Chris
09-17-2017, 10:01 AM
'The Once And Future Liberal' is a blistering critique of identity politics and a fractured left (http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-lilla-liberal-20170915-story.html) is just that.
In it, liberal Alexander Nazaryan traces the roots of identity politics to the Reagan Revolution, but doesn't explain this very well. I trace it as a post-modern neo-Marxism that shifted class oppresion to identity group oppression. But let's see what he has to say.
...“The Once and Future Liberal” is an expansion on an op-ed piece that Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, wrote for the New York Times 10 days after Trump’s unlikely victory in the November election. Titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” the piece argued that “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 group.”
...This book expands on Lilla’s op-ed piece, though not by much: “The Once and Future Liberal” is only 160 pages long, buttressing the original argument with historical context. Lilla divides modern American politics into two “dispensations,” as he calls them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government and Ronald Reagan’s little government. His canny central insight is that we have never recovered from the ruinous atomization of the Reagan Revolution, which depicted any government at all as “an alien spaceship descending on the happy residents of Middlesuburb, U.S.A., sucking up into itself all the resources, corrupting the children, and enslaving the population.” He notes, for example, that it was Bill Clinton who declared that “the era of big government is over” in 1996. Yes, I know he was “triangulating.” But he was abdicating too.
But if Democratic politicians have largely abandoned New Deal policies, it is because their liberal base had by the 1980s lost interest in the kind of economic populism that had once been the party’s central creed. In the hands of the post-Vietnam left, Lilla argues, the individualism of the right became identity politics, an obsession with race, ethnicity and gender that blinded Democrats to unifying realities: “Reaganism for lefties.”
The noble convictions of the civil rights movement, Stonewall and feminism, Lilla says, have devolved into an obsession with selfhood, in the ways we are different, not the same. He singles out Black Lives Matter as “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity”: The movement highlights the wrongs suffered by African Americans by a society that has never transcended Jim Crow. At the same time, it insists that whites could never fully understand that plight and could thus be only partial allies in the struggle for equality.
...Yes, Donald Trump is president. But if his disastrous presidency proves anything, it is that Republicanism is the biggest lie. Lilla plainly believes that the Reaganite vision of limited government is going the way of the CD player. Spend two minutes watching a waxen House Speaker Paul D. Ryan try to explain the benefit of tax cuts, and that point will be thoroughly confirmed. But what comes next, after Trump and his minions are embalmed in ignominy? Will the Democrats come up with a more compelling message, or will they squabble about whether a white candidate’s use of a Mary J. Blige song is cultural appropriation? The future is unwritten, but it can also be remarkably unkind.
In it, liberal Alexander Nazaryan traces the roots of identity politics to the Reagan Revolution, but doesn't explain this very well. I trace it as a post-modern neo-Marxism that shifted class oppresion to identity group oppression. But let's see what he has to say.
...“The Once and Future Liberal” is an expansion on an op-ed piece that Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, wrote for the New York Times 10 days after Trump’s unlikely victory in the November election. Titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” the piece argued that “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 group.”
...This book expands on Lilla’s op-ed piece, though not by much: “The Once and Future Liberal” is only 160 pages long, buttressing the original argument with historical context. Lilla divides modern American politics into two “dispensations,” as he calls them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government and Ronald Reagan’s little government. His canny central insight is that we have never recovered from the ruinous atomization of the Reagan Revolution, which depicted any government at all as “an alien spaceship descending on the happy residents of Middlesuburb, U.S.A., sucking up into itself all the resources, corrupting the children, and enslaving the population.” He notes, for example, that it was Bill Clinton who declared that “the era of big government is over” in 1996. Yes, I know he was “triangulating.” But he was abdicating too.
But if Democratic politicians have largely abandoned New Deal policies, it is because their liberal base had by the 1980s lost interest in the kind of economic populism that had once been the party’s central creed. In the hands of the post-Vietnam left, Lilla argues, the individualism of the right became identity politics, an obsession with race, ethnicity and gender that blinded Democrats to unifying realities: “Reaganism for lefties.”
The noble convictions of the civil rights movement, Stonewall and feminism, Lilla says, have devolved into an obsession with selfhood, in the ways we are different, not the same. He singles out Black Lives Matter as “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity”: The movement highlights the wrongs suffered by African Americans by a society that has never transcended Jim Crow. At the same time, it insists that whites could never fully understand that plight and could thus be only partial allies in the struggle for equality.
...Yes, Donald Trump is president. But if his disastrous presidency proves anything, it is that Republicanism is the biggest lie. Lilla plainly believes that the Reaganite vision of limited government is going the way of the CD player. Spend two minutes watching a waxen House Speaker Paul D. Ryan try to explain the benefit of tax cuts, and that point will be thoroughly confirmed. But what comes next, after Trump and his minions are embalmed in ignominy? Will the Democrats come up with a more compelling message, or will they squabble about whether a white candidate’s use of a Mary J. Blige song is cultural appropriation? The future is unwritten, but it can also be remarkably unkind.