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In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla offers an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Although there have been Democrats in the White House, and some notable policy achievements, for nearly forty years the vision that Ronald Reagan offered - small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism - has remained the country's dominant political ideology. And the Democratic Party has offered no convincing competing vision in response. Instead, as Lilla argues, American liberalism fell under the spell of identity politics, with disastrous consequences. Driven originally by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the left has now unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than in party politics. Lilla goes to show how the left's identity-focused individualism insidiously conspired with the amoral economic individiualism of the Reaganite right to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated. Now they have an opportunity to reset. The left is motivated, and the Republican Party, led by an unpredictable demagogue, is in ideological disarray. To seize this opportunity, LIlla insists, liberals must concentrate their efforts on recapturing our institutions by winning elections. The time for hectoring is over. It is time to reach out and start convincing people from every walk of life and in every region of the country that liberals will stand up for them. We must appeal to - but also help to rebuild - a sense of common feeling among Americans, and a sense of duty to one another. A fiercely argued, no-nonsense book, enlivened by Lilla's acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times. -- from dust jacket.… (more)
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Liberalism is a child of the Enlightenment, and the core value on which that was based is skepticism. Lila lacks skepticism regarding his own political values and beliefs. He lives with the religious fervor that the Democrats are the only true democrats. It’s totally fair to disagree with conservatives and Republicans, and Trump and his voters. But labeling them all as evil and unprincipled while claiming you believe in solidarity, makes you a preachy hypocrite.
This is a super-brief political-social history of the "how we got to here," starting roughly in 1960, but with references to the 40's and 50's, the 1770's, etc. combined with an indictment
I'm sick and tired of identity politics, of politics as the personal, of politics as religion; of the reduction of all and everything to power and nothing more; of much or even all that Lilla is sick and tired (and angry and worried) about. But... I wonder if he gives identity liberalism and its practitioners/proponents too short shrift? He nods in the direction -multiple times- of there being real issues of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ, etc. But he fails to connect those nods to what he is criticizing.
Much as we need to understand the real issues that are driving "Trump voters" are not all/only about racism, xenophobia, and general revanchism, that there are issues of equality, poverty, criminal justice, "vision" and the like that are completely open to "liberal" solutions, we also need to understand the issues that, to take an example Lilla calls out, BLM are driving forward and/or fueled by. Lilla fails to do that.
But maybe that isn't his role. He's in his sixties, after all, and "social justice warriors" are, broadly speaking, somewhere between their teens and their 30's. Maybe people from that "generation" (edges of X, Y, and Z) need to step up. I think that is happening, at least in some amount. I dunno, we'll see...
In any case, 3.5 stars for part of an important critique and not-quite counterproposal.