美国自由派的过去与未来--身份政治的批判及再批判

"The Once and Future Liberal"是Mark Lilla作為自由派在2016年大選之後為民主黨的挫敗開出的診斷。 Lilla在書中批評民主黨過於依賴身份政治，忽略了公民共同體的建設而與選民脫鉤。四年過去，Trump的任期比預想中更不堪，但民主黨似乎在身份政治的路上越走越遠，也遠走越堅定了。 2016年時我對Lilla在紐約時報發表的時評深以為然(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html)，2020年大選之際重讀Lilla，反而讀出了他的局限性。往前看去選情仍是撲朔迷離，只能自私地希望Lilla對身份政治的批判全盤皆錯，希望大選能帶來驚喜，證明民主黨在過去四年里為挽救美國社會的分崩離析做出的努力沒有完全白費。

一

七年前懷著對通識教育懵懵懂懂的憧憬來到東海岸時，我對美國自由派校園裡無處不在的身份政治尚一無所知。當時心裡期待的是某種抽象意義上的自由，閃閃發光卻不可名狀。相較之下種種擔心無一例外經過了大陸新聞或通俗文化的過濾，形態具體。比如槍支暴力，比如校園霸凌和派對文化。這些擔心一降落在童話般的校園裡就迅速消解了，而“自由”的概念則伴隨著通往成熟的掙扎一點點生動起來：光芒漸漸有了層次，也漸漸顯示出千奇百怪的樣子。大概是因為厭惡大陸壓迫的政治環境，來美國念本科前我對“政治”毫無興趣。十八歲前政治於我等同於官僚主義和高壓專制，而我能想像到的自由無論消極積極，都恰恰站在政治的對立面，最重要的是不受任何體制的牽制。在這想像的自由里我是個來去自如的世界公民。著迷於這種與政治體制對立的自由意味著忽略社會生活的構成因素，我也因此一貫對自己的女性身份毫不自知，對“亞洲人”或是”外國人“的標籤也全盤接受從未細品，不過是當作世界大同的白日夢必然遇到的無數障礙之一而已。可以說“身份”和”政治“都提不起我的興趣。

但與身份政治打交道在美國校園裡是不可避免的。新生週時有許許多多的破冰活動，大家圍成一圈自我介紹，除了姓名家鄉總還要加上preferred pronoun。彼時我並不知道pronoun的意思，但也隨大部分姑娘加上了一句"my preferred pronoun is she/her“。那是我第一次了解到原來性向認同可以存在於生理性別之外。在女校很快便自然接受了性別意識的流動性，對大家常常討論的如何讓日常語言更包容的議題，雖然不甚關心卻也覺得合情合理。儘管Michael Brown被警察無由槍殺之後一系列以Black Lives Matter為主題的示威沒有激起心裡太大的漣漪，對校園裡鋪天蓋地的抗議還是直覺地支持。當時我不過抱著世界公民的幻想站在純粹的道德高台上，覺得譴責濫用暴力和種族歧視都是再天經地義不過的選擇，卻從未試圖通過”身份“或是“政治”去理解那一聲聲呼喊。直到2016年大選希拉里意外敗落，秋日的校園陷入突然的絕望，我被周圍令人窒息的憤怒籠罩著無處逃遁時心生困惑，才終於把校園裡的平權議題和政治聯繫起來--彼時政治於我意味著公共情緒對私人空間的擠占。這憤怒的巨大能量讓我有些隱隱不適，而我把這種不安歸結於反感校園里政治化一切的風氣。怎麼費盡力氣逃離的政治，會在大洋彼岸校園的城堡前換一個模樣出現呢？

