You may have asked yourself, as I have, “So what’s the problem with identity politics? After all, there are marginalized groups in the U.S. and U.K., bigotry is still with us, and why shouldn’t people belonging to those groups agitate to get the rights and treatment they deserve? What were the feminist and civil-rights movements of the Fifties and Sixties besides identity politics?”

That’s a good question, and one that Mark Lilla takes up in two places: in an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “How colleges are strangling liberalism” (this is an excerpt from his new book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics), and in an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, “Mark Lilla on his critique of identity politics.” Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University (he was once at the University of Chicago), “specializes in intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought”, and identifies as a “liberal Democrat” and a “centrist liberal.”

In the New Yorker interview Lilla defines identity politics and also fingers its big problem:

Now, you can say that people think of themselves as Italians or Jews or Germans, and then they become a kind of interest group. We’ve had interest-group politics before. But there’s a kind of essentialism to identity politics, where it means going out into the democratic space, where you’re struggling for power and using identity as an appeal for other people to vote for your side. And I think Bannon’s completely right, and I’ll stand by what I said: that it works for their side and it doesn’t work for our side, for all kinds of reasons. Now, that is not to say that we don’t talk about identity. To understand any social problem in this country, you have to understand identity. And we’re more aware of that than ever, and that’s been a very good thing. But, to address those problems with politics, we have to abandon the rhetoric of difference, in order to appeal to what we share, so that people who don’t share this identity somehow can have a stake, and feel something that other people are experiencing.

In other words—and this is what Lilla emphasizes in the Chronicle review—identity politics so fragments the populace, in particular the Left, that they lose understanding of what’s good for society as a whole, concentrating on what’s good for their identity group—in fact, not even that, but concentrating on what’s good for them as individuals. This not only prevents the Left from political success, claims Lilla, but heartens the Trump administration. As Remnick notes (who isn’t largely on board with Lilla’s views), “There is a quote recently that Steve Bannon, of all people, delivered: ‘The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I’ve got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focussed on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.’”

Lilla also blames identity politics for the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Part of his exchange with Remnick:

Lilla: . . . But, when we go out on the stump, it makes no sense to call out to various groups, as Hillary Clinton did, and inevitably leave people out. She would list the groups that liberal Democrats care about today: African-Americans, gays and lesbians, women. One out of every four Americans is evangelical. Thirty-seven per cent of Americans live in the South. Seventeen per cent, as many as there are, of African-Americans in this country live in rural areas. There are different ways in which people think of themselves, right? And those people did not feel called out to.

Remnick: Why do you think they felt called out to by Barack Obama and not by Hillary Clinton? What was the key difference there?

Lilla: Precisely because Obama did not list groups. Because he talked about “we.” He didn’t always finish his sentences—he would say, “That’s not who we are,” and wouldn’t quite tell us who we are. But he understood that. Both Obama and [Bill] Clinton understood that playing identity politics in electoral politics is a disaster for the liberal side.

But what about the notion that we’re throwing those marginalized people under the bus by appealing to a greater unity while ignoring their “identity issues”? Here’s the exchange about that.

Remnick: Unless I misread your book, you seem to say that, in the interest of winning—and politics is about power, ultimately—the Democratic side ought to think about abandoning certain issues, certain kinds of rhetoric, in order to win. But abandoning certain things like full-throated opposition to bathroom bills will mean that certain people—transgender people, some of the most vulnerable people in our society—will get hurt. How does a party go about sacrificing people on the altar of the general good?

Lilla: Well my main point is this, and I want to get this across: we cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power. It is just talk. Therefore, our rhetoric in campaigning must be focussed on winning, so then we can help these people. An election is not about self-expression. It’s not a time to display everything we believe about everything. It’s a contest. And once you hold power, then you can do the things you want to do. Your rhetoric has to be mobilizing, and it’s got to mobilize—

. . . if we want to make people more tolerant, the psychology of that is very complicated. What we do know—and psychologists study these sorts of things—if you call someone a racist, they completely shut down. You’re not persuading, you’re not building a bridge to that person. And while it’s satisfying to speak the full truth about something, and I understand that urge, if you’re trying to persuade people and move them a little toward your position, you’ve got to find common ground. And that’s very hard to take for people who are in movements, and feel frustrated that things aren’t going their way.

