The Once and Future Liberal

Mark Lilla

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062697462
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

From one of the most internationally admired political thinkers, a controversial polemic on the failures of identity politics and what comes next for the left — in America and beyond.

Following the shocking results of the US election of 2016, public intellectuals across the globe offered theories and explanations, but few were met with such vitriol, panic, and debate as Mark Lilla's. The Once and Future Liberal is a passionate plea to liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of the future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.

Driven by a sincere desire to protect society's most vulnerable, the left has unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than party politics. Identity-focused individualism has insidiously conspired with amoral economic individualism to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good.

Now is the time to re-build a sense of common feeling and purpose, and a sense of duty to one another. A fiercely argued, important book, enlivened by acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our times.

III
Politics

Politics is slow, steady drilling through hard boards.

—Max Weber

The first effort, then, should be to state a vision.

—“The Port Huron Statement” (1962)

Reset

And so concludes our tale of anti-politics and pseudo-politics in the long age of Reagan. Now what can liberals learn from it?

The most important lesson is this: that for two generations America has been without a political vision of its destiny. There is no conservative one; there is no liberal one. There are just two tired individualistic ideologies intrinsically incapable of discerning the common good and drawing the country together to secure it under present circumstances. We are governed by parties that no longer know what they want in a large sense, only what they don’t want in a small sense. Republicans don’t want the programs and reforms that are the legacy of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Democrats don’t want Republicans to cut them. But what are the parties’ ultimate aims, whatever the size and shape of government? What are they fundamentally after? What sort of image of the future governs their actions? They seem no longer to know. So the public can hardly be expected to. We find ourselves in a post-vision America.

It is difficult to discuss political vision without sounding faintly ridiculous. It is not something you can shop for. You can’t grow it, mine it, or hunt for it. There are no laboratories for discovering it, no candidates with résumés lined up to be interviewed for the position. Political vision emerges of its own accord out of the timely encounter of a new social reality, ideas that capture this reality, and leaders capable of linking idea and reality in the public mind so that people feel the connection. (Understanding it is less important.) The advent of leaders blessed with that gift, like Roosevelt and JFK and Reagan, is as impossible to predict as the return of the Messiah. All we can do is prepare.

How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy is already wracked with scandals. But the real scandal is that he is president at all. Yes, a few extra votes in key states might have changed the electoral college outcome. But a Democratic victory would not have masked the fact that it was a third force that surged from below to fill a vacuum and defeat both parties. There proved to be an untapped yearning to hear someone address America’s new challenges in a different key, someone willing to champion change and say without equivocation that America can be great. Trump offered an authoritarian snarl and an ever-changing string of bizarre spontaneous “positions,” not a political vision. But his demagogic skills were sufficient to move millions to applaud his race baiting, his misogyny, his hardly veiled threats of violence, his contempt for the press, and his contempt for the law.

The effects can already be felt: with each passing day our public life is getting uglier. So it is encouraging to see how quickly liberals have organized to resist Trump. But resistance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.

The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic dramas over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self. The frustrating truth is that we have no political vision to offer the nation, and we are thinking and speaking and acting in ways guaranteed to prevent one from emerging.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it whatever hopes were still invested in Communism, a group of reform-minded Italian leftists started a lively political magazine titled Reset. (It has since morphed into a lively website.) The title was well chosen and reflected the editors’ conviction that a certain idea of the left, a certain tradition of thought and action, had been defeated in no uncertain terms. And so it was time to rethink fundamental assumptions, question old dogmas, break bad habits, and puncture taboos.

With the election of Donald Trump, American liberalism has reached its Reset moment. It is time to reacquaint ourselves with the demands, the possibilities, and the constraints of democratic politics in our system. As a small contribution to this effort, I conclude with some lessons that can be drawn from the history and analysis I have offered.

The first three have to do with priorities: the priority of institutional over movement politics; the priority of democratic persuasion over aimless self-expression; and the priority of citizenship over group or personal identity. The fourth has to do with the urgent need for civic education in an increasingly individualistic and atomized nation. Others might draw different lessons from my story, or add their own, or question the story itself. That’s fine. The point is 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. Our common goal must be to put ourselves in a position to develop an inspiring, optimistic vision of what America is and what it can become through liberal political action.