後來我去法學院唸書，三年來幾乎每天都在學習美國的政治與社會體制。後知後覺地意識到我夢想中自覺的自由可以在政治語境裡找到最崇高的表達，也必須依靠政治才有實現的可能性。理想中的自由世界至此更多有了公民共和主義（"civic republicanism"）的影子。於此同時我對身份認同的理解不再局限於對人稱代詞或廁所標識的討論，也親身經歷了在親密關係中女性意識的覺醒。因為大選之後在潛意識裡把身份政治與民主政治劃了等號，我對二者的認知同時開始，互相加深：因為與社會和他人更深入的聯結轉而審視自己在這些關係中的身不由己，也由此切身體會到”身份認同“的含義。我的個人經歷與Lilla對身份認同“偽政治化"甚至於”去政治化“的批判是不相符的。

二

Lilla批判民主黨從裡根之後就走入了身份政治的死胡同，其實是順應了保守派創造的個人主義劇本。裡根政府借戰後的經濟繁榮強調個人主義對激發資本主義潛能的重要性，削弱政府在社會生活中的作用。科技水平的迅速提高和郊區化的加速加速了社會原子化的進程，而里根主義是在冷戰即將結束的歷史背景下，羅斯福新政失去吸引力之後對美國夢煥然一新的詮釋。 "我們”的概念變得陌生，個人主義的教理取代了一切屬於集體的社會構想：自給自足的個人代替了社群中的公民，公民所共享的社會構想和責任也隨之消失；創造足夠的財富讓小家經濟獨立成為社會發展的第一要義，而財富分配退居其次；自由市場被奉為圭臬，政府監管的有效性因此被廣泛質疑。在絕對個人主義的語境裡，傳統意義上的民主政治變得蒼白而陌生。既然個人奮鬥決定一切，以社群甚至是國家為單位的討論便再無意義。

里根新自由主義之所以成功，很大程度上是因為羅斯福新政逐漸僵化，福利建設的負擔無處解決，政府的過度監管不再有效，大量財政開銷無法再大幅提升生活水平。裡根為選民勾畫出資本主義黃金時代的圖景，共和黨也抓緊機會，通過由上至下的各級選舉鞏固勢力，同時通過政治教育培養未來的共和黨人。里根的新自由主義深入人心，自由派卻未能提出與之相匹配的願景。共和黨的統治不斷鞏固，民主黨卻忽視了基層選舉和民意培養，將所有精力投入於總統大选和訴訟之中，即使偶爾能有勝利，成果的根基無法鞏固，不過是一盤散沙。當保守派最終也沒能逃出僵化的命運而成為社會進步的阻礙，民主黨毫無準備，將團結民眾的機會拱手讓出，右翼民粹便趁經濟困境之虛而入。

Lilla此書對民主黨的批判聚焦於里根之後的身份政治。在Lilla看來，過於強調身份政治導致民主黨無法從共和黨及保守派手中爭取政治權力，如此一來平權的議程不但無法得到推進，反而因為民眾的敵意而變得更加阻力重重。民主黨的策略性失誤首先在於其將政治運動的主戰場轉移到了理想主義的校園裡，等於沒有爭取就放棄了對政治機構的控制。而政治機構在美國社會恰恰是重要公權力的源頭，掌握著分配社會資源的決定權。與這一策略失誤同樣致命的是民主黨以身份政治對抗體制政治的決定。對Lilla來說，里根政權之後自由派的身份構建是向內的，分裂的，排他的，因而是反政治的。和60年代的平權運動不同，身份政治的重點在於“身份”而非政治。平權運動的宗旨在於建立一個更平等的，與美國精神更契合的社會，其對於美國社會共同體的積極設想能號召很多和非裔經歷不同盟友。 Lilla讚賞平權運動的建設性和包容性，也藉此批評當代身份政治將全部關注放在少數群體身上，但未能向前一步，促進少數群體向公民的轉變。身份政治的此種局限體現在其過度強調權利卻避而不談義務，過度強調個人經歷而拒絕對話，過度強調”我們“的痛苦而輕視”我們“和”他們”在社會治理中必需的互動與合作。