So Lilla’s view is that “movement politics”—a unified push by different groups—is the only way for liberals to get power, and once that power is seized, then we can concentrate on the issues of specific groups.  Now I’m not sure I’m completely on board with that view, but there’s no doubt that the Right has been heartened by identity politics. Just look at Breitbart, The Daily Wire, or any number of right-wing sites, which daily publish articles on “P.C. [politically correct] craziness.” It makes the Left look petty, embroiled in trivial problems like cultural appropriation and bowdlerizing literature, while what we need is to get political power back from a group with a deeply regressive agenda.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education piece, Lilla of course concentrates on the universities’ responsibility for the fragmentation of the Left, and I think we do bear some of that. Humanities courses reinforce identity politics, and these students, particularly from elite universities, are the ones who will shape the next generation of Leftist politics. Again, Lilla emphasizes the dangers of this fragmentation:

Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people — African-Americans, women, gays — seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. But by the 1980s it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities. The main result has been to turn young people back onto themselves, rather than turning them outward toward the wider world they share with others. It has left them unprepared to think about the common good in non-identity terms and what must be done practically to secure it — especially the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort. Every advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of effective liberal political consciousness.

Campus politics bears a good deal of the blame. Up until the 1960s, those active in liberal and progressive politics were drawn largely from the working class or farm communities, and were formed in local political clubs or on shop floors. Today’s activists and leaders are formed almost exclusively at colleges and universities, as are members of the mainly liberal professions of law, journalism, and education. Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that, especially at the elite level, are largely detached socially and geographically from the rest of the country. This is not likely to change. Which means that liberalism’s prospects will depend in no small measure on what happens in our institutions of higher education.

What’s strange about this essay, though, is Lilla’s take on my own cohort: the “’60s generation”, now in charge with teaching in the universities, and presumably of infecting students with identitarianism.

Lilla credits that group with having learned that “movement politics” (the cooperation of different groups to get power) was “the only mode of engagement that actually changes things”, but curiously, adds “which was once true but no longer is.” If it’s no longer true, and identity politics does change things, why is he writing this essay? Perhaps I misunderstand him. He adds that that generation also learned something that promoted current identity politics: “political activity must have some meaning for the self, making compromise seem a self-betrayal (which renders ordinary politics impossible).” I’m not sure if he’s right here: if Sixties politics was effective in promoting civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights, which it was, how did we internalize lessons that, says Lilla, aren’t effective in changing a more right-wing government?

I’ll give a few more quotes from Lilla’s article (yes, this is getting long, but we’re supposed to have a higher attention span than The Kids). Here’s his view of how college transforms an entering young woman into an identitarian. This, to me, seems accurate (my emphasis):

Imagine a young student entering such an environment today — not your average student pursuing a career, but a recognizable campus type drawn to political questions. She is at the age when the quest for meaning begins and in a place where her curiosity could be directed outward toward the larger world she will have to find a place in. Instead, she is encouraged to plumb mainly herself, which seems an easier exercise. (Little does she know. …) She will first be taught that understanding herself depends on exploring the different aspects of her identity, something she now discovers she has. An identity which, she also learns, has already been largely shaped for her by various social and political forces. This is an important lesson, from which she is likely to draw the conclusion that the aim of education is not to progressively become a self — the task of a lifetime, Kierkegaard thought — through engagement with the wider world. Rather, one engages with the world and particularly politics for the limited aim of understanding and affirming what one already is.