The Marcher and the Mayor

During the Roosevelt Dispensation the two grand themes of American liberalism were justice and solidarity. And liberals understood what should still be obvious today, which is that securing those things depends ultimately on acquiring and holding power in established democratic institutions—executive offices, legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies. As a corollary it followed that, given our federalized system, winning elections across the country was the first order of political business.

Identity liberals, though, have never absorbed this lesson. They remain under the spell of movement politics. The role of social movements in American history, while important, has been seriously inflated by left-leaning activists and historians, though for an understandable reason: between the 1950s and the 1980s the country was indeed transformed by organized efforts to secure the rights of African-Americans, women, and gay Americans. There is, though, a natural tendency for anyone who lives through such a transformation to begin reading the past in light of it, and then to project an imagined trend outward into the future. The result is Whiggish history. Many if not most of the first-year students I find in my college classes have been taught American history in this way or have picked it up from films and television documentaries. The spine, so to speak, of their skeleton knowledge of American history is a narrative that moves smoothly from abolition and the women’s suffrage movements in the nineteenth century, to the labor movements of the early twentieth century, and ends with the more recent movements I’ve mentioned. It seems to have left them with the strong impression that a historical process has been unfolding and is destined to continue into the future.

The problem with this narrative is that it gives a false impression of what the main focal point of American democratic politics is and always has been: government. The framers of our Constitution arranged things so that political action would have to be filtered through institutions that require consultation and compromise, and would depend on a system of frequent elections, checks and balances, the autonomy of the civil service, civilian control of the military, the writing of laws and regulations, and their impartial enforcement. And all this would have to be done at three levels of government. This meant that being politically successful would require a lot of tedious, incremental work, which for the framers was a recommendation. They wanted to spare the United States the fate of Europe, which they saw as wracked for centuries by the arbitrary rule of tyrants, court intrigues, coups d’état, wars of religion, and republican factionalism. The stuff of poetry, but stifling to the human spirit. How much better, they thought, to canalize political energy into institutions, while making them as transparent and participatory as possible.

Romantics chafe at this undramatic conception of politics. They prefer to think of it as a zero-sum confrontation—the People against Power, or Civilization against the Mob. And it’s not hard to see why. What could be more stirring than history seen as a series of revolutions, counterrevolutions, restorations, manifestos, mass marches, dissidents, police repression, general strikes, arrests, jailbreaks, anarchist bombings, and assassinations? And what could be more dreary than the history of parties and public administration and treaties? There was a strong anti-liberal streak in European political thinking running from the French Revolution until quite recently, on the left and right, and it was inspired as much by aesthetic disdain for democratic dullness as by moral conviction.

When Marxian socialism came to the United States after the 1848 revolutions, it brought along in its baggage this European suspicion of liberal-democratic procedures. Eventually that was dispelled and socialist organizations began participating in electoral politics. But they continued to think of themselves more as the vanguard of a movement than as voices in a democratic chorus. And their preferred political tactics remained the mass demonstration and the strike—rather than, say, winning elections for county commissioner. The significance of these groups in American politics peaked during the Great Depression and then faded. But their movement ideal retained its grip on the left, and in the 1960s it captured the imagination of liberals as well. There had been emancipatory movements before, against slavery, for women’s rights, for workers’ protection. They did not question the legitimacy of the American system; they just wanted it to live up to its principles and respect its procedures. And they worked with parties and through institutions to achieve their ends. But as the 1970s flowed into the 1980s, movement politics began to be seen by many liberals as an alternative rather than a supplement to institutional politics, and by some as being more legitimate. That’s when what we now call the social justice warrior was born, a social type with quixotic features whose self-image depends on being unstained by compromise and above trafficking in mere interests.

Yet it is an iron law in democracies that anything achieved through movement politics can be undone through institutional politics. The reverse is not the case. The movements that reshaped our country over the last half century did much good, especially in changing, as we say, hearts and minds. That is perhaps the most important thing any movement does, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. believed. But over the long term they are incapable of achieving concrete political ends on their own. They need system politicians and public officials sympathetic to movement aims but willing to engage in the slow, patient work of campaigning for office, drawing up legislation, making trades to get it passed, and then overseeing bureaucracies to see that it is enforced. Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed.

And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One m...