Lilla指出身份政治對小我的迷戀很大程度上建立在浪漫主義對於社會人的不切實際的幻想之上：自由派期望“我”的感受和“我”的社會經歷完美重合，“我“的全部身份認同都能被社會接納。幻想不會成為現實，因而免不了帶來失望。和不同身份群體之間的摩擦讓這些小群體更加不願意離開身份認同的庇護，與社會愈加脫節。在Lilla看來，脫離兩黨制內的政治機構導致身份政治所追求的平權成為妄想，對”邊緣化“群體的過度迷戀致使身份政治的關注愈發偏離主流社會，而失去和“主流”對話的能力也自然而然將這些議題邊緣化。黨同伐異的姿態注定會疏離"身份“之外的民眾。得不到民眾的支持又失去了對政治機構的掌控，基於特定"身份"的運動游離於政治之外，不但無法在平權上取得進展，反而加劇了美國社會的分裂。

三

第一次讀到Lilla是在2016年大選之後。自由派校園的泡泡被現實戳破，年輕人理想主義的憤怒鋪天蓋地，令人暈眩。我去找教政治學的教授，問他為什麼自己感受不到同樣分量的痛苦。教授笑笑說大家都在試圖理解Trump意味著什麼，而關於是否或者如何聲討Trump所代表的一切，沒有也不會有正確答案。那個學期上的兩門課恰好都在討論資本主義和社會秩序，講馬克思講新自由主義，理論和歷史虛虛實實的交錯已經給我帶來許多思考。可是精巧的理論在大選結果的震驚面前免不了顯得無用。定下神來，Lilla似乎為大選之後的政治參與提供了急需的，現實的指導，但細細一看卻仍有很多經不起推敲之處。對Lilla書中觀點的批評主要集中在一下幾點：

（1）質疑Lilla對於“民主政治”單一的理解(n.1)。在Lilla看來，民主政治的美妙之處在於公民通過討論，在相互尊重的大前提下解決資源分配的難題。換言之民主政治的基礎在於公民參與，因此如果公民彼此不信任，對社會發展沒有共同願景，那麼不但“共同治理”無法有效開展，手腕高超的政治家也會藉機通過煽動分裂來攫取權力。批評者提出Lilla對“政治”的理解忽略了政治參與對於身份表達的紧密连结：許多人在身份意識覺醒之後才意識到參與的重要性，而參加基於身份意識的“運動”反過來加強了他們對特定身份的認同。對這部分人來說，民主政治本身就存在於”運動“而非Lilla所強調的”機構“之中。呼籲他們弱化"身份意識"無異於鼓勵他們遠離政治。有的批評者甚至更進一步，質疑脫離了個人表達的政治能否有存在的基礎。這位批評者認為無論是個人主義還是身份政治，某種意義上都奉個人權力的表達而非社會秩序的構造為第一要義。既然如此，除非我們能跳出虛無主義，重新建立社會生活形而上的基礎，Lilla所擔心的分崩離析就不可避免(n.2)。

（2）質疑Lilla的結論過於簡單化，缺乏實證支撐(n.3)。鑑於此書本來就是一本陳述觀念的小冊子，作者本來就沒有用實證闡明觀點的意思，也無心提出理論框架，作品難免單薄了一些卻也無可厚非。批評者不但不滿於Lilla的論證，對他的歷史敘述也不認可，認為他關於羅斯福和里根時代的總結過於粗枝大葉，完全忽視了歷史背景下社會現實中的種種複雜性。比如Lilla將羅斯福新政之後的美國描繪成充滿希望的黃金時代，對當時普遍存在的社會衝突和結構性歧視卻閉口不提。比如在Lilla大大簡單化了80年代的政治，將裡根的民主黨描述為一台高速運行的意識形態機器。相應的，書中對身份政治和自由派學生的批評也大多建立在刻板印象之上，雖然許多漫畫式的描述讀來令人捧腹，Lilla卻並沒有對自己摘取的誇張現象進行深入的分析，也沒有嘗試理解參與這些運動的個人或群體出發點為何，將身份政治輕描淡寫為毫無意義的個人表達。以這樣粗糙的方式來批判社會現象複雜如身份政治，必然導致有失偏頗的匆忙定論。另一些批評者認同Lilla的觀點，但對Lilla的淺嚐輒止感到可惜(n.4)。這樣的批評認為Lilla沒有理解身份政治的最終目標，也沒有分析透徹為什麼身份政治失敗或終將失敗。同時，批評者不滿於Lilla對社會現實的一筆帶過，沒有結合移民，美國的人口構成變化，全球化和民粹主義來討論身份政治和所謂的公民概念。

