[RC] Critique of the identity politics of the Democratic Party

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

 
A  Liberal Calls Out His Party for Its Identity Politics

 
 
By: Peter Berkowitz
Real clear Politics
August 25, 2017
 

Following a week of relentless criticism from  the mainstream media for 
ham-handed and vacillating responses to the neo-Nazi  march in Charlottesville, 
President Trump saw his approval rating _rise_ 
(https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/656915?unlock=GZTW3EZ94OLSYW8J)  slightly. 
It’s as if elites have one 
 agenda, and a significant part of the public another.  
The  polling result also suggests that round-the-clock banging on about 
Trump’s flaws  and missteps will not be enough to rehabilitate the fortunes of 
a flailing  Democratic Party that not only lost the White House last year 
and remained the  minority in both houses of Congress but also, since the 2008 
election of Barack  Obama, has been routed on the state level, retaining 
control of only 16  governorships and 21 of 98 partisan state legislative 
chambers. 
 
There  is, though, another approach.  
In  1985, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s crushing defeat of Walter 
Mondale, a  small group led by party operative Al From and several Democratic 
governors and  senators formed the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC 
sought to understand  why the electorate had thoroughly repudiated their party, 
which, in their minds,  was the people’s true representative.  
Undertaking  the frequently painful act of looking within, the DLC found 
the party’s message  to be out of touch with the legitimate interests of 
middle-class voters. The DLC  brain trust—including a slick young Arkansas 
governor who studied at Georgetown,  Oxford, and Yale Law School—recalibrated 
their side’s rhetoric and refashioned  policies to address, consistent with 
core 
Democratic convictions and progressive  ideals, voters’ sincere concerns 
about dysfunctional big government, the fraying  of community, and the elite 
scorn for faith.  

Seven  years later, DLC golden boy Bill Clinton was elected president of 
the United  States.  
Although  Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote, her Electoral College 
loss—the only  result that is constitutionally relevant—to Donald Trump 
inflicted a trauma  for Democrats comparable to 1984. True, Mondale’s  margin 
of defeat was enormous, but he ran against a popular incumbent president  and 
gifted politician whose policies were credited with reviving a moribund  
economy. And yes, Clinton fell a mere 70,000-combined votes short in 
Wisconsin,  Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But the embarrassing scandal for 
Democrats 
was that  a race between their former secretary of state/former senator/former 
first lady  and the major-party candidate with the highest disapproval 
ratings and the least  political preparation in American history was even 
close. 
 
In  contrast to the DLC’s prudent 1985 decision to ask where their party 
had gone astray, today’s  Democrats revel in racking up points in the 
target-rich environment provided by  Trump’s incessant tweets and belligerent 
utterances. This leaves the left little  time for the less thrilling but vital 
task of introspection and  self-criticism.  
Mark Lilla, whose antipathy toward Trump is  heartfelt and resolute, 
recognizes the danger. Last November, shortly after the  election, he _called_ 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalis
m.html?_r=0)  in the New York Times for fellow liberals to face up to their 
party’s portion of  responsibility for Trump’s victory, which Lilla traced 
to the rise “identity  liberalism.” His contention that “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” provoked outrage on the left. 

In  “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” Lilla 
elaborates on his  thesis, providing a short, elegant polemic exposing the 
profound 
harm that  identity liberalism has caused to the Democratic Party. A 
professor of  humanities at Columbia University, and a regular essayist at the 
New 
York Review  of Books, Lilla uses the term “liberal” to denote those who 
identify with the  achievements of the New Deal, which summoned Americans to “
a collective  enterprise to guard one another against risk, hardship, and 
the denial of  fundamental rights.” The essential contrast in post-World War 
II American  politics, for Lilla, is between such liberals, who embodied the “
Roosevelt  Dispensation,” and those who embraced the “Reagan Dispensation” 
with, according  to Lilla, its hyper-individualistic citizens living in 
their separate  communities and its dedication to free markets, economic 
growth, and the  shrinking of government.  
Liberals,  he argues, must repudiate the politics of identity because it 
undermines the  pursuit of the common good to which American liberalism is 
properly directed.  Identity liberalism divides Americans into groups—women, 
African-Americans,  Latinos, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, 
Asian-Americans, and on and on. It  nourishes a “resentful, disuniting rhetoric 
of 
difference” that defines  membership in terms of distinctive narratives of 
victimhood, and confers status  in proportion to the magnitude of the 
oppression one 
claims to have suffered  under the hegemonic sway of white, male structures 
of power. Propelled by  America’s colleges and universities—which, Lilla 
observes, have replaced  political clubs and shop floors as the incubators of 
liberal political  leaders—identity liberalism has abandoned the political 
mission of bringing  fellow citizens together in favor of the evangelical one 
of extracting  professions of faith and punishing heretics, apostates, and 
infidels.  
Disappointingly  for an author whose purpose is to rouse fellow liberals to 
action, Lilla offers  no proposal for reforming our colleges and 
universities, which he blames for  indoctrinating students in identity politics 
dogma. 
But he does sketch the  larger political goal: a “more civic-minded 
liberalism” that cultivates a shared  appreciation of the rights and 
responsibilities that all America citizens share  and which encourages 
individuals to 
undertake “the hard and unglamorous task of  persuading people very different 
from themselves to join a common  effort.”  
The  reply from the establishment left to Lilla’s brief for less victim 
politics and  more retail politics was swift and sure. To mark publication last 
week of “The  Once and Future Liberal,” the New York Times published a 
_review_ 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/mark-lilla-the-once-and-future-liberal.html?mcubz=0)
  by Yale University History Professor  
Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as  
erudition.” Finding nothing bad to say about identity liberalism except to  
wonder 
why it hasn’t generated more marchers, Gage sent Times readers on their  way 
with a clear conscience to continue to exhaust themselves in venting fury  
against Trump’s daily outrages.  
The  serious criticism of Lilla is twofold. First, while holding aloft the 
idea of a  common citizenship, he lapses from time to time into an illiberal 
politics of  friends and enemies revolving around a fundamental antagonism 
between right and  left. Conservatives, in Lilla’s account, are 
simple-minded, selfish, and  anti-political; indifferent to the plight of those 
not like 
them; and oblivious  of the claims of culture and nation. To assert that “a 
vote for Trump was a  betrayal of citizenship, not an exercise of it” is—
in lockstep with the  purveyors of identity liberalism—to smear nearly half 
of your fellow citizens as  traitors.  
Second,  Lilla propagates a basic misunderstanding about the liberalism he 
laudably sets  out to save. That liberalism is not the antithesis of 
conservatism, or, at least  of that conservatism devoted to liberty, limited 
government, and democratic  politics. Despite his best efforts to ignore or 
conceal it, the liberalism that  he labors to restore has a decisively 
conservative element, because, as Lilla  rightly recognizes, the enduring 
ground of 
citizens’ solidarity in America is a  shared commitment to a constitutional 
order that equally protects the individual  rights of all.  
Sorting  these matters out can provoke a useful soul searching for 
Democrats. And  for Republicans who believe that Trump has hijacked  their 
party.

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