#99 — What Happened to Liberalism？
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Summary
Mark Lilla is a professor at Columbia University and a prize-winning essayist for the New York Review of Books and many other publications. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, and his latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, which is about the nature and history of liberalism in the United States and how identity politics has changed it. In this episode, Mark and I talk about the ways in which identity politics may or may not be legitimate, wealth inequality, and the role of class in American society. We disagree about a few things, but it was a very enjoyable conversation, and one that many of us who care about the future of politics have been having more and more often. So now, without further delay, I am here with Mark Lilla to bring you the first part of this conversation: Mark's background, his early life, and how he became interested in the politics of identity politics and what it means to be a liberal in the 21st century. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, our support is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of our podcast, by becoming a subscriber. We re making sense of what we're doing here. Thanks to you, becoming a member of the Making Sense Podcast, and helping us make sense of the world! Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcatcher and The Once & Future Liberal Mark Lila ( ) . , & ... And in the making sense Podcast? The Podcast ? What We're Doing Here? , The Once And Future Liberal? (The Once andFuture Liberal ) , and the by : or This is a Bigger Than That? ? , The Bigger than the Bigger That That Means That? , The Real Thing? & The Real Deal? And the , the ) , The Real Good, That s Not a Biger Than That Can I Have A Bigger Like That , That s a Good Thing Than That, And The Real Real Deal, And So Much Less Than That (The Bigger And The Biger That That So Much So So Much Better Than That Than That??
Transcript
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Mark is a professor at Columbia University and a prize-winning essayist for the New York Review
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His books include The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, and his
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latest book, which is what we discuss, is The Once and Future Liberal.
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And Mark and I talk about essentially the nature and history of liberalism in the United States
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We talk about the ways in which identity politics may or may not be legitimate.
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We talk about the role of class in American society, wealth inequality, and we disagree
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But it was a very enjoyable conversation, and one that many of us who care about the future
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So now, without further delay, I bring you Mark Lilla.
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Andrew is someone who I have sparred with to our mutual amusement and benefit, and he's
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the great example for me of someone who you can disagree stridently with and still become
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This is really what I aspire to have all disagreements become, but it doesn't usually work out that
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Yeah, the two of you have been going at each other for quite a while, haven't you?
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So you've written this wonderful new book, and it's wonderful also in part because it's
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It really is one of these books that you can pick up and finish no matter what your bandwidth
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And it's really this elegy for a real liberal politics that we seem to have lost.
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And in its place, we have this horror show of identity politics.
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So before we get into this, perhaps you can just summarize your background as a writer
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How do you describe what you have done and focused on as a writer?
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Well, the stuff that's relevant to this book, I think, in my biography is I grew up in a place
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called Macomb County, Michigan, which is a blue-collar county bordering on Detroit, eminent
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So Macomb County used to be, in the early 60s, the most democratic, lopsidedly democratic
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By 1972, George Wallace won the Michigan primary, and the county went for Nixon.
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And ever since, political scientists have been studying it, and pollsters have been studying
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I saw it happen within my own family, extended family, not my close family.
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And I've been puzzling ever since then about why it is that the party and liberalism more
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generally lost the affection and the enthusiasm of what used to be their base, their white
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working class base, and what might bring us back on course.
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So I started at Wayne State University, commuting, putting myself through school, got a scholarship
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to Michigan, and went off to the Kennedy School to study public policy.
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And when I was done, I was offered a job on the public interest by my professor, Daniel
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And the public interest was known as the first neoconservative magazine.
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But what neoconservative meant back in the 70s is that you were, as Irving Kristol liked
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to put it, a liberal who had been mugged by reality.
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And what that meant was that you were still a liberal, but you realized that a lot of the
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solutions that, or rather programs that we thought would solve social problems, didn't
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I realized that no one was paying attention to economic growth and also not paying attention
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So it was people, and the working class more generally.
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And so it was that the party had been sort of captured by the activist class.
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So people who had been involved with, you know, the, I forget what it was called, the Coalition
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And so being a neoconservative meant being a kind of reform liberal, while liberalism sort
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of took off in its own direction after McGovern.
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And so ever since I've watched these various, you know, the lines between right and left and
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liberal and conservative move around, I don't feel I've moved that much.
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But essentially, I'm still the kind of pre-McGovern liberal that I was back then.
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And so, you know, I've been writing, I've been writing in the New York Review books about
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And then in my more scholarly work, I've been writing about attacks, modern attacks on the
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Well, let's define a few terms here, because these key words that you use in the book.
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And perhaps you could disentangle it from, if it can be disentangled, from the word left?
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Well, I think we have to talk about those two terms in the American context.
