A humanities professor at Columbia University in New York City says Donald Trump’s presidential win should signal the end of liberal identity politics.
Speaking with NPR Friday morning, Mark Lilla argued that Mr. Trump’s election victory was due to American voters being “disaffected with the liberal message.”
“Democrats have simply lost the country,” he said. “They have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly educated.
“Ever since Reagan, [Republicans have] been able to capture the message and an understanding — or persuade people of a certain understanding of what the nation is about and what’s good for it,” he added.
Mr. Lilla, author of “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction,” described identity liberalism as “expressive rather than persuasive.”
“It’s about recognition and self-definition,” he said. “It’s narcissistic. It’s isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people. It says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I’ve defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognize me and feel for me. Well, if you’re so different that I’m not able to get into your head and I’m not able to experience or sympathize with what you experience, why should I care?
“To take one example,” he continued, “the whole issue of bathrooms and gender — in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers. Is that really the issue we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It’s that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.”
Mr. Lilla made similar arguments in an op-ed for The New York Times, which prompted another Columbia professor to publicly accuse him of making white supremacy “respectable.”
Katherine Franke, a law professor, wrote an article this week comparing Mr. Lilla to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for rejecting the “whitelash” narrative that racial animus led to Mr. Trump’s election.
“Both men are underwriting the whitening of American nationalism, and the re-centering of white lives as lives that matter most in the U.S.,” she wrote. “Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the more nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable. Again.”
Mr. Lilla said he was “very glad” to read Ms. Franke’s article, “because it showed exactly what I’m talking about.”
“The only response I would have is, I rest my case,” he told NPR.
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