（3）質疑Lilla對於公民社會共同構想的建議是對白人至上的妥協(n.5)。這些批評最尖銳，最刺耳，卻也最產生共鳴。 Lilla認為身份政治是分裂的，破壞公民群體間的團結因而不具建設意義。 Lilla自詡為自由派，支持促進社會平等和進步的議題，書中對身份政治的全部批評都集中在其對於推動這些議題的反作用性。 Lilla認為進步只有通過民主政治來改變人心才能實現，不管是法庭上還是總統選舉中的勝利，缺了基層政府和人民的支持都不過是空中閣樓。進步離不開各級政治機構和社會的廣泛支持，而這種支持必須靠平等的對話來爭取，因而只能在互相尊重的環境裡實現。身份政治忽視了廣泛結盟的重要性，也將所有不同的觀點拒之門外，自然難以推動真正的進步。 Lilla的批評者不是沒有意識到結盟對於自由派的實戰來說至關重要。他們不過認為現存的社會秩序根本就是建立在歧視和壓迫的基礎上為既得利益者（大部分為白人男性）服務的。批評者提出身份政治的意義在於將這些腐敗因素暴露出來，而在此之前Lilla所倡導的合作毫無意義，只能是不平等的幫兇。婦女運動前女性在談判桌邊無一席之地，在平權運動之前黑人無法以平等的身份參與政治結構內外的對話。如果弱勢群體仍在與結構性壓迫鬥爭，發聲得不到傾聽，那麼過度關注結盟最終不過是給掌握了社會資源的規則制定者提供了更多籌碼。更何況歷史上壓迫者往往最擅長利用”身份政治“來製造對立，平等大同從來就沒有真正發生過。這樣看來，如果被邊緣化的群體不強調他們被邊緣化的身份，這些”身份“在任何联盟中都逃不過被忽視甚至踐踏的命運(n.5)。 Lilla所幻想的公民社會的願景只有在人人平等的前提下才值得爭取。在這之前，身份政治是治療結構性歧視的重要一步。

（4）質疑Lilla對身份政治的批評忽視了其真正的局限性：沒有認識到新自由主義的經濟秩序才是壓迫的根因(n.6)。批評者認為建立在群體認同上的政治運動在歷史上本不是新鮮事，也是人性的體現，不可避免，也不一定值得批評。當代自由派對身份政治的過分推崇不免模糊了經濟秩序的重要性，而不平等的經濟秩序是一切不平等的根源。民主黨在裡根之後徹底放棄了與新自由主義的對抗，反而選擇了擁抱自由市場為王的理念，在新自由主義的範式下試圖促進包容與平等(n.7)。然而此種基於個人身份認同的平等只能帶來虛假的安慰。無論多少飄揚的彩虹旗都不能改變資本的剝削越來越不受限制的事實，這些被邊緣化的群體不過在這不平等的大背景下受到更多傷害罷了。

四

Lilla對當代身份政治的不滿主要針對這些運動”向內看“的特質。 Lilla認為年輕人期望社會對個人成長經歷全盤接納是不切實際的，因此將全部注意力集中在個人的傷痛上並無法帶來積極的改變，反而會把潛在盟友拒之門外。對我來說身份政治的意義則恰恰相反。曾經以為“我”能夠分擔全人類的悲歡而成為一個抽象的自由人。在慢慢長大，和種種或宏觀或微觀的社會建構打交道之後，才意識到純粹的，絕對的自由是不可得的。在被社會化的過程中我被迫接受了各種“身份”帶來的枷鎖，意識到自己是女性，是中國人，是學生，是在美漂泊的異鄉客，是為資本主義秩序服務的小螺絲釘。這些身份在社會關係中才漸漸有了輪廓，想來對我而言“身份政治”反而首先是向外看的。當然，身份意識反過來啟發了更多內省，在這過程中我愈發體會到自己與其他社會群體的聯結，逐漸明白自己和“社會”甚至於公民共同體的密不可分。我會經歷屬於自己的逃不掉的掙扎，也終會盡力讓這些掙扎對未來一代變得不那麼痛苦。

