Mary Eberstadt:
Just when it seemed as if the election of Donald Trump had rendered his supporters incoherent with triumphalism and his detractors incoherent with rage—thereby dumbing-down political conversation for a long time to come—something different and more interesting happened. A genuine debate has sprung up among liberals and progressives about the subject of the hour: identity politics.
Jump-started by a short manifesto called The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, it’s a conversation worth following for reasons beyond partisanship. As in his New York Times essay published 10 days after Trump’s electoral victory, Lilla’s purpose in this broadside is two-fold: to excoriate identity politics, sometimes called “identity liberalism,” and to convince his “fellow liberals that their current way of looking at the country, speaking to it, teaching the young, and engaging in practical politics has been misguided and counterproductive.”
The discussion now underway on the left illuminates a fault line that has yet to be sufficiently mapped or explained. The deeper question raised is not the instrumental concern of Lilla and others—how liberalism can retool itself in order to win more elections. Rather, it’s the elemental one: How has the question of “identity” come to be emotional and political ground zero for so many in America, and elsewhere in the Western world?
As the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains in its entry on identity politics, “wherever they line up in the debates, thinkers agree that the notion of identity has become indispensable to contemporary political discourse.” In The Once and Future Liberal, Lilla offers one kind of answer to why that’s so. “[T]hirty years of economic growth and technological advance that followed the Second World War,” he argues, combined with new geographic, institutional, and erotic mobility and led to a “hyperindividualistic bourgeois society, materially and in our cultural dogmas.”
Flush with prosperity and unprecedented new freedoms, we moderns, Lilla believes, went on to atomize ourselves: “Personal choice. Individual rights. Self-definition. We speak these words as if a wedding vow.” By the 1980s, such hyperindividualism coalesced into what he calls the “Reagan Dispensation,” which prized self-reliance and small government over the collective—thus marking a radical break from the preceding “Roosevelt Dispensation” emphasizing more communal attachments, including duty and solidarity.
By embracing the politics of identity, Lilla says, liberals and progressives have unwittingly contaminated their politics with a “Reaganism for lefties,” resulting in the toxic consequences visible today: shutdowns of free speech on campuses, out-of-touch urban and globalized elites, and a political order deformed into a “victimhood Olympics.”
In effect, his is a supply-side answer to the “why” question: Identity politics became the order of the day because it could. What’s lacking from this analysis—as from other critiques, right as well as left—is what might be called the demand-side answer: Why have so many people found in identity politics the very center of their political being?
After all: That identitarianism is now the heart and soul of politics for many is a visceral truth—as raw as the footage of violent political clashes making headlines with a frequency that would have shocked most citizens only a decade ago. What’s singular about such politics is exactly its profound and immediate emotivism, its frightening volatility, its instantaneous ignition into unreasoned violence. Lilla acknowledges this reality obliquely in describing “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity”—all true, as far as it goes. But the problem is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
When a mob of young men attack a 74-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, as happened at Middlebury College in March in the case of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, something deeper is afoot than American individualism run amok. When debate after campus debate is preemptively shut down due to social media threats of violence, reasoned talk of a “Reagan Dispensation” doesn’t begin to capture the menace there. Berkeley spent $600,000 on “security” for a visit by the conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro. Non-progressive speakers who have nothing to do with racism or supremacism are regularly harassed, threatened, disinvited, and shouted down on campuses across the country. To ascribe these transgressions to identitarian narcissism alone is to miss what’s truly novel about them. And most chilling.
What’s unfolding on campuses today isn’t merely the “pseudo-politics of self-regard” of Lilla’s description. It’s all panic, all the time. Even “assaults on free speech” doesn’t capture the gravity of the new menace, though of course they are that, too. Dangerous collective hysteria is more like it.
Writing after she gave a 2015 lecture at Oberlin on feminism that was mocked and jeered and protested, including by people whose mouths were covered in duct tape, Christina Hoff Sommers observed that “some of those students need the services of a professional deprogrammer. What I saw was very cult-like.” “The inmates ran the asylum,” Charles Murray reported of the attack at Middlebury, adding that he had “never encountered anything close to this. . . . and the ferocity.” Ben Shapiro, who has been heckled all over the country, has pronounced his protesters “delusional.”
The trend toward preemptive silencing is, moreover, escalating. As Stanley Kurtz has documented in National Review, there were as many anti-speech incidents on U.S. campuses in the first six weeks of the fall 2017 semester as in the entire spring semester, including the “disruption of a lecture at Reed College, the shout-down of former FBI Director James Comey at Howard University, the disruption of an immigration debate at the University of Pittsburgh, the shout-down of a spokesman for the ACLU at William and Mary, and the attempted shout-down of the President of Virginia Tech.”
This aggressive irrationalism goes missing from The Once and Future Liberal, as it does from most other accounts by liberals of identity politics. It is true, as Lilla observes, that today’s culture of victimization encourages people to “descend into the rabbit hole of self.” But the question remains: What gravitational force pulls them toward that hole in the first place?
