London Review of Books Reviews “Against Passion”

London Review of Books Reviews "Against Passion"London Review of Books reviews “Against Passion” (by James Meek). What is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class.

 Identity politics hurting Democrats

 Lilla argues that the pursuit of identity politics by liberal graduates, brainwashed by their teachers into a self-centered world-view that filters all issues through their own bespoke set of oppressions, has crippled the Democrats, distracting them from the struggle for institutional power at county, state and congressional level. For Lilla, the Democrats’ failure to win elections isn’t a consequence of bad candidates, or fake news, or Russia, or the Democratic establishment’s chumminess with the billionaire class, or people thinking too many immigrants are coming in and too many jobs are going out. The reason is that liberals haven’t established an ‘imaginative, hopeful vision’ of citizenship all Americans can believe in. Instead they have scattered, spending themselves in the hermetic purity of causes.

Great movements for justice in America’s past centered around “We”

Lilla portrays America’s colleges (he is professor of humanities at Columbia University) as dark, suspicious places where debate has been smothered by political correctness and use of the pronoun ‘we’ is anathematized. The great movements for justice in America’s past, in civil rights and gay rights and feminism, he says, worked through political institutions to right wrongs. They sought equality in citizenship. Those who joined them wanted to be part of things, to have the same opportunities and freedoms as straight white men.

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London Review of Books Reviews “Against Passion”

But during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular identity, whether related to gender, or sexual orientation, or ethnicity, or body type, or disability, or chronic medical condition:

What’s extraordinary – and appalling – about the past four decades of our history is that our politics have been dominated by two ideologies that encourage and even celebrate the unmaking of citizens. On the right, an ideology that questions the existence of a common good and denies our obligation to help fellow citizens, through government action if necessary. On the left, an ideology institutionalised in colleges and universities that fetishises our individual and group attachments, applauds self-absorption, and casts a shadow of suspicion over any invocation of a universal democratic we.​＊

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  • BUY The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla
    Harper, 160 pp, £19.00, August, ISBN 978 0 06 269743 1
  • BUY The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla
    NYRB, 166 pp, £9.99, September 2016, ISBN 978 1 59017 902 4

 

 

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