1. What Lilla isn't seeing is that we come to electoral politics in many different ways. Some people come to it through a desire for public service, bypassing social movements altogether. Others join social movements, get stuck in identity silos and ignore elections. This book is for them. But many others — like myself — were drawn to politics by participating in social movements. When I was in high school, politics seemed very much a male realm. It was through feminism that I learned that I, too, had a voice, could join the conversation, advocate, petition, vote. Again, it was as a civil rights worker in the South that I got a frightening look at the link between race and electoral politics (https://www.washingtonpost. com/outlook/liberals-woes-run-deep-but-the-way-out-is-murky/2017/08/18/14d81e3c-7235-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html).
2. Despite his fondness for ridiculing the religious intensity of the “social justice warrior,” Lilla fails to recognize that a rejection of one's political expressivism could be experienced as a religious deconversion. For some, the remedy may well be worse than the disease. Of this reality Lilla is oddly oblivious. And this is tragic. As much as one may enjoy Lilla's scorching wit, a stronger seasoning of empathy might have occasioned some advice for those navigating such a discomfiting transition. Lilla's recognition of the deep affinity between Reaganite economics and left identitarianism is the most profound aspect of The Once and Future Liberal . It is also the element around which his entire project unravels. In all his denunciations of both movements he is curiously shy of naming the irreducible heart of their similarity: nihilism. Whether the will to power finds expression in economic self-determination or in the assertion of one's identity over-against an other , it remains a gr oundless nothing, a sheer, arbitrary exuberance. The will to power sits beneath Lilla's critique just as it resides within the objects of his scorn. This is made clear by his unwillingness to apply his critique of individualism to his own political commitments. And this is perhaps what most irks Lilla's critics on the left, even if they're wary of articulating it: any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-once-and -future-mark-lilla/).
3. Lilla adopts the tone of a long-suffering professor who just wants to discuss Marx and Emerson but finds himself besieged by hybridity and intersectionality. And yet he often fails in some basic professorial imperatives, like familiarizing himself with the relevant literature and providing research and evidence to support his argument. Lilla contends that the New Deal initiated a golden age of liberalism, filled with “confidence, hope, pride and a spirit of self-sacrifice,” all but ignoring extensive scholarship on the era's conflicts and structural inequities. His narrative of the modern conservative movement is no more nuanced, depicting the fractious post-1980 Republican Party as “an ideologically unified and electorally potent force that thought and acted like a 'fine-tuned machine.' This is not, of course, a work of historical scholarship. It is a polemic about the dangers of “identity liberalism,” and a critique of the misguided professors and students who seem so enamored of it. Campus movements admittedly make for an easy target, with their self-serious posturing and ever-lengthening strings of abbreviations. But for an intellectual historian, Lilla seems remarkably incurious about what all of this actually means to the people involved. One might suppose that an author taking aim at college activists would interview a few of them — find out what their experiences have been, how they view the world, why they do what they do. Instead Lilla draws on a handful of quotes from the 55-year-old Port Huron Statement , the long-ago manifesto of the white student left, to capture most of what has gone wrong ever since. Lilla's labels can be slippery; he often conflates liberals, leftists and Democrats. By contrast he takes a rather narrow view of “ identity politics” as something practiced mainly by left-wing movements and not, say, by the Republican Party. His dislike of this form of activism seems to have something to do with its claim that “the personal is political, ” that we are all social and political beings even in the most intimate settings. Lilla rejects what most feminists would say about that venerable phrase: that it opened up new areas of life to political analysis and civic action. To the contrary, he sees it as a disastrous turn inward, a rejection of tough-minded electoral warfare in favor of “aimless self-expression (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/mark-lilla-the-once -and-future-liberal.html).
