Robert just read The Once and Future Liberal, After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla. Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia who writes books on modern politics and philosophy (including one about Isaiah Berlin written with Ronald Dworkin). This short book was born out of an article Lilla wrote after the 2016 Presidential election arguing that the Democratic party needs to move away from its focus on race, gender, and other personal identity divisions as an organizing idea.  It is a very quick read.

According to Lilla, after Reagan, liberals left the hard work of politics behind. They retreated into the universities and into the promotion of organizations dedicated to single causes. The theme of liberals became a theme of individualism and the individual’s fight against power. Lilla sees this individualism as somehow akin to the rugged individualism and unwillingness to give up comforts of capitalism that were the appeal of Reagan.

Within the universities sit grey-haired liberal professors and their students who look backward and not forward. Who ensconce themselves in university towns and are unwilling to engage with most of America. To the detriment of liberal politics and the Democratic party.

Lilla gives the following prescription: The left needs to “start focusing attention on whatever barriers we have erected between us and the American public, and between us and the future. And we must begin by questioning the taboos — particularly the taboos surrounding identity — that have protected those barriers from scrutiny.”

Basically, Lilla thin that liberals need to focus more on winning than on change. One comes before the other.

Robert was disappointed in the book, though. Lilla is too intellectual and his focus is too philosophical and historical for Robert.  Lilla finds the roots of identity politics in European-style political romanticism, Marx, Emerson, SDS manifestos, blah blah. For Robert, the roots and mechanics of identity politics within universities, especially as practiced by students, must be more simple.

Incredibly, for Robert, there is no mention in the book of affirmative action policies as playing a role in the growth of identity theory and politics at universities and ultimately in mainstream US politics. For Robert, whatever your position on the correctness of affirmative action as a social tool, there is no denying the obvious truth (at least for Robert) that since the early 1970s these programs have been a significant cause of the focus on identity and the preoccupation with victimhood within higher education (Lilla calls it the Victimhood Olympics). It seems to Robert that genuine examination of merits and costs of affirmative action as a social tool is just the kind of taboo inquiry that Lilla wants liberals to engage in. But he does not touch it! At least not in this book.