Identity crisis: liberalism needs a broader collective vision to break free of its captivity to the political interests of narrow groups.

• Author: Oppenheimer, Daniel
• Position: The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics - Book review

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

by Mark Lilla

HarperCollins, 160 pp.

In the days after last fall's presidential election, as Democrats and journalists grappled with Donald Trump's unexpected victory, the political theorist and public intellectual Mark Lilla dropped a bomb of an essay in the New York Times. Lilla argued that much of the blame for Trump's election should be assigned to the takeover of American liberalism by the strain known as "identity politics," and to the ways in which that paradigm celebrates cultural and ethnic differences at the expense of a shared American identity.

"National politics in healthy periods is not about 'difference,'" Lilla wrote, "it is about commonality." Hillary Clinton and her party had failed to offer Americans a compelling vision of their shared destiny. Her campaign speech was a series of call-outs to the country's often marginalized constituency groups--African Americans, Latinos, gays, or women--leaving other Americans wondering whether they were included in Clinton's vision. "If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them," Lilla argued. "If you don't, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data showed, was exactly what happened."

Like so many others on the left, Lilla was trying urgently to make sense of what he called "the repugnant outcome" of Trump's election. Who was to blame? Where had we gone wrong? Had we lefties and liberals in fact gone wrong? Or had we simply underestimated the racism and resentment of so many Americans, while overestimating their capacity to make intelligent and humane decisions?

These questions were mostly implicit in Lilla's recent collection The Shipwrecked Mind, which came out two months before the election. But in his new book, The Once and Future Liberal, an expanded version of his Times essay, the answers are in bold--and painted with a very broad brush.

Lilla argues that for much of the twentieth century, Rooseveltian liberalism was a unifying and positive force in American politics and culture. Roosevelt built an expansive coalition that assimilated demands for first-class citizenship from the margins while also speaking to the aspirations and expectations of the more comfortable and whiter middle. Through the vigor of its ideas, the charisma of its leaders, the strength of its institutions, and the scale of its accomplishments, Rooseveltian liberalism also gave a depth and specific...