4. His understanding should be tempered by an examination of the humiliating and often self- abnegating demands placed on “allies” in identity movements. Many—most!—of the adherents of these movements' ideologies aren't “romantics” at all; they' ve been browbeaten by constant accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. They say things like “My role in this movement is to shut up.” Not exactly Ralph Waldo Emerson there. The “self-regard” frame also obscures some of identity politics' worst faults. Lilla suggests that “a recognizable campus type drawn to political questions” will be taught such that “those issues that don't touch on her identity are not even perceived.” Actually, today's “recognizable campus types” proselytize a bowdlerization of a sociological anti-theory called intersectionality . In this current form, intersectionality dictates that all identitarian struggles are actually the same; the enemy is always and everywhere simultaneously white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, neoliberalism, capitalism, imperialism and so on. This is how Israeli flags get banned from gay pride parades. Now it could be that, in some sense, these “campus types” appropriate other struggles in order to enhance their self- image in some way or another. I wouldn't know, and Lilla doesn't make such an argument. There is, however, a really important way in which campus-style identity politics is self-regarding. One of its ultimate goals is the personal expiation of historical sins like slavery through “working on” one's own “unconscious biases” (and so forth). This matches up with the contexts in which such ideas are most strongly felt in the lives of average students and white-collar workers : hostile workplace training seminars; microaggression workshops; first-year orientations where well-paid diversity consultants revel in the tears of struggling suburbanites who are hearing for the first time that they are oppressors just in virtue of being themselves. This personal focus is in stark tension with the claims of high-minded identitarians to be addressing “systemic” or “structural” issues. But Lilla is unable to plumb the depths of this tension; stuck in the battles of the sixties, he understands neither what identitarians are trying to accomplish nor how they've failed to accomplish it. Talk of “purity”, and of what Lilla calls “the social justice warrior” as “a social type with quixotic features whose self-image depends on being unstained by compromise”, seems immature and unsympathetic. Even Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was able to recognize that guilt and self-loathing often silently underpin the spoken conviction that others are going to hell. With the “social type” in question, it's not silent. They happily say that they, too, are racists, misogynists, and phobes of various sorts who often can't help propping up an invisible and infinitely unjust system. To fail to recognize this is to fail to appreciate the scope of the pathology and the way it damages those inside the ideology more than those outside. When it comes to the right, Lilla at least recognizes political differences, but his framework makes them feel cultural. We hear very little about terrorism and immigration. In a book ostensibly about the relationship between identity politics and Republican electoral success, they deserve not just mention but extended analysis . Lilla believes citizenship is the rhetorical concept Democrats need right now. But of course emphasizing citizenship leaves Trumpian policies like the border wall and the Muslim ban untouched . Which is precisely the point of Trump's supporters! We hear very little about the vast demographic changes the country is undergoing, about the glut of (rightly or wrongly) breathless news stories heralding the proportional reduction of white people in America. Again, in a book like this, that topic seems almost required for full credit. Is the Democrats' “demographic strategy” promisin g? Will Hispanic voters turn Texas blue? Would a black Democratic candidate have defeated Trump due to better turnout? To hold to his pragmatic anti-identitarian thesis Lilla must believe the answer is no, but we never hear why (https://quillette .com/2017/09/02/review-future-liberal-identity-politics-mark-lilla/).
