Lilla Takes Aim at Identity Politics

Mark Lilla, best-selling author and professor of humanities at Columbia, paid a visit to Dartmouth on Thursday afternoon at the invitation of the College’s Daniel Webster Program. Lilla, a self-described liberal, whose 2017 book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics made him “more enemies on the left than on the right” according to The Guardian, both expounded and expanded on the basic premise of the book.  He analyzed how modern American liberalism had become too defined by identity politics to its own detriment, leading first to an inability on the part of its leaders to govern effectively and ultimately to the election of Donald Trump. Tracing the history of the Democratic Party in the 20th century from what he termed the “Roosevelt dispensation” to the “Reagan dispensation,” Lilla argued that liberal social movements became increasingly stratified and self-destructive, fighting internally along the lines of racial and sexual identity. Given the current inability of the Democratic Party, and American liberalism as whole, to win over many of the Americans they claim to represent, Lilla’s broad theory certainly seems to hold up, as Democratic politicians focus more on social issues and less on creating American jobs and helping the working class.

While Lilla’s speech, in keeping with his book, focused primarily on the inability of Democrats to win over the working class, he also delved into typical liberal critiques of the Republican Party post-Reagan.  Lilla argued that Reagan’s brand of Republicanism had abandoned the protectionism favored by earlier Republicans in favor of a free market approach which largely embraced globalism even at the expense of American jobs in the manufacturing sector (Lilla glossed over the fact that Democrats pursued the same policies, explicitly condemning Republicans for such policies while describing them as purely “neoliberal” when referencing the Clinton administration). Lilla attempted to paint the modern-day Republican Party as out-of-step with traditional conservatism, which rejected economic as well as social liberalism. Given that the Trump administration has embraced some protectionist reforms in its trade policy, is Donald Trump then a more traditional Republican than George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan? The GOP, like other right-wing and center-right parties, has in the postwar era come to advocate the free market along with more traditionalist positions. Given how the right has shifted towards this ideology, in spite of the rise of protectionism under Trump, it seems inaccurate for Lilla to classify the Republican Party as out of step with conservatism. Instead, it would seem more appropriate to contend that the conservative embrace of the free market evolved out of opposition to left-wing policies which, in the eyes of those on the right, constrained potential economic output by too placing too tight a leash on the economy. Modern conservatism is not a contradiction, as Lilla argued, but instead a product of evolving ideology on right and left.

Unlike other public intellectuals, who pontificate endlessly on their proposed solutions for issues while lacking any support for their ideas in the public or private sector, Lilla did not offer any specific solutions to the current malaise affecting the Democratic Party. Instead, he made clear his role in the modern liberal movement was merely to observe its decline as a political force. The losses suffered by Democrats in the 21st century are significant, and occur in the places in which identity politics do not carry weight with the voting population: white, rural, working class areas which have shifted from Democratic- to Republican-leaning since the Reagan Revolution. While Lilla made clear his conviction that the Democrats remained the party of the working class, such a claim is outdated and simplistic. The Republican Party, while by no means free of the elitism and corporate influence proponents of Trumpism claim to detest, has indisputably become the new party of the working class, and a professor from an Ivy League university is the last person in a position to dispute that. Identity politics have certainly been a factor in the white working class’ shift to the GOP, but, on a broader level, the Democrats have abandoned white rural voters who were their backbone during the New Deal and Great Society eras in favor of urban voters and educated suburbanites, a strategy which may have won them the popular vote in 2016 and the 2018 midterms, but which has alienated vast swaths of the people they claim to represent. The path forward for the Democrats remains murky at best, and public intellectuals like Lilla are not in a position to solve it in any real way. While many of his points were certainly interesting and well-grounded, his view of conservatism and Republican voters was simplistic to the point of caricature. The left’s obsession with identity politics was not the only reason rural whites rejected Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates in 2016 and ‘18. Instead, the Democratic decline was a long time in the making, the result of failed Clinton-era policies and the inability of the Obama administration to address the effects of the recession in rural America. Lilla certainly disagrees with Republican economic policy, as any good urban liberal would, but he should be able to recognize its messaging as being vastly more effective among the working class as the Democratic economic message is. That is not to say that racial resentment, and frustration with the Democratic Party’s shift towards identity politics has not played a role in its collapse in rural America. However, it is a secondary symptom of their failure to communicate with voters that, in the party view, should naturally come into its fold.