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Why Americans Can’t Avoid ‘Identity Politics’
We keep discussing our identities. With reference to the book ‘The Once and Future Liberal’.
Writing for the political moment shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Mark Lilla identified what he saw as a core problem: The rights and quality of life of certain identity groups are threatened by American conservatism. His solution: Liberals need to win elections, including local elections to create broad support to accomplish nationwide agendas, so they can restore rights to all citizens.
Just win. Focus on that first. The ends may justify the means.
Lilla said in The Once and Future Liberal that liberals needed to quit “identity politics” to gain sympathy, win political battles, and ultimately have the power to actually uphold rights for specific groups. The strategy was “top-down”: If we could just put good people in power (one imagines), they would manifest rights, representation, and inclusion for specific identity groups, and therefore all our energy should focus on putting good people in power.
Unfortunately, explicitly talking about these rights somehow (in Lilla’s view) was causing liberals to lose elections. And, when liberals lose elections, of course they lack political power to enact their principles. He made a pragmatic argument for liberals to stop self-sabotaging with what he saw as unwinnable strategies. He said that liberals should drop the emphasis on identity politics and instead develop a more inclusive, effective brand to attract more voters and accomplish their agenda. He argued that more broad-based appeals to the defense of individual rights, rooted in a shared identity of “citizenship,” should do the trick.
When the book was newly released — The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics was published in August 2017 — I disagreed with its overall thesis. I did appreciate some of its historical analysis, but not its disparagement of so-called “identity politics.”
Now, nearly four years later, there’s a big piece of evidence that undermines its theory.
What actually happened: Identity politics got louder on both sides. White nationalism grew, and the summer of 2020 was marked by the George Floyd protests.
