Review of Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal

Mark Lilla is an intellectual historian at Columbia. His new book, The Once and Future Liberal is a bit of a screed. At the same time, it is the type of cultural criticism that I treasure, a book that gives us a lens to view the state of political life.

For me it crystallizes a vague disquiet that I have had for years but did not have the wit to notice well. I first noticed it in Gary Hart in 1984. He was addressing himself to the suburbs more than to the working class. I later recall the taunt of Paul Tsongas that liberals love jobs but dislike employers. I had a bad feeling when the latest Democratic convention brought o up group representatives but did not include obvious labor or working class representatives. Democrats assumed a bump in support for Sec. Clinton, but still, a majority of women voted for the president.

He places the burden of his argument on what he terms identity politics. He sees the Democrats as representing disparate groups of people, but that lack common concerns, a sense of the public interest. (See Lowi on interest group liberalism). At the convention, Democrats will tend to bring up representatives of different groups as illustrative of their concerns, but often lack a policy agenda for those concerns. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders could quickly speak of aid to college students and universal health care in every speech. In so doing, Democrats have abandoned their long standing base of support, the working class.

He makes an analogy to the new wave of political discourse to religion. It has a passion for purity, not compromise. It has a high priesthood in a hierarchy of values. It excludes others, even allies, if they do not demonstrate a dogmatic commitment to its creed of the moment. He directs most of his ire toward campus limitation of robust discussion into an echo chamber of language games. For me it would be crystallized in the notion that “dead white men” should have their work disparaged or ignored due to their race and gender. I would add that his work dovetails into my concern for discussion of privilege as a political loser. I am open to the clear signs of privilege as advantage, as unearned, undeserved advantage, and my eyes are not as open about “micro-aggressions.” to privilege the under-privileged would not necessarily lead to better information and decisions. Quite simply, it would not speak to someone in southern Indiana who is dealing with a collapsing economy and community fueled by meth and opiate abuse.

In so doing we have adopted the politics of theater, symbolic politics, more than the difficult, even agonizing work, of pounding out legislation and regulation. For me, the classic instance was Democratic representatives holding a sit-in within the very halls of Congress. From my vantage point, did any substantive change emerge, from their job as legislators, from this stunt?

Lilla suggests that we try to re-introduce the language of citizens as possessing rights and duties as a way to energize political results for the entire nation. In his views, citizens work together for common purposes. Equal protection is his lodestar for assessing the reality or appearance of privilege.