5. Let me be blunt: this kind of liberalism is a liberalism of white supremacy. It is a liberalism that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction. It is a liberalism that figures the lives and interests of white men as the neutral, unmarked terrain around which a politics of “common interest” can and should be built. And it is a liberalism that regards the protests of people of color and women as a complaint or a feeling, ignoring the facts upon which those protests are based — facts about real dead, tortured, raped, and starved bodies. The liberalism Lilla espouses reduces these facts of human suffering and the systems of power that produce that suffering as beside the point . What matters are liberal values and the idea of America as a “shining city on a hill” that deserves our allegiance, not our protest. The ways that racial inequality has been baked into liberalism through the structural disadvantage of black people found in the GI Bill, discriminatory lending policies, redlining, inferior education for people of color, and — oh right — the refusal to provide reparations to formerly enslaved people, are just glitches and not actual features of the splendors of liberal governance for the likes of Lilla （http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/making-white-supremacy-respectable/).
6. But we will have to start from the ground up. It's not like there has historically been this sense of solidarity or commonality and we've somehow lost it. It would be anachronistic to say this country was founded on identity politics, but it was founded deliberately and systematically on division, not to mention frontiersmanship, which is to say rugged individualism. The White elite government of the colonies calculatingly turned poor Whites against Black slaves. Then they turned both against Native Americans in order to obtain more and more land. Then they diverted the anger of the poor toward the British and away from themselves, who were arguably exploiting the masses of destitute colonists as much as the crown was oppressing the colonies in order to win the Revolutionary War. Then, they set up the country so that only White men who owned property could vote, and it stayed that way until ... well, my mother was a teenager when Martin Luther King Jr. cast his dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Citizenship, as Lilla suggests, may indeed be the way forward — certainly emphasizing what we have in common rather than giving into the fear and hatred of the current administration and recovering a sense of duty to one another is necessary — but a direction is not a map (https://www.realchangenews.org/2018/05/02/book-review-once-and-future-liberal-after-identity-politics).
7. The fact is that there has always been a politics of groups in the United States; not much in this regard has changed recently, and you simply do not get very far by linking recently prominent groups to the culture of narcissism, real as it certainly is in our time. Now, it is plausible to say that group campaigns have always articulated some causes rather than others, and articulated them in ways adapted to and shaped by powerful forces in their time. But you might get much further by claiming that, rather than the rise and fall of groups being determined by existential neediness, the victory of economic libertarianism made movements such as trade unions collapse while others were forced into compatibility with the explosion of inequality in our times: racial justice on condition it is class-free, “lean in” neoliberal feminism, and so forth. And to that extent, it is again not a critique of identity politics in the universities that US liberalism needs, but a critique of libertarian e conomics in society. Roosevelt's genius was not to transcend specific identities in the name of US identity, but to insist that markets serve more than the rich. The fact that this original liberalism did not serve all groups, as Lilla too occasionally concedes, has been an excellent reason for rectifying omissions, which is what many Democrats were trying to do until they were stopped in their tracks after 1968 and the country went another way. Not the New Deal, but that later crossroads, when neoconservatism and neoliberalism arrived, is a good starting point today in our search for a social justice, and therefore a liberalism, the likes of which the United States has yet to see (http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/samuel-moyn-mark-lilla-and -crisis-liberalism).

