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

Mark Lilla is a liberal. He is a humanities professor at Columbia, the author of several books, and a writer for New York Review of Books. He wrote this book in frustration at the direction liberal politics has taken for the last several years and with a recommendation about how we might make a course correction for the future. This thin book came out in 2017 as a quick response to the election of Donald Trump. I read it then and found it helpful in making sense of what had happened and where we might go next. It was interesting to read it again now as we approach the (please, God) end of the Trump administration. Today, the question of what comes next becomes even more pertinent.

Lilla sees Trump’s win in 2016 as a failure of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Trump defeated Bush in the primaries and Clinton in the general. Both represented decades-old political responses to a national mood that demanded something new.

Lilla’s analysis is that the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan established a “dispensation”, as he calls it: a determinative cultural environment that dominated politics from that time until now. Lilla sees FDR’s election as the establishment of a similar dispensation lasting a similar 40 years or so. The Roosevelt dispensation was characterized by a sense of national belonging, common effort and shared sacrifice. The Depression and World War II taught us faith in the power and efficacy of government. That mood was shattered by the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency and the dispensation died during the Carter administration. The Reagan dispensation was characterized by self-reliance, self-interest, and distrust in government. Lilla’s insight of these multi-decade eras is that the worldview is not a philosophy belonging to one party or the other but a national mood that shapes the politics of both parties. Eisenhower and even Nixon governed under the Roosevelt dispensation. Clinton and Obama had to work under the Reagan dispensation. Whether we are eager to embrace the prevailing ethos or squirm beneath it, both political parties operate within it.

The political right responded to the Reagan dispensation with tax cuts, de-regulation, and destruction of the welfare state. The political left experienced the Reagan era distrust of government as a loss of faith in political institutions. Instead, we resurrected the 1960s-era strategy of movement politics. We learned to speak truth to power. We protested and marched. But we failed to recognize that lasting social change requires institutional power. We relied on the Supreme Court to impose national standards rather than building consensus from local government and the legislature. Our movement politics, while still occasionally effective became narrowly focused instead of broadly transformative, preachy, instead of persuasive, and alienating instead of attractive. Maybe that’s the best we could do under the Reagan dispensation, but it’s no longer sufficient.

Additionally, the glorification of self-reliant individuals proclaimed by Reagan translated on the left to the elevation of a politics based in personal identity. We fractured our communities into ever-narrower stories of self and become suspicious of our ability to know or care about persons outside our own identities. This focus draws necessary attention to marginalized communities but obscures the commonalities required to win elections and develop the democratic power that will actually serve the needs of people of marginalized identities. Politics should be about making lives better not just perpetually crying our hurt.

Thankfully, Lilla sees Trump’s election as the death throw of the Reagan dispensation. Our national mood has changed again. We are ready for the next thing. Trump or Trumpism is not it. He is a reactionary figure channeling grievance against the past but not for any vision of the future. Unfortunately, Lilla sees the Democratic party also failing to provide the attractive vision of where we should go from here. So where do we go?

Persuasive vision depends on a visionary figure, a Roosevelt, or a Reagan. While we wait for such a one to emerge, Lilla offers tactics to prepare the way. He suggests:

“the priority of institutional over movement politics; the priority of democratic persuasion over aimless self-expression; and the priority of citizenship over group or personal identity. The fourth has to do with the urgent need of civic education in an increasingly individualistic and atomized nation.” (page 104)

We need to get inside the halls of power instead of standing outside. That means winning elections. And that means persuading a majority of voters to support us. Effective persuasion requires listening for and naming shared goals, across our differences, not emphasizing our personal stories and circumstances as insurmountable divides.

Much of this sounds like, or at least harmonizes with Pete Buttigieg’s prescriptions in Trust. (I find Buttigieg to be the kind of visionary figure we need.) Buttigieg calls for commitment to national service restoring a sense of shared sacrifice, a broader and more equitable tax base to make Government effective again, a restorative justice program to address unhealed wounds in our national history, and election reform to combat the “minority rule” we currently suffer under. His ideas, like the tactics Lilla calls for, lead to a stronger sense of community, patriotism, citizenship, and faith in political institutions.

Since Trump’s election, and the publication of this book, I’ve been encouraged by the national response. At the mid-terms, liberals recognized the importance of institutions and won elections. Joe Biden won the nomination by tacking a centrist course and with a message of inclusion to both the left and right. The experience of the last several decades makes many think Biden’s vision of working across the aisle is naive. But the dispensation of the last several decades is done. We’re done (please, God) with pushing away, demonizing, abandoning fellow countrymen and retreating to opposite poles. We’re through with fractured communities, selfish individualism, impoverished and neutered government. What must come next, whatever comes next, must be a vision that speaks expansively, that invites, that calls in, that participates in the work, and shares in the rewards.