The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla (review)

To be fully transparent, I want to acknowledge that I am a white man reviewing a book by a white man who is criticizing identity politics. I suppose the fact that I might need to make that acknowledgment is part of Mark Lilla's point in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

To say this is a polemical work would be an under-statement. Lilla, who self-identifies as left-of-center politically, takes dead aim at the Democratic Party and what he sees as its misguided reliance upon identity politics. The critique is sustained and sometimes repetitive. The book includes a fair number of generalizations that probably lack enough evidence (or any evidence at all in some cases). And while Lilla is not the first liberal to critique identity politics, the book is a good summary of the general argument for the Democratic Party to move from a reliance on identity politics and to seek a broader and more inclusive political vision.

The book features an introduction and then three chapters. In the first two chapters, Lilla diagnoses the key problem with our current politics—taking aim at the Republicans in Chapter I and the Democrats in Chapter II. Then, in Chapter III, he offers suggestions about how Democrats can reform and revitalize their politics.

Chapter I explains what Lilla calls the "Reagan Dispensation." This dispensation is characterized by the prioritization of the individual, a diminution of the public good, and a rabid antipathy to government. For Lilla, Reaganism was part of a broader cultural shift, "one in which the needs and desires of individuals were given near-absolute priority over those of society" (26). The result is that we "have become a hyperindividualistic bourgeois society, materially and in our cultural dogma" (29). Such hyperindividualism is particularly destructive of notions of the public good. In addition, the government (the entity that through taxing and spending most directly impacts the public good) becomes the villain that is anathema to the projects of individuals. Thus, we have had decades of Republican venom toward the government—which, from the conservative perspective, needs to be small if not nearly eliminated (though, of course, they have done little to diminish the actual size of the government).

For Lilla, the response of the Democratic Party to Reagan individualism was an identity politics that was another form of individualism. He argues that Reaganism and identity politics are two sides of the same individualism coin. As he says, "Identity is Reaganism for lefties" (95).

In Chapter II, Lilla credits the New Left (the progressive politics that came to maturity in the 1960s) for driving home a number of important issues that have helped to make the country a more tolerant, inclusive, and just society. However, the child of the New Left was identity politics. The latter failed to develop any kind of unified and progressive vision for the country, instead focusing on redressing issues that pertained only to one group or another. As Lilla notes, "what replaced a broad political vision was a pseudo-political and distinctly American rhetoric of the feeling self and its struggle for recognition. Which turned out to be not all that different from Reagan's anti-political rhetoric of the producing self and its struggle for profit. Just less sentimental and more sanctimonious" (78). The sanctimony in particular seems to irritate Lilla, and for good reason. Identity politics tends to be accusatory, proclaiming that everyone is racist, sexist, and homophobic to some extent. The goal then is for one to cleanse one's self of those sins; to prove, in effect, that one is pure enough to be a member of the identity politics congregation. Indeed, Lilla sees identity politics as having a religious dimension to it (91). He concludes, "That one now hears the word woke everywhere is a giveaway that spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is the demand" (114–15).

What Lilla thinks...