The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

Author:Mark Lilla [Lilla, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2017-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

A Primer in Pseudo-Politics

Flash forward to 1980. Ronald Reagan has been elected and Republican activists are setting out on the road to spread the new individualist gospel of small government and to campaign in out-of-the-way county, state, and congressional elections. Also on the road, though taking a different exit off the interstate, you see former New Left activists in rusting, multicolored VW buses. Having failed to overturn capitalism and the military-industrial complex, they are heading for college towns all over America, where they hope to practice a very different sort of politics within educational institutions. Both groups were successful and both left their mark on the country.

The retreat of the post-1960s left was strategic. Already in 1962 the authors of the Port Huron Statement argued that, given the power of the Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party and the quiescence of the labor movement, “we believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.” Universities were no longer isolated preserves of learning. They had become central to American economic life, serving as conduits and accrediting institutions for post-industrial occupations, and to political life, through research and the formation of party elites, eventually displacing unions in both spheres. The SDS authors made the case that a New Left should first try to form itself within the university, where they were free to argue among themselves and work out a more ambitious political strategy, recruiting followers along the way. The ultimate point, though, was to enter the wider world, looking “outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.”

But as hopes for a radical transformation of American life faded, ambitions shrank. Many who returned to campus invested their energies in making their sleepy college towns into morally pure, socially progressive, and environmentally self-sustaining communities. If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere. Children were taken out of public schools to become test subjects in alternative educational schemes. Interminable city council meetings ended in rancor over the most radical position to take on recycling. Sister cities were sought out in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East (though not in the conservative rural communities nearby that one passed on the way to the airport). And indeed these campus towns still do stand out from the rest of America and are very pleasant places to live, though they have lost much of their utopian allure. Most have become meccas of a new consumerist culture for the highly educated, surrounded by techie office parks and increasingly expensive homes. They are places where you can visit a bookshop, see a foreign movie, pick up vitamins and candles, have a decent meal followed by an espresso, and perhaps attend a workshop and have your conscience cleaned. A thoroughly bourgeois setting without a trace of the demos, apart from the homeless men and women who flock there and whose job is to keep it real for the residents.

That’s the comic side of the story. The other side—heroic or tragic, depending on your politics—concerns

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