A Few Words on Mark Lilla

Columbia University professor Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal has been generating a lot of debate.  I'm not giving to give the book a full treatment right now (alas!), but I thought I might make a few points after reading it this week.

Basically, The Once and Future Liberal is written by a man of the left for the left (and for others who want to eavesdrop).  In it, he argues that the political left has become too dependent upon identity politics; this dependence has helped the Republican party gain power.  I don't agree with all of it, but it is an illuminating read.  See these interviews with Lilla by Rod Dreher and David Remnick for more.

One of the things that many of Lilla's critics on the left miss about his book is that Lilla is not calling for the left to ignore questions of discrimination, racism, etc.  Instead, Lilla is calling for the left to rethink the way it approaches these questions.  Rather than pitting identity groups against each other, Lilla argues that the left should instead emphasize a common citizenship.  This common citizenship would mean that, if a person is being mistreated because of his race, this mistreatment should of course be redressed because his rights as a citizen were being violated.  Lilla hopes that the appeal to a common citizenship would be a vehicle for righting social injustices (and he suggests that the civil rights movement of the Sixties was motivated by such a vision).

One of the more interesting themes of Lilla's book is his effort to confront some of the forces that have made our public debates so intolerant and broken in recent years.  Obviously, the intellectual causes of our current political stagnation have been of great interest to me recently, so I enjoyed his comments on those topics (even, again, if I might not necessarily agree with all them).

A good summation of Lilla's enterprise comes near the end, where he lists some priorities for reforming our politics: "the priority of institutional over movement politics; the priority of democratic persuasion over aimless self-expression; and the priority of citizenship over group and personal identity."  Lilla argues that those on the left need to think harder about how to win over concrete political institutions (instead of nurturing amorphous movements), how to persuade Americans rather than endlessly shame them, and how to stress the virtues of a common citizenship.

Lilla's diagnosis points to broader issues, too. We've suffered a diminished appreciation for both political and civic institutions, and strengthening a diverse range of institutions could help counter political hysteria.  We've also experienced a crisis of persuasion, with ideological slogans and identity-politics primal screams replacing reasoned debate.  As I've written elsewhere, the right has had its own problems with undervaluing political persuasion, as the 2016 campaign made clear.

In recent years, we've seen thinkers on both the left and the right become aware of a loss of civic solidarity.  A bigger project of mine right now is thinking about the conditions of civic solidarity and their implication for a free society.  Lilla's work represents one effort on the left to think through what has weakened that solidarity and what it would take to restore it.