SUNDAY REVIEW
The End of Identity Liberalism
It
is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a
beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly
those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths,
are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but
certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an
extraordinary success story.
But
how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal
answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware
of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of
moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics
in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped
into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that
has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a
unifying force capable of governing.
One
of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and
its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be
brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting
when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they
relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at
home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and
slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to
African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This
was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America,
you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will
notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what
happened with the white working class and those with strong religious
convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees
voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
The
moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good
effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life.
Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a
conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our
popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public
life.
But
the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a
generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of
conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the
task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young
age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual
identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college
many assume that diversity discourse
exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about
such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.
In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which
anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the
past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals
that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements,
for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if
you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in
establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)
When
young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus
on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators
whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of —
“diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make
great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such
issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into
the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in
the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to
the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students
the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when
addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story
of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?
This
campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the
liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and
minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an
extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite
literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly
and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have
encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and
editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.
Recently
I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a
full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My
thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was
far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity
has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for
example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X
to do Y” — is told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has
even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply.
However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of
transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating
Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will
determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet
in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.
But
it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has
failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in
healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And
it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations
about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully,
whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a
page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from
its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic
programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance)
and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in
office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different
groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is
largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections
— but can lose them.
The
media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white
male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about
this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal
interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that
Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic
disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is
convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and
allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding
concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is
doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals
have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The
surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump
should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country,
the more politically diverse they become.
Finally,
the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not
recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white,
rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged
group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not
actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they
tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they
are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what
they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that
the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan,
which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared
to lose it.
We
need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past
successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would
concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans
and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would
speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together
and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly
charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially
those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work
quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase
Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’
damn bathrooms.)
Teachers
committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main
political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens
aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in
our history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that
democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its
citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity
liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country
that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially
religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate
Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially
their historical dimension.
Some
years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a
panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941.
The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women,
blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and
then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I
looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was
struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to
Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the
freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear —
freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was
reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are.
Mark Lilla,
a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a visiting scholar at the
Russell Sage Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “The
Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”
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