By HANNA GRISSEL
Earlier this month, Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, published in the New York Times what he might consider a “leftists jab at PC culture.” The piece was titled “The End of Identity Liberalism.”
Lilla writes, “In recent years, American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”
Like many moderate liberals, he finds oppressed people’s pushing for acknowledgment to be a destructive force, working to diminish the values he believes to be operating smoothly for all. Apparently, this is what is preventing liberalism from becoming a unifying force.
The idea is misguided. Even a cursory inspection of the movement’s history proves that liberalism lost its ostensibly unifying ability back when the Democratic Party adopted neoliberal economics. And if we’re being honest, because of liberalism’s insistent lack of inclusivity, the movement has never been as unified as the bourgeois believe.
Liberalism’s loss in the last election is not the fault of radical progressiveness. It is the fault of traditionalists resisting to evolve their beliefs and address the actual issues that American liberalism is losing support across the board.
David French echoed Lilla’s misguidedness in an article in the National Review titled “Identity Politics is Ripping Us Apart,” noting “the ticket to white acceptability in progressive politics is a form of self-loathing: a constant attitude of repentance.” He goes on later to say, “oddly enough, this self-loathing doesn’t diminish the power of the white progressive.”
French is right about self-loathing as a response to one’s discontent. However, he thoroughly misunderstands the response that is necessary upon realizing one’s privilege in the light of progressivism.
This misunderstanding is a reason for stagnancy, one that Audre Lorde explains in her 1981 presentation of “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” She states, “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action,” and it later “becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
In actuality, only recognizing one’s own privileges and prejudices followed by knowledge-seeking and collective action in the fight for equality will produce results.
It is no surprise that traditionalists such as Lilla and French haven’t seen the progression. It’s also quite obvious they see the advent of identity politics to be their enemy because they cannot identify with it.
An interesting notion to say the least, considering they are the same folks that claim progressive politics is narcissistic in nature, a notion that leads me to question what Lilla actually identifies with.
According to his piece, he believes in a traditional “American Liberalism.” He fervidly declared that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms remind him “of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are.”
But while these liberals defend the frameworks of pre-identity liberalism, they hinder the progress of a sustainable and unifying structure being built upon it. As long as leftists continue to feel comfortable idealizing outdated theory, disjointedness in the movement will continue.
In Susan Griffin’s essay “The Way of All Ideology,” she writes, “When a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge. … All that it fails to explain it records as its enemy. Begun as a theory of liberation, it is threatened by new theories of liberation; it builds a prison for the mind.”
In the end, it’s simple: the more inclusive a movement, the more people will be behind it. And as we well know, there’s power in numbers. If we wish for liberalism to truly unify the people, we must not resist change any longer.