This New York Times essay from November 18, “The end of identity liberalism,” is one of the best things I’ve read on the topic in some time. It’s by Mark Lilla, identified as “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.”

Lilla’s thesis, a familiar one, is that identity politics is wrecking the Left, and ruining the unity that, in some measure, used to characterize liberals. He also blames this divisiveness, in which each person (except white males) has a claim to some form of oppression, as having ruined Clinton’s chances to be President:

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.

Well, I’m not so sure about that, as Hillary had other problems (including identification with the status quo and her affection for $$), but Lilla’s words do make a lot of sense. I’m just going to give you several excerpts from the piece, as I’m tired and am having trouble braining. Besides, I can’t say it any better than Lilla can. What I can do is verify his stuff about college’s fixation on “diversity” (a code word for race, but never for viewpoint or class equality), because I see it constantly at my own University. Do note that Lilla is a liberal in favor of gay rights, feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A few snippets

. . . 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.

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”?

And the media, which includes not only PuffHo, but now alkso Atlantic, the New York Times, and so on. I’ve watched with chagrin as one liberal outlet after another starts championing identity politics:

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. [JAC: Think PuffHo’s: “First Muslim to wear a hijab while fencing” and so on ad infinitum.] 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.

I’ll let you read his solution for yourselves. It starts this way:

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.)

How many of us have had that last thought to ourselves, in a time when the country is coming apart at the seams? Lilla may be wrong about the contribution of identity politics to Clinton’s loss, but I think he’s on the money about what liberals must do to regain any power in American politics. We can’t rip liberalism apart at its ethnic and gender-based seams and expect to retain any measure of political unanimity.

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of The Young Turks (TYT) show. I guess I just lost interest when Cenk Uygur went after Sam Harris in a long (3 hours!) and deeply unfair interview, not admitting that he’d consistently distorted Harris’s words. I also see the show as exemplifying the smug and arrogant form of Regressive Leftism that I deplore.

Yet the show is incredibly popular, perhaps because it has a young vibe to it, and is both news and editorializing at once: a sort of humorless edition of Jon Stewart’s old “Daily Show”.  TYT’s election night coverage got 4.5 million viewers—a record for them—over a nearly 12-hour broadcast. (If you want to see the whole thing, go here). You can see some highlights of it below in a 26-minute distillation.

I can sympathize with the commenters in one sense: over the 26 minutes in this video you can see certainty—the certainty that Clinton would win—dissolve into anger, rage, and then vitriol towards those who voted for Trump. While I never shared the vitriol part, I, too, was certain (but dead wrong) that I’d wake up and find that we’d elected Clinton. And over the night (well, the day, as I was in Hong Kong), my stomach got queasier and queasier as the election returns came in.  This video shows that shift of emotions very clearly.

What I don’t like about it, however, is that vitriol: the nastiness and the dead certainty that those who voted for Trump were ignorant, racist morons. (I shared the sick feeling of loss, but never the rage.) That misses the underlying dynamic that drove this election: whatever it was, it was more than a bunch of idiots and racists—KKK supporters some said—who simply wanted a President who shared their bigotry.

Now this video seems to have been made by someone who doesn’t like TYT (viz., nasty interpolation at 21:15), but that doesn’t matter. What bothers me is the kind of smug, dismissive attitude toward our opponents that will hinder us Leftists from regrouping and having substantial political power. For if we get that power, we must appeal to a wider audience and, if we can’t share some of the values of our opponents, at least find some common ground with them and concentrate on the problems of all the dispossessed, disadvantaged, and deprived.

Here are a few cringeworthy moments from this excerpt.

2:09 Aida Rodriguez says that people don’t like Hillary Clinton simply “because she has a vagina”. (Repeats this claim at 13:41, saying that Clinton lost “because she was a woman”).

8:59  Cenk has a tantrum about the Democratic Party: he says he’s at “war” with it for allowing Clinton to be defeated by a bigot. (Wasn’t he in favor of Hillary?) Later he calls them “fucking morons.” Cenk, I’ve discovered, has a lot of repressed anger (see here and here).

14:53: Ana Kasparian says that women who voted for Trump are “fucking dumb”, and says, “I’m losing my mind tonight because of how stupid the majority of the country is.”

19:20: Rodriguez calls the people criticizing her on Twitter “motherfuckers” and gives the camera two middle fingers

19:33: Kasparian addresses those whom (she thinks) voted for Trump because they don’t like affirmative action. She says, “Affirmative action is not the reason you failed in life. You failed in life because you fucking suck! Because you’re a loser!”

23:08: The team turns on Hillary, starts blaming her for the loss.

And, though I’m no prude, I don’t like the pervasive swearing. Like ever other display of petulance and rage, it’s unprofessional. I really don’t know why people are so attracted to this show.

