I picked this book up after hearing an interview with the author (Mark Lilla) on Sam Harris’ podcast.
It is a very short read. I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, is still confused about Donald Trump’s win, and has deep misgivings about how divisive identity politics have taken center stage. In fact, the author is not the first to see a connection between the election and the identity politics trend.
I have struggled to define my own personal set of coherent political principles among all the noise. I look at my own side and it seems to be the source of anti-vaccine hysterics, irrational GMO bans, endless online hectoring and moralizing, and inconsistent views on consent, religion, immigration, local development and other issues.
I look at the other side and see it as even more incoherent.
I find clear voices here and there in certain blogs, podcasts and books, but they don’t seem to have a message that can fit on a bumper sticker or in a Tweet. (The Flying Spaghetti Monster will not change the mind of a religionist.)
This book does not reconcile any of this. It is just a short reflection on what got us here, to a Trump presidency.
Below are a few passages I highlighted:
“As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same.”
“That one now hears the word woke everywhere is a giveaway that spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is the demand. Relentless speech surveillance, the protection of virgin ears, the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones, the banning of preachers of unclean ideas—all these campus identity follies have their precedents in American revivalist religion.”
“Surges of fevered fanaticism come over us, all sense of proportion is lost, and everything seems of an unbearable moral urgency.”
“What replaces argument, then, is taboo.”
“And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.”
“In these courses she also discovers a surprising and heartening fact: that although she may come from a comfortable, middle-class background, her identity confers on her the status of one of history’s victims.”
“This is a classic ploy familiar to revolutionary leaders throughout history: the failure of the revolution proves the need to radicalize it.”
“A whole scholastic vocabulary has been developed to express these notions: fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more. Anyone familiar with medieval scholastic disputes over the mystery of the Holy Trinity—the original identity problem—will feel right at home.”
My one gripe with the book is the latter part, where the author reflects nostalgically on the 1960s activism of his Baby Boomer contemporaries. He seems to look at this time as a period of true engagement, where liberals turned movement politics into party politics and then into governance.
But I view Boomers less charitably, as a generation that used political power to saddle the younger generation with a variety of debts (student debt, national debt, etc.) and drove into insolvency the two giant entitlement programs after guaranteeing the benefits for themselves. As the book describes, they engaged energetically in movement politics in the 1960s… and then voted Reagan into office in a landslide.
Whatever comes next will be an improvement on identity politics and on the Boomer mistakes. Voters are beginning to recognize that their fears and prejudices being manipulated and inflamed by highly motivated entities such as news organizations, advocacy groups, foreign governments and politicians. With the tools of the Internet they are learning to better hone their “bullshit detectors.” They are ready for progress based on reason, science and humanism. I just wish there was a major political party to represent them.
pseudoisaac 