The Once and Future Liberal by Mark Lilla

In this short book, Lilla attempts to describe “how we got here,” meaning at this nihilistic moment in the political history of the United States, and then to call on his fellow Liberals to seize the moment, change their drift, and provide a new (but old) compelling vision for the country and the electorate.

He does an admirable job with his first task. Much less so with the second.

The essential summary of “how we got here” comes late in the book.

Democracies without democrats do not last. They decay, into oligarchy, theocracy, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, authoritarian one-party rule, or some combination of these.

For most of its history the United States has been lucky enough to evade these classic forces of entropy, even after a devastating Civil War and mass immigration. What’s extraordinary -- and appalling -- about the past four decades of our history is that our politics have been dominated by two ideologies that encourage and even celebrate the unmaking of citizens. On the right, an ideology that questions the existence of a common good and denies our obligation to help fellow citizens, through government action if necessary. On the left, an ideology institutionalized in college and universities that fetishizes our individual and group attachments, applauds self-absorption, and casts a shadow of suspicion over any invocation of a universal democratic ‘we.’ This at a time when, precisely because America has become more diverse and individualistic in reality, there is greater, not less, need to cultivate political fellow feeling.

The idea that really strikes me is this “death of the ‘we,’” as in, supposedly, “We” the People. Lilla sees this trajectory on both the right and left, but his deepest analysis on this point actually leans more left than right.

The more our student gets into the campus identity mind-set, the more distrustful she will become of the word ‘we,’ a term her teachers have told her is a universalist ruse to cover up group differences and maintain the dominance of the privileged. And if she gets deeper into “identity theory” she’ll even start to question the reality of the groups to which she thinks she belongs. The intricacies of their pseudo-discipline are only of academic interest. But where it has left our student is of great political interest.

An earlier generation of young women, for example, might have learned that women as a group have a distinct perspective that deserves to be recognized and cultivated, and have distinct needs that society must address. Today the theoretically adept are likely to be taught, to the consternation of older feminists, that one cannot generalize about women since their experiences are radically different, depending on their race, sexual preference, class, physical abilities, life experiences, and so on. More generally, they will be taught that nothing about gender identity is fixed, that it is all infinitely malleable. This is either because, on the French view, the self is nothing, just the trance left by the interaction of invisible, tasteless, odorless forces of “power” that determine everything in the flux of life; or, on the all-American view, because the self is whatever we damn well say it is. (The most advanced thinkers hold both views at once.) A whole scholastic vocabulary has been developed to express these notions: fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more. Anyone familiar with medieval scholastic disputes over the mystery of the Holy Trinity -- the original identity problem -- will feel right at home.

That is some really deep philosophical shit, but it does work to explain the death of the ‘we’ from the left, something that seems more elusive than the more obvious death of the ‘we,’ or at least the exclusion of only certain classes of the ‘we,’ on the right.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.