And so she begins. She takes classes where she reads histories of the movements related to whatever she determines her identity to be, and reads authors who share that identity. (Given that this is also an age of sexual exploration, gender studies will hold a particular attraction.) In these courses she also discovers a surprising and heartening fact: that although she may come from a comfortable, middle-class background, her identity confers on her the status of one of history’s victims. This discovery may then inspire her to join a campus group that engages in movement work. The line between self-analysis and political action is now fully blurred. Her political interest will be genuine but circumscribed by the confines of her self-definition. Issues that penetrate those confines now take on looming importance and her position on them quickly becomes nonnegotiable; those issues that don’t touch on her identity (economics, war and peace) are hardly perceived.

The more our student gets into the campus identity mind-set, the more distrustful she will become of the word we, a term her professors have told her is a universalist ruse used 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.

There are few thing more empowering and heartening than discovering that you’re a victim of sorts, for now you have the privilege to tell other people to be quiet because of your superior “lived experience,” and you suddenly become special, something that shouldn’t be underrated. A Muslim student with a hijab is special because she can claim she’s oppressed because of her identity, while a Muslim woman with uncovered hair has no such status. I have seen these claims repeatedly. (I add the usual but unnecessary caveat that bigotry against Muslim individuals or members of any minority is reprehensible.) But the point—or rather Lilla’s point—is that this specialness defuses any desire to work with others to do things like get a damn Democrat in the White House.

Lilla (again, my emphasis):

The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they are to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X … This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: The winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.

So classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one “epistemology,” black women have another. So what remains to be said?

What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.

Having spent my whole life after 1967 in college (indeed, I liked it so much that I vowed, one way or another, that I’d never leave—and haven’t), Lilla’s words here seem accurate. The fragmentation of the Left into competing oppressed groups has prevented them from working together—something we see among educated atheists as well. And I think that Lilla’s comments on identitarianism defusing movement politics also has some merit. When, for example, I hear enraged students indicting Israel for various “apartheid” crimes (and ignoring the Palestinian attacks on civilians, as well as the own religiously-based oppression of their citizens), I don’t see students committed to solving this nearly intractable problem. Rather, they want to shout slogans, vent their rage, some want to flaunt their virtue, and none of this is even aimed at addressing the nearly intractable problem—unless you mean by that getting rid of the state of Israel.

Now most of the “identity” causes are meritorious: there’s still racism and sexism in this country, and that needs to go. But I don’t see it going so long as each group denies the other a contribution to the conversation—something that’s impossible if you claim full possession of the truth and the right to speak based on your identity. I may sound like an old guy here (and I am), but I remember that when marching in civil rights demonstrations, or discussing those issues, or fighting against the war, there were few arguments about which group had the hegemony of power and right to speak. Rather, I remember a wonderful sense of common purpose: we were all in this together, and we were going to change the world. Seriously—we really thought that! Well, we didn’t, of course, but that unanimity did help stop the Vietnam War and secure rights for women and blacks (gay rights weren’t yet on the table when I was a student).

To close, I’ll reprise Lilla’s thesis once again from the Chronicle piece:

Conservatives are right: Our colleges, from bottom to top, are mainly run by liberals, and teaching has a liberal tilt. But they are wrong to infer that students are therefore being turned into an effective left-wing political force. The liberal pedagogy of our time, focused as it is on identity, is actually a depoliticizing force. It has made our children more tolerant of others than certainly my generation was, which is a very good thing. But by undermining the universal democratic we on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled, and action inspired, it is unmaking rather than making citizens. In the end this approach just strengthens all the atomizing forces that dominate our age.

Remnick, as I said, is pretty critical of Lilla, and seems himself somewhat of a Control Leftist in his interview (this is reflected in the New Yorker‘s slant on politics). So, if you have time, read that interview, and also the Chronicle piece, and weigh in below. Weigh in even if you haven’t had time to read either, as I’ve given, I think, a sufficient precis of Lilla’s arguments.