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The word liberal means something else in England.
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It means something very different on the continent, where it essentially means just radical free
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American liberalism was always, I think, founded on or developed around two fundamental principles
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And the first was social solidarity, that we stuck together, that the Hoover Republicans
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were happy to let people fall off by the side of the road.
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And the other is that there should be equal protection under the law.
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And so those two principles were the principles that liberals professed.
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They didn't always live up to those principles when it came to practice.
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And then I think what was added onto that was liberal anti-communism and no illusions about
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Marxism and especially communism as both in theory and in practice.
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And so there was a kind of liberal anti-communist consensus, certainly, that continued from the
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And the left, I suppose you could say, includes some of those liberals.
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But there are people on the left who, while they accept some of those two principles of
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solidarity and equal protection, have always had a soft spot, if not for communism, then
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for Marxism, for movement politics, for radical movements seeking some sort of imaginary
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And so, you know, on the left, I would say there were the sober people who were the liberals
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Well, the word progressive, you know, originally was sort of the foundation of liberalism, you
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know, but progressivism was also very patriotic.
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It's very interesting now to return to the writings of Teddy Roosevelt and to read his attacks
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on monopoly and his fight for protecting American workers, which was wrapped up with a kind of
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optimism about the country and the experiment that it is.
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And a defense of America as a nation and as one nation without denying the, you know, the
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He believed in a kind of unifying citizenship and people who call themselves progressive,
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you know, have held on to the economic message, but they've lost that sense of the nation.
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And that's what I'm trying to bring back in in my book.
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You describe a time when liberals could salute the flag without embarrassment.
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And I must say that is a time before my time or certainly before any time I can remember.
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Liberalism, at least in my experience, has always been associated with it with a kind
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of cynical distance from anything that could be called patriotism without any kind of self-consciousness.
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I mean, is this what Watergate in Vietnam did to liberalism?
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Well, I think it begins with the civil rights movement and the recognition that Democrats
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in particular had allowed Jim Crow to continue and flourish in the South.
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And that seemed to be a violation of what the country stood for and what liberalism seemed
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And then, of course, Watergate, I think, was less important than Vietnam, which really broke
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the contract between the American government and the American people.
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You know, I saw this quite intimately where I grew up.
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Where I grew up, a lot of kids served in Vietnam.
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And in the afternoons, I'd drive by at dusk and I would see these stars in the window.
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Now, do you know what a star in the window used to be?
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Well, it used to be that if you had a child in the military, that the army or whatever
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the service was would send you a little flag with a star on it.
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And what people would do, they'd hang them in the window with a kind of Christmas light
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around it so you could see that they had someone there.
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And there was another one if he or she had died there.
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And so you could just drive by, you know, I drove by on my bike and I would just see all
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these lights and the two colors and know when it was that someone lost somebody.
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I served at funerals of families that lost their sons.
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And, you know, those people felt on the one hand betrayed by the government because it was
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clear that their sons were dying to no purpose.
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But they had even deeper anger at the elite class of journalists and writers and activists
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and kids on campus who were spitting on the flag that they had just used to drape the coffins
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And so it both disaffected these people from other liberals and also from the government
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itself and made them cut them loose in a way for whoever came along.
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Reagan came along promising to make everything better and on and on.
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Yeah, yeah, well, we'll talk about anger at the elites eventually, because that is at
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the center of so much of what's going on in our politics now, and really on both the
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Well, I think the meaning of identity politics has changed.
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So I need to distinguish the kind of identity politics that began in the 50s and what we're
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living with now, you know, with the civil rights movement, you had a movement that was focused
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on one identity group, and then you had the women's movement that did the same and the
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And those identity movements, in a sense, weren't about identity.
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They were about groups, but they weren't about so much about the inner experience of an identity.
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Rather, they were about making America fulfill its promise to make everyone an equal citizen.
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And so those movements were really about enfranchisement, that you say we're citizens and we're not
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And so that is very consistent, to my mind, with the older liberal tradition.
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But then what happened in the 80s and on is that people who were wrapped up in politics,
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in the politics of these movements, became very self-referential.
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And for them, an identity was not something that bound people together and to the country,
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but rather it became a kind of way of reflecting on difference.
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And a lot of social movements broke apart on the basis of identity resentments.
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And so the new left broke apart for all kinds of reasons.
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But one of them is that African-Americans complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which
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Women complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which was true.
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Lesbians complained that feminists were normalizing heterosexuality, which was also true.
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And so the united front of the left broke down over these identity issues.
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And then what happened is that there was a retreat to the universities.