Interview with Lilla (New Yorker)

Lilla : To give you an example, I'm not a black motorist. I will never be a black motorist. I don't know what it's like to look in the rearview mirror of a car and see the lights flashing and feel my stomach churn. But I am a citizen. And that person is a fellow-citizen. And, if we can make the case that there are citizens in this country who can't just go for a drive without being worried about this, and they won 't be equally protected by the law, I think I can make the case to people who aren't black that that's a terrible thing, right? And so I want to frame the issue in terms of basic values and principles that we share in order to establish sympathy and empathy and identification with someone else.

Remnick : So what did Black Lives Matter do that you're, at best, ambivalent about—and very critical, really?

Lilla : And then I say, “But there's no denying that the movement's decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society and its law-enforcement institutions and to use Mau Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence played into the hands of the Republican right.”

Lilla : What I see, essentially, is that, to the extent that they are political, their political interest is circumscribed by either how they see their own identity or what they think identity issues are. I'm struck by the lack of interest in military affairs, class structure, economics that's not economics in order to get into business school. There's a lack of interest in American religion. All of these subjects that might help you understand the country in a richer way. They're very much drawn to classes that are about themselves. Of course, they're eighteen to twenty-two, and they're also searching—searching politically and to situate themselves in terms of racial and other identities. And, certainly, sexually, they're trying to figure themselves out. And so they're drawn to classes that speak to that.

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 focused 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—

Lilla : Of course. Of course. And the situation of transgender people can be very, very difficult, especially young people, who feel trapped in a body. And suicide rates are terrible, and homeless rates are terrible. But let's be concrete about this : transgender people make up less than one half of one per cent of the country. There is no electoral group that we're trying to mobilize. That's not to say that we don't want to help them, and focus on that when we analyze our problems and when we get into power. But that is not how you seize power in this country, especially in the states we need to win. Look, we have the two coasts. We need to go to the middle of the country. And if we keep talking about groups, and small groups, and especially if we touch on anything that involves children and sexuality—that's insane. You don't campaign on the basis of that.

Lilla : Well, Stonewall certainly mobilized people to then focus on particular pieces of legislation, and also to mobilize in order to get research and work on aids and HIV But that's, again, just to focus on one particular issue and one particular group. And , if each group is just thinking about itself, it's not thinking like a party. Party politics, right now, has to come first. Because we cannot help any of these people if we don't get elected.

Now, we not only have to speak about identity when it comes to understanding our social problems but we also want to change people's hearts and minds. And that doesn't happen through electoral politics. It happens through our churches, education, it happens through television—“Sesame Street,” “Murphy Brown,” all these shows sort of made this country a more tolerant place. But 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.

lilla : Well, as long as we think of ourselves as groups and think—as the Democratic Party is, which has me worried—that now they have to just add another group, or shift to another group, which is the white working class, we're not going to get anywhere. The big changes in political life and consciousness in this country have come when a vision, again, of what we are as a country comes along, so that we can identify, no matter what group we come to, with the aspirations of that. It doesn't mean that we say it's the reality.

lilla : Narcissism that's fed by the fact that we're a class-ridden society—class-ridden and also now geographically divided. We need to start thinking about the principles we hold that they also hold. We can't do that by demonizing them and thinking that they're all hopeless racists and reactionaries. Because that's a comforting myth. Because then you don't think you have to do anything but lay back, get behind your laptop, and send off some tweets.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conversation-with-mark-lilla-on-his-critique-of-identity-politics

The idea that politics as Arendt imaged it is beyond saving due to the "fanatical righteousness of the new Manichaeans" of both the Left and the Right

For Arendt, the mass politics of a nation-state such as ours is positively deadly to this sort of public-spiritedness. The “great numbers,” “conformism,” and inhumane “automatism” of nation-state politics, she believed, embody “precisely those traits which, in the Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own,” and frustrate a politics of virtue by rendering it rhetorical and sentimental.

At the same time, Lilla's account of the new Manichaeans is open to the charge that it makes too much of the part played by mere ideas. Our politics today are to this extent unreal: What we are talking about, very often, is not really what we are talking about. Ideas and policies do not fully explain the passionate hatreds we encounter in today's Manichaean debates, the hysterical anger lavished on comparative trifles, the ever more intensive division of the world into friends and enemies between whom compromise is impossible. The more energy we expend in fashioning our verbal voodoo dolls, in making Barack Obama into a crypto-Stalin or Donald Trump into a crypto-Hitler, the clearer it becomes that something else is at work.

The fanatical righteousness of the new Manichaeans, whether of the Left or the Right, has all the characteristics of too much inward play, of passion squandered on private playgrounds, in part because, amid a landscape of so much formless sprawl, there are no adequate public ones. The game of mass politics, particularly as it is played in today's electronic forums, breeds Manichaeism precisely because it is both so robotic and so introverted—so inhumane, you might say. The players feel the frustration of those who cannot make themselves heard or felt through their play. They shout the louder, because they are shouting in a vacuum.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/08/28/mark-lilla-the-once-and-future-liberal/