Page 10
Book Review
Us against us
Author Mark Lilia reflects on how
identity politics fractures the Left
BY MEGAN WILDHOOD
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
had thought the malaise of relentlessly
focusing on identity was just me. That only I
was feeling like an ant under a magnifying
glass in the sun, and occasionally like the
person holding the glass. That gaining a robust
understanding of what it means to be the race,
gender, age, economic status I am, and having
the sexual and gender orientation I have was
not only not doing anything about the problems
that scared me the most in the world, but were
maybe making them worse.
I’d started, horrifyingly enough, to think that
perhaps I wasn’t a liberal after all; certainly I
could not be a member of Donald Trump’s
party? Enter Mark Lilia’s “The Once and Future
Liberal.”
Lilia provides an elegantly concise how-we-
got-here history; “here” being that liberalism is
currently not much more than identity politics,
which Lilia refreshingly nails as “a pseudo
politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow
and exclusionary self-definition that is now
cultivated in our colleges and universities. The
main result has been to turn young people back
■pH tp' thg'mac.Ho, rather thawtowwag
outw ard toward th e w ider world. I t has left
them unprepared to think about the common
good and what must be done
practically to secure it —
especially the hard and
unglamorous task of persuading
We're already la cing
people very different from
hideous le w is of
themselves to join a common
Isolation, which is as
effort Every advance of liberal
identity consciousness has
had lo r human health
marked a retreat of liberal
as sm oking, We can't
political consciousness, without
a llo rd any more
which no vision of America’s
division.
future can be imagined.”
He goes on to claim both
that we are governed by parties
that have no bigger vision than
obstructing the other party, and that the reason
liberalism is losing is that they have no cohesive
image for American life to compete with that of
the Republicans. Indeed, the Republican Party
has a vision for the country. You can easily find
it on their website. You don’t have to like it, but
it brings together people who would view one
another with suspicion if they were Democrats.
Go to the Democratic Parly’s website and you’ll
find links to different “people” — Native
Americans, women, LGBTQ, etc. Each link
takes you to a home page tailored specifically
for that group. There isn’t even an attempt at
solidarity.
I know. We liberals have been trained to
mistrust the word “we” in any form, and for
good reason. A sense of “us” has all too often
been used to cover up legitimate grievances;
attempts to find common ground have been
used as ways to steamroll those who are already
marginalized far too many times. But listen to
Lilia’s response: Fragmenting in terms of
identify leaves all-too vulnerable groups even
more vulnerable. “In a democracy, the only way
I
to meaningfully defend (minorities) — and not
just make empty gestures of recognition and
‘celebration’ — is to win elections and exercise
power in the long run at every level of
government” And liberals aren’t even in the
contest anymore. “The paradox of identify
liberalism is that it paralyzes the capacity to
think and act in a way that it professes to w ant”
It’s not that identities don’t matter. Lilia
champions Martin Luther King Jr. as “the
greatest movement leader in American history.
But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed
out, his efforts would have been futile without
those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson,
a seasoned congressional dealmaker willing to
sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil
Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed.” For
that matter, neither he “nor Elizabeth Cady
Stanton nor Angela Davis received an identity-
based education. And it’s difficult to imagine
them becoming who they became had they
been cursed with one.”
It’s that, “as soon as you cast an issue
exclusively in terms of identify, you invite your
adversary to do the same.” The more we
emphasize the differences between us, Lilia
argues, “the less likely it will be to feel
outrage at the mistreatment of others.” We
don’t have to like it, but that’s how
human beings work. Why should
nonmembers of group X care about
members of group X, unless they
believed they shared something in
common? Healthy party politics,
Lilia points out, encourage work
toward common goals; movement
politics encourages smaller and
sm aller splits and “th e practicing
of ideological o n ^ ip m a n sh ip
We’re already facing hideous
levels of isolation, which is as bad
for human health as smoking. We
can’t afford any more division. And
Lilia reminds us that it was Bernie
Sanders who pointed out that, while a
black or female CEO is a sign of
progress, “if (they’re) going to be
shipping jobs out of the country and
exploiting workers, it doesn’t mean a whole
hell of a lot if (they’re) black or white or Latino
Lilia’s answer is that, if liberalism is to revive,
it needs to stop focusing on identity and start
focusing on what we all have in common; the
only thing he knows of is citizenship. He
clarifies that he is not talking about the polluted
discourse surrounding immigration, who should
be granted status and who shouldn’t be. “We
are a republic, not a campsite. Citizens are
not roadkill. They are not collateral damage.
They are not the tail of the distribution. A
citizen, simply by virtue of being a citizen,
is one of us. We’ve stood together to
defend the country against foreign
adversaries in the past. Now we must
stand together at home to make sure
that none of us faces the risk of being
left behind. We’re all Americans and we
owe that to each other. That’s what
liberalism means.”
But we will have to start from the
ground up. It’s not like there has
historically been this sense of solidarity or
commonality and we’ve somehow lost i t It
would be anachronistic to say this country
was founded on identity politics, but it was
founded deliberately and systematically on
division, not to mention frontiersm anship,
which is to say rugged individualism. The white
elite government of the colonies calculatingly
Street Roots • June 1 -7, 2018
turned poor whites against black slaves. Then
they turned both against Native Americans in
order to obtain more and more land. Then they
diverted the anger of the poor toward the
British and away from themselves, who were
arguably exploiting the masses of destitute
colonists as much as the crown was oppressing
the colonies in order to win the Revolutionary
War. Then, they set up the country so that only
white men who owned property could vote, and
it stayed that way until... well, my mother was a
teenager when Martin Luther King Jr. cast his
dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Citizenship, as Lilia suggests, may indeed be
the way forward — certainly emphasizing what
we have in common rather than giving in to the
fear and hatred of the current administration,
and recovering a sense of duty to one another is
necessary — but a direction is not a map.
Reprinted from Street Roots sister paper, Real
Change, in Seattle, Wash.