Last Friday, two tweets were posted to my feed within minutes of each other. David Duke tweeted: Bannon, Flynn, Sessions Great! Senate must demand that Sessions as AG stop the massive institutional racism against whites! (Yes, I follow David Duke on Twitter I now follow many right wing sites, I learn more from them than I do from the echo chamber of Facebook), and the New York Times tweeted out Mark Lillas opinion piece, The End of Identity Liberalism. In the new political climate we now inhabit, Duke and Lilla were contributing to the same ideological project, the former cloaked in a KKK hood, the latter in an academic gown. Both men are underwriting the whitening of American nationalism, and the re-centering of white lives as lives that matter most in the U.S. Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his statements, while Lillas op-ed does the more nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable. Again.
Mark Lilla and I both teach at Columbia University, and I acknowledge that this is a harsh indictment of my colleague. But these are harsh times. Lillas op-ed makes an argument for the commonalities between Americans, arguing that we have to move on to a post-identity liberalism, refocusing our attention away from identities to broader, more abstract ideas of citizenship. Narrower issues, like the right to choose a bathroom, should be worked on quietly and sensitively so as to not scare away potential allies. This argument, put simply, trivializes several generations of civil rights organizing in the service of breathing life into the dying corpse of political (neo)liberalism. What a curious time to take up that project on the pages of the New York Times, just ten days after an election that delivered the White House to Donald Trump, an avowed racist, sexist, Islamophobic nationalist, and vulture capitalist who defeated a person who made the best, and losing, case for (neo)liberalism. It turns out, Lilla argues, that Clintons loss can be blamed on the moral failure of identity politics, which never wins elections.
Lilla blames people of color, women, and gay and trans people for Trumps election a repugnant outcome he concedes. By his telling, left movements have indulged a narcissistic moral panic of identity that has devolved into whining about trivial complaints of invisibility, exclusion, and an obsession with petty individual feelings. This attachment to a counterproductive politics of identity and personal grievance, he argues, diverts our attention from the more important project of defending a collective commitment to a pre-civil rights-era notion of a national personality. This grander, transhistorical idea of nation is unmarked by difference and is strengthened by an attachment to shared liberal values. He argues that students, brought up on discussions of identity and diversity, have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good as if these forms of political discourse have nothing to do with one another. Talking about identity, or better yet status-based power, does not preclude discussions of class, war, the economy or the common good. And while Lilla grants that the womens rights movement was real and important (an acknowledgement that resonates more as mansplaining than munificence), any benefits that may have been achieved by the womens or other social justice movements, are premised upon the founding fathers achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights. Last I checked, the founding fathers denied women the right to vote, the right to equal protection of the laws, indeed, even full rights of citizenship at the founding of this great nation. It was the womens rights movement that forced a correction in the liberal structure created by the founding fathers. Even worse, the founding fathers both countenanced and participated in the enslavement of black people, counting them as 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution, and building a modern liberal economy on the barbaric commodification of human life. But as Lilla tells it, this history, indeed the present facts of inequality, distort and degrade the noble purpose of American liberalism.
It's going to take decades to recover, and I worry so much for my kids' futures here.