Several commenters on the Internet have blamed the Regressive Left (RL), for contributing to Trump’s victory, asserting that working-class whites, who were Trump’s major supporters, were turned off by the identity politics of liberal young people and Regressive Leftists. This thesis appeals to me because I despise the RL’s hypocrisy and arrogance and would love for Trump’s victory to have one salubrious effect—that of dissolving the RL. But as a scientist and skeptic, I am wary of supporting theses that emotionally appeal to me, and I’ve always doubted whether white working-class Americans even read anything by RLs, including feminists and liberals who support oppressive Muslim ideology.

Yet the RL-created-Trump idea is adumbrated by the estimable Nick Cohen in this week’s Guardian, in a piece called “If liberals want to stop the right winning, we must change.” He first blames Democrats in general for running a poor candidate, one who didn’t appeal to the white working class:

If we were just talking about the United States, we could concentrate on the shocking irresponsibility of the Democratic party in running an establishment candidate in a country that was sick of the status quo. It is bizarre to see people who condemn cultural appropriation engage in political appropriation. But maybe US leftists are right to think that a portion of Trump supporters were secretly on their side and a more radical Democrat would have won them over.

Unfortunately, this is not just an argument about the wretched Clinton campaign. Not only in America, but across the democratic world, liberals and leftists are becoming used to waking up in the early hours and learning that they have lost. Again. They did not expect the Conservatives to win the British general election or the British to vote to leave the EU. They didn’t see Trump coming. They won’t see Le Pen coming. Poland may be the future. In a country that had a centre-left government within recent memory, not one member of the Polish parliament now calls himself or herself a social democrat or socialist. Debate is between the internationalist right in opposition and the authoritarian nationalists in power. Theirs may be our future too.

To suffer such calamitous defeats and not feel the need to change is to behave as irresponsibly as the US Democratic party. It is a myth that Trump and Brexit won because of overwhelming working-class support. Nevertheless, they could win only because a large chunk of the white working class moved rightwards. Debates about how to lure them back ought to reveal the difference between arguing with and arguing against your fellow citizens, which most middle-class leftists have not even begun to think about.

Here I think he’s right. I never was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton, though I voted for her (and stop blaming me for being tepid in that support!), and the Democrats simply didn’t have an appeal to populism. It’s also true that many Americans who voted for Trump previously voted for Obama, probably because Obama offered hope for the working class, and indeed tried to provide it through initiatives like Obamacare. (Ironically, many of those who voted for Trump were voting for the elimination of their own healthcare).

But then I think Cohen goes too far in blaming the Regressive Left on the calamitous US election as well as the calamitous UK Brexit vote:

You can only argue against committed supporters of Trump. If they believe all Mexicans are rapists and Muslims terrorists, you cannot compromise without betraying your principles. Fair enough. But before you become self-righteous you must accept that the dominant faction on the western left uses language just as suggestive of collective punishment when they talk about their own white working class. Imagine how it must feel for a worker in Bruce Springsteen’s Youngstown to hear college-educated liberals condemn “white privilege” when he has a shit job and a miserable life. Or Google the number of times “straight white males” are denounced by public-school educated women in the liberal media and think how that sounds to an ex-miner coughing his guts up in a Yorkshire council flat. [JAC: have a look at those links.]

Emotionally, as well as rationally, they sense the left, or at least the left they see and hear, is no longer their friend. They are men and women who could be argued with, if the middle classes were willing to treat them decently. You might change their minds. You might even find that they could change yours. Instead of hearing an argument, they see liberals who call the police to suppress not only genuine hate speech that incites violence but any uncouth or “inappropriate” transgression.

For too many in the poor neighbourhoods of the west, middle-class liberals have become like their bosses at work. They tell you what you can and can’t think. They warn that you must accept their superiority and you will be in no end of trouble if you do not.

Cohen offers two solutions, both involving abandoning RL tactics:

There are times when your opponents must be defeated, whatever the cost. Defeating them today involves nothing so violent as necessary murders. Thinking about class, not instead of but along with gender and race, would be a step forward. Realising that every time you ban an opponent you prove you cannot win an argument would be another. I do not doubt history will look back on 2016 and say “alas”. But it will not pardon defeated liberals who never learned that to win they had to change.

And here he’s partly right and partly wrong. RL speaker bans and identity politics that exclude class as a factor may have played a very minor role in both Brexit and the Trump victory; buit the real solution involves in running liberals who have a solid program to help the working class. After all, such a platform is the historical basis of liberalism, but has been abandoned in favor of Clintonian appeals to the rich and to the upper middle class. She had nothing to say to the working class except vague pieties, and while Trump had nothing substantial to offer them either, he represented an alternative, however odious, to the “rich people’s politics” of Hillary Clinton. Remember how much money Clinton made by giving speeches to Wall Street Banks. That was not going to instill confidence in the poor that she was on their side.

Any working class person who voted for Trump probably wasn’t thinking, for Trump is also rich, favors the rich (as does his party), and his pandering to the working class was largely an appeal to prejudice and nativism. But it was still an alternative to the status quo. We, the Left, need to offer something tangible to the poor, both black and white, and not just demonize Republicans or sneer at working-class whites, people who are generally seen by RLs as racist and sexist—and therefore unworthy of consideration.