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And so people on the left really abandoned electoral politics in these groups and instead
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developed this idea that all social change happens through social movements that are tied
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to identity and you end up with gender theory, you end up with race theory, you end up with
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feminist theory, and you end up now with maybe three generations of young people, liberal elites
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who've been brought up in the university to think about politics in terms of group and their
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own individual identities, rather than of the common good and a message that might bind us
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You have a nice passage here on what happened to the new left.
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The new left was torn apart by all the intellectual and personal dynamics that plague every left,
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Blacks complained that most leaders were white, which was true.
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Feminists complained that most all were men, which was also true.
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Soon black women were complaining both about the sexism of radical black men and the implicit
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racism of white feminists, who themselves were being criticized by lesbians for presuming
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What all these groups wanted from politics was more than social justice and an end to the
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They also wanted there to be no space between what they felt inside and what they did out in
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They wanted to feel at one with the political movements that mirrored how they understood
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I mean, that picture of fragmentation seems exactly what has happened.
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And you have this, you know, what has been described as the oppression Olympics, where there's
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an economy of victimhood where certain identities trump others.
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And if you are a black lesbian, you know, you're somewhere near the apex of grievance.
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And therefore, more or less anything you say is undeniable by someone who doesn't share
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If you're a black lesbian Muslim, well, then better yet.
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So I've been paying a little attention to the reception that your book has gotten.
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And so I noticed, for instance, the review in the New York Times, which had to be annoying
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And it was obvious that that review was silly and unfair.
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And then I also saw the interview you did with David Remnick in The New Yorker.
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And he seemed, again, desperate to shore up some concept of identity politics.
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What has been your experience thus far in making your case post-publication?
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And why do you think people are not readily seeing what is wrong with identity politics,
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both politically, as a matter of just political pragmatics, but also intellectually and morally?
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Well, I think one of the reasons, well, there are two reasons, I think.
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One of the reasons is that identity politics has really become an evangelical project.
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And or it has all the all the markings of American revivalist religion.
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You know, the fact that we use the word woke, which comes from, you know, which comes from
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conversion, you know, the great awakenings in this country.
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And especially over the past three, four years, for some reason, we've gotten into a panic
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about a lot of these issues that are real issues, but they've been around for a long time.
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And suddenly there's developed a hypersensitivity about certain things.
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You know, what's happened with African-Americans and the police and various other things, Charlottesville,
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But it's also become dogmatic in the sense that it's not that people want you to agree
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They want you to accept their version of American history, their critique of American society,
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And while you may agree with some of those things, what you look for in politics is kind
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of common ground, what you can agree on, like police mistreatment of African-American
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So, you know, they become people who won't take yes for an answer, I think, often.
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But the other thing is, I have felt in the reaction to the book that I put my finger on
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And that is that I keep saying in interviews, as I say in the book, that protecting minority
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You cannot protect anyone if you don't hold institutional power.
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Institutional power in this country is not just held in the presidency, it's held in
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the courts, Congress, and especially at the state and local level.
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If you are not competitive at the state and local level or the congressional level, you
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Now, the only way to be successful at those levels is to have a message that reaches beyond
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Therefore, if you want to actually protect African-Americans, gays and lesbians just walking down the street
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holding hands, women who are being paid less than men, you need to hold power.
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And you have to find a new message, not one based on yourself and your feelings and your
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identity, but a message about certain principles that you hold and that inform your political
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commitments, but that other people can also hold.
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And so these big themes of solidarity and equal protection, I think, just as principles most
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But then once you get down to cases, then you're going to have disagreements, so you can persuade
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But if you say to someone, you must understand me, but you cannot understand me because of
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who you are, you completely hermetically sealed yourself and you're unable to persuade anyone
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And so your politics become expressive and you fall in love with noble defeats.
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I mean, that is the what is left for you to do by way of persuasion, because a reason has
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failed there is to just bully people with, in this case, the threat of being called a racist.
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What you just said strikes me as a fairly complete recapitulation of what I recall Hillary Clinton
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saying when confronted by some Black Lives Matter people at one of her events.
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Yeah, yeah, I mentioned it briefly in the book.
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And, you know, she, I forget if it was at that time or not, but they were just, they weren't
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You know, they had adopted these mau-mau tactics of breaking into meetings, not letting people
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And I forget if it was then or another time when Hillary Clinton pointed out that Martin
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Luther King would not have achieved his goals were it not for the practical politician,
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LBJ, who was willing to cut deals, cut deals with Dixiecrats, and to make the, you know,
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civil rights legislation happen, the great society programs.
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And institutional politics can always trump what movements have achieved.
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I mean, look what's happening at the state and local government in this country.
