... the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.
"Diversity": it's a mantra of the political left today. Synonyms: "multiculturalism," "political correctness," "identity liberalism."
Lilla argues that staunchly honoring the mantra of identity diversity put paid to Hillary Clinton's electoral chances this year, letting Donald Trump win. After all, Clinton's tactless "basket of deplorables" utterance came while she was speaking before an audience of LGBT partisans.
"Political incorrectness" of any variety serves today as a sure rallying point for liberal anger. During the 1960s the ur-source for political anger was the Black Power movement. That movement's tendencies toward incendiary protest primed the then-ongoing anti-Vietnam war protests to incite police violence in Chicago in 1968. Women's liberationists who supposedly (but not actually) began burning their bras in 1969 were expressing anger akin to that of blacks about their oppression. The gay rights movement, for its part, had its origins in the Stonewall riots of that same year.
The unified response to all these developments was that "identity anger" in general became embedded in liberal politics. Fast forward to today, and we have liberals dutifully echoing identity anger at the oppression that keeps transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice.
All those versions of identity liberalism further alienated two other groups of Americans who have long felt ignored and oppressed, says Lilla: "the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals."
What are liberals to do in response to white-working-class anger? Jettison their own embedded identity anger? Mr. Lilla recommends:
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
But what exactly does "work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale" mean? And, importantly, how would it affect the liberal ur-commitment to racial equality?
Thomas B. Edsall writes in "The Not-So-Silent White Majority" in The New York Times that it has long been the case that
“Blacks constitute the explanation [for white working-class voters] of [their] vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.”
Tapping in to this white-working-class version of identity politics goes back at least as far as Richard Nixon's successful appeal to the "Silent Majority" in the 1968 presidential election. The idea of white victimhood has since had its electoral ups and downs, but it is what propelled Donald Trump to victory this year.
Slavery, it is said, was our country's "original sin." Its spawn have included the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in general. If we liberals follow Mark Lilla's advice, do we have to soft-pedal our anti-racism commitment? And if we do that, what of the other matters of identity justice that so many of us liberals are committed to fostering? Do they have to go by the boards, too?
These are tough questions for tough times.
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