violated. You would never guess that the phrase they love to repeat, We, the people, stands at the beginning of a document that establishes a new, yes, government. You would never guess that without government, their lives and those of their voters would grind to a halt. Who, after all, sends all those Social Security and Medicare checks to elderly Republicans?”

“Unlike Ronald Reagan, they became absolutists on tax cuts, gun control, and abortion, and purged from their ranks any who dared dissent. And they began participating in the daily bacchic rites of shock radio and Fox News, whipping each other and their base into a frenzy of apocalyptic doom about the state of the country.”

“If they failed, Republicans could claim that the Washington deep state and the media were still in enemy hands, so more extreme measures were called for. This is a classic ploy familiar to revolutionary leaders throughout history: the failure of the revolution proves the need to radicalize it. This is why for decades now, Americans have been spectators at the dark comedy of Republicans running for office successfully against ‘the government’ – and then, once in power, running for reelection on the promise to bring down ‘the government’ they themselves control.”

“In one respect only was Donald Trump indebted to the conservative movement that Ronald Reagan founded: it bequeathed to him an angry, fearful base, which he was even more adept at manipulating than movement leaders had been. He destroyed his Republican adversaries by out-apocalypsing them.”

“You might have thought that, faced with a novel anti-political picture of the nation, liberals would have countered with an imaginative, hopeful vision of what we share as Americans and what we might accomplish together. Instead, they lost themselves in the thickets of identity politics and developed a resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference to match it.”

“And so she begins. She takes classes where she reads histories of the movements related to whatever she decides her identity is, and reads authors who share that identity. (Given that this is also an age of sexual exploration, gender studies will hold a particular attraction.) In these courses she also discovers a surprising and heartening fact: that although she may come from a comfortable, middle-class background, her identity confers on her the status of one of history’s victims. This discovery may then inspire her to join a campus group that engages in movement work. The line between self-analysis and political action is now fully blurred. Her political interest will be real but circumscribed by the confines of her self-definition. Issues that penetrate those confines now take on looming importance and her position on them quickly becomes nonnegotiable; those issues that don’t touch on her identity are not even perceived. Nor are the people affected by them.”

“The more our student gets into the campus identity mind-set, the more distrustful she will become of the word we, a term her teachers have told her is a universalist ruse used to cover up group differences and maintain the dominance of the privileged.”

“The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political 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 tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So 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. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue.”

“The most important lesson is this: that for two generations America has been without a political vision of its destiny. There is no conservative one; there is no liberal one. There are just two tired individualistic ideologies intrinsically incapable of discerning the common good and drawing the country together to secure it under present circumstances. We are governed by parties that no longer know what they want in a large sense, only what they don’t want in a small sense. Republicans don’t want the programs and reforms that are the legacy of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Democrats don’t want Republicans to cut them. But what are the parties’ ultimate aims, whatever the size and shape of government? What are they fundamentally after? What sort of image of the future governs their actions? They seem no longer to know. So the public can hardly be expected to. We find ourselves in a post-vision America.”

“But resistance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty.”

“At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic dramas over identity.”

“The movements that reshaped our country over the last half century did much good, especially in changing, as we say, hearts and minds. That is perhaps the most important thing any movement does, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. believed. But over the long term they are incapable of achieving concrete political ends on their own. They need system politicians and public officials sympathetic to movement aims but willing to engage in the slow, patient work of campaigning for office, drawing up legislation, making trades to get it passed, and then overseeing bureaucracies to see that it is enforced. Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed.”

“Relentless speech surveillance, the protection of virgin ears, the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones, the banning of preachers of unclean ideas—all these campus identity follies have their precedents in American revivalist religion. Mr. Twain might have found it amusing but every opinion poll shows that the vast majority of Americans do not.”

“Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony. They are not therapy sessions or occasions to obtain recognition. They are not seminars or “teaching moments.” They are not about exposing degenerates and running them out of town. If you want to save America’s soul, consider becoming a minister. If you want to force people to confess their sins and convert, don a white robe and head to the River Jordan. If you are determined to bring the Last Judgment down on the United States of America, become a god. But if you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about, it’s time to descend from the pulpit.”

“Children do not respond well to scolding and neither do nations. It just puts their backs up. They become better only when they are told that they are already good and therefore can improve. It would be wise for us to admit—indeed celebrate the fact—that on some of the issues we care about, things have gotten better, thanks to our efforts: the building of an educated black middle class, improved job opportunities for women, social acceptance of homosexuality, and so on. We should be using progress already made as an incentive to continue the work rather than pretending that things have never been so bad and Americans never so morally depraved.”

“You need to visit, if only with your mind’s eye, places where Wi-Fi is nonexistent, the coffee is weak, and you will have no desire to post a photo of your dinner on Instagram. And where you’ll be eating with people who give genuine thanks for that dinner in prayer. Don’t look down on them. As a good liberal you have learned not to do that with peasants in far-off lands; apply the lesson to Southern Pentecostals and gun owners in the mountain states. Just as you wouldn’t think of dismissing another culture’s beliefs as mere ignorance, don’t automatically attribute what you are hearing to the right-wing media machine (as loathsome and corrupting as it is).”

“The Democratic Party first performed this experiment on itself at the 1992 national convention. That was the year Robert P. Casey, the Catholic Pennsylvania governor who had worked relentlessly to expand social services in his state and was very pro-union, asked to address the convention and present a pro-life plank to the platform, even though he knew it would be defeated. His request was denied. That sent a strong signal to working-class Catholic and evangelical voters that if they did not fall into line on this one issue they were no longer welcome in the party. In the run-up to the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017 the same thing happened to religious feminist groups that wanted to express their disgust with Donald Trump but were opposed to abortion. They were disinvited. And one more bridge was burned.”

“Charity, like tipping, is now left to the customer’s discretion.”

“It would not be such a terrible thing to raise another generation of citizens like them. The old model, with a few tweaks, is worth following: passion and commitment, but also knowledge and argument. Curiosity about the world outside your own head and about people unlike yourself. Care for this country and its citizens, all of them, and a willingness to sacrifice for them. And the ambition to imagine a common future for all of us. Any parent or educator who teaches these things is engaged in political work—the work of building citizens.”

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