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—

REMNICK: But you can imagine how outraged a transgender person would feel about such a tactic?

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.

REMNICK: Mark, you mention Joe Biden as somebody who gets it. Joe Biden was probably the clearest and foremost voice for gay marriage in the Obama Administration.

LILLA: Oh, of course, yeah, but how did we get gay marriage? It was not just that there was a fiat from above. On the contrary, it’s that this change happened socially. It happened in families, it happened at dinner tables, when children came out to their parents—sometimes parents came out to their kids.

REMNICK: But it also happened because you had people in the streets shouting, “We’re here. We’re queer.” Which is something that, in the book, you say will only get you a pat on the head. Didn’t that help get power, too? Didn’t Stonewall help get power, the civil-rights movement help get power?

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 H.I.V. 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.

REMNICK: The slogan of Occupy Wall Street was “We Are the Ninety-nine Per Cent.” That’s a pretty big tent. What did you think of Occupy Wall Street?

LILLA: Well, as I mentioned, nearly forty per cent of the country is Southern. One out of every four Americans is evangelical. I didn’t see those people represented there. You know, I thought it was, the fact that—

REMNICK: But that’s what the discussion was about. It was about class.

LILLA: It was about class, but it was bourgeois activists who were there. And that’s fine, because at least someone was expressing outrage by the bailout of the banks and what happened after the crash. So I was happy that someone was saying anything. But it was theatre, right? And it doesn’t lead to anything else.

REMNICK: Was it helpful theatre?

LILLA: Well, it was helpful in the sense that it certainly got liberals talking more about this, and it was just there that people were protesting. But by the time it descends into the drummers in Zuccotti Park, and people arguing into the night about which groups are being represented when they go up on the platform and speak, that just illustrates what’s wrong with us.

REMNICK: How so?

LILLA: That we’re always about . . . Movement politics, I think, encourages people to radicalize their positions and to impose purity tests on each other. And so we’re always checking each other on our privilege or our positions. And that does nothing to seize power out there. That’s all about what you do within the group. Now the Women’s March was an extraordinary thing, and was worldwide. My wife and daughter were there. I was out of the country, or I would have been there. But it almost didn’t happen. Why is that? Because this woman in Hawaii had a very good idea and posted on Facebook: why don’t we show up in Washington and protest the fact that this President has spoken about women this way. What could be easier? And you know what happened afterward? She was attacked by black groups because she didn’t have a committee, she didn’t have other people represented—

REMNICK: But isn’t that a footnote—a glitch, really? I mean, look at the outcome!

LILLA: I’m talking about the mentality that it reflects. And it hurts us in other ways. And one way in which it definitely did hurt us is that there was a group of pro-life feminists, religious feminists, who had asked to join the group, were accepted, and then, once word got around that they would be there, they were disinvited. That was an opportunity to build a bridge. Now, I’m second to none in my support of abortion rights—I’m an absolutist on a woman’s right to an abortion. But I also know that there are other issues we have to care about, and there’s got to be some way within the Democratic Party to accept that some people are going to have different views while still standing by the majority view. But when you’re involved in identity politics, you don’t see that. Your mind is not tuned. And nothing that you learn in the university prepares you to reach out and to speak thematically in this way.

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.

REMNICK: If you look at those movements, though, there are always more radical voices and less radical voices. You look at the AIDS activism—Larry Kramer was a radical voice, and said things, and still says things, that make people crazy, and that seem extreme, and all the rest. But couldn’t you argue that it depends on where you are in time? In other words, without a Larry Kramer, without some of the radicals in the civil-rights movement or in the women’s-rights movement, that, in fact, things might not push forward quite as well, or quite as quickly, or quite as effectively? But, in real time, when you’re experiencing those radical voices, and they say things that are outrageous or ridiculous, the tendency is to be dismissive of them or to find them ridiculous.