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The Democratic Party and feminist groups fought for a constitutional right for a woman to get
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But in large parts of this country, a woman de facto cannot get an abortion.
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It isn't because we haven't had enough court cases.
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It's because Democrats and liberals do not hold power at the state and local level where
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rule where in subtle and not so subtle ways, it's become impossible for people to run clinics
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And the only way to change that, the only way to make that right actual, is to go out to the
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South and the Southwest and find a way to convince those people to come over to your side.
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And you've got to go and meet people and talk to them.
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And just to reach your ends, not because you need to genuflect to the white working class
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or Joe Sixpack as if he's some sort of special figure, to achieve what you want to achieve.
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Now, but you have argued that, I think you say this in your book, perhaps this was just
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in an interview, but I believe you've argued that there's an asymmetry here between the
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There's an identity politics of the right as well.
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But where identity politics is a losing strategy for liberals, it isn't necessarily a losing
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I mean, you know, it's hard to know what to say about this subject at this moment, because
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10 years ago, when researchers would ask white people in surveys, how important is your white
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identity and you feel whites are being discriminated against, you get maybe 5%.
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Well, it's not that people have always felt that way.
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Rather, you know, we have a right wing media, almost monopoly on news and parts of this country
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And they've been able to play it up, in part because we on the liberal side keep talking
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That's not to say that identity politics creates racism.
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It is to say that it can make it more salient at different moments.
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And, you know, the rise of this white consciousness, you know, it's tied to all sorts of things,
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including social changes that have happened in the country, economic changes, you know,
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the rising, the rise of a black middle class, the fact that, you know, women are in the workplace
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and also the growth of a non-working white male population.
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But so, you know, we're in a funny moment right now.
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But in this moment, at least, it's certainly clear.
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And Steve Bannon said this himself, that the more we talk about difference and engage in
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sort of campus, campus opera buffa, the more we help recruit people to the other side to
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say we have an identity to, you know, Breitbart, Breitbart ran an article about my book, saying
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we've been saying this stuff for years, and it's been working for us.
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And Steve Bannon said that in his famous interview with Bob Kuttner that got him fired.
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Yeah, and on one level, it's just, if you're going to practice identity politics, you shouldn't
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be surprised when white people eventually practice identity politics of their own.
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But is it a consequence of the fact that whites are still a majority in the country, that it
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doesn't, the identity aspect of it doesn't prove to be a liability in the same way?
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I mean, actually, to give you just a little more material here, I wanted to read another
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passage, which points up, again, I don't know if this is the same asymmetry, but it certainly
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When you talk about how the web pages of the two parties differ, and you talk about, you
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know, on the Republican site at the time you wrote this, there was a, essentially a white
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paper titled Principles for American Renewal, and just, it was just a statement of positions
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of the party and just a vision for, you know, where the party wanted to take the country.
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And then you said on the Democratic website, there was no such document, and now I'm quoting
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you, there's no such document to be found on the Democrats' homepage.
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Instead, when you scroll to the bottom of it, you find a list of links titled People, and
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each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity, women, Hispanics,
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quote, ethnic Americans, the LGBT community, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian
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There are 17 such groups and 17 separate messages.
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You might think that by some mistake, you've landed on the website for the Lebanese government,
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not a party with a vision for America's future.
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I mean, I don't know if that's the same geometry of weakness there, but you can see how that kind
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of fragmentation, like where we means nothing but diverse groups, each of which is solely
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empowered to attest to its own grievances by virtue of its identity.
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That's not a moral or a political foundation from which to argue in ways that will attract
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people from outside your group to form a common cause with you.
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Yeah, one thing I've learned in talking about the book is that I should have emphasized one
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thing more that I say, but I needed to put it front and center, and that is that you cannot
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understand any social problem in America without talking about identity.
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If you don't address how these policies affect many of these different groups, that's absolutely
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And we're more aware of that now, and that's a good thing.
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But when it comes to addressing those problems and building a common vision for the country
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that will appeal to people who aren't members of those groups, that's the time to employ a
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And so often the response I'm getting from people is, but how can we not talk about identity
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because identity is important in all these ways?
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So when you analyze a problem, you know what your commitments are once you understand the
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But in order to follow through and achieve a result out there and not simply express yourself
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and make yourself heard, politics is not a speech act.
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Politics requires a common effort and persuasion, not self-expression.
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And so it requires a kind of double-mindedness, I would say now, about identity, recognizing
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it to understand the country, speaking in a different way in order to try to do something
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I guess I'm going to sound more skeptical of identity than you do, at least in this
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I mean, again, I hear you arguing that it's politically irrooted to emphasize identity as