THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERAL

After Identity Politics

By Mark Lilla

$24.99. 143 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.

Still gobsmacked by the 2016 election, many liberals may be yearning for a thoughtful, generous and well-informed book to put it all in perspective, a strategic account of where they’ve been, where they are now and where they ought to go. In “The Once and Future Liberal,” Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.” Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

The inspiration for this slim volume came from Lilla’s November 2016 New York Times article, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” That essay argued that “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity” had turned liberals into navel-gazing do-nothings, “narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups.” In order to stop losing elections to the likes of Donald Trump, Lilla proposed, “the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” As the book’s promotional material proudly notes, the piece set off “a firestorm of controversy.”

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In theory, this sort of provocation lends itself nicely to a book-length treatment, allowing an author a chance to summon additional research and bring depth to an otherwise surface argument. With “The Once and Future Liberal,” Lilla expands his scope to include the last 80 years of American politics, a period when the liberal “Roosevelt Dispensation” gave way to the conservative “Reagan Dispensation” (with deleterious consequences). He also fleshes out his vision of what should lie ahead — not just “the end of identity liberalism” but the start of a new liberalism focused on citizenship, duty and shared purpose. All too often, however, Lilla opts for attitude over substance. Though he calls for liberals to adopt “a coldly realistic view of how we live now,” he spends much of his book jeering from afar at millennial “social justice warriors,” whose “resentful, disuniting rhetoric” supposedly destroyed a once-great liberal tradition.