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

good morning everyone I'm Joanne Myers director of public affairs programs and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to welcome you to our first breakfast of the new program year our speaker is Mark Lilla professor of humanities at Columbia University as well as a prize winning SaaS for the New York Review of Books and other publications worldwide today he will be discussing the once and future liberal after identity politics this book is based on an op-ed article that appeared in The New York Times shortly after the 2016 election this piece argued that quote the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressive narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self defined groups and quote as to be expected professor Lilla was applauded by some readers for being so vocal while denounced by others this essay ignited a firestorm of controversy with more than 1.5 million views the piece was the number one ranked political opinion essay of 2016 that appeared in the New York Times we begin this new season at a tumultuous political moment with election behind us in a new president in the White House the u.s. finds itself increasingly divided along lines of race ethnicity gender religion and sexual identity countless demagogues stand ready to exploit those differences their purpose to disunite and disrupt us while there are many ways to view the world ways to agree ways to disagree one of the many lessons of the 2016 presidential election is that using identity as an appeal for other people to vote for your size has left many Americans fighting one another rather than working together to build a better society a better country while Professor Lilla focuses attention on the failure of American liberalism one could argue that the criticism levied against the Democratic Party could be directed against political parties in general that is self-absorption and investing in neural social movements rather than focusing on the basic values and principles that we all share where the idea of ethics is central to thought in action while divisions in our society are real there's always an opportunity to achieve the common good alexis de tocqueville the 19th century french diplomat who identified strengths in the American experiment wrote in the first volume of democracy in America that the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation but rather in her ability to repair her faults the big question is how to proceed from here how should we think about the future about what we owe each other our country in the world to begin a new conversation please join me in welcoming our guest the very thoughtful Marc thank you well you did such a good job of summarizing the book I think I'll just take questions this actually is the I've been interviewed a lot about this book and about the original article that's the first time I'm sort of presenting so this is my first time so be gentle with me if you would the book really has is as two booklets in it it's a great book bargain there is one book in there that is very partisan and I write as a centrist liberal speaking to other liberals and progressives and I don't presume that that includes you and I want to make clear that I'm not assuming that that's all good thinking people we share the same politics but I want you to know that that it's meant for a certain audience it meant to move a certain audience though others are there are things I think have interest for everyone but that part is an argument or that partisan booklet rests upon a historical more detached and historical account of how we came to this pass in this country and I think by taking a little historical a little distance and speaking about the history I think there are implications for what going on in democracy around the world and maybe in the question period we'll be able to talk more about that there is I think a crisis of democratic citizenship in all advanced democracies right now and you see a degradation of the sense of what it is to be a citizen and not only what one's rights are but especially what one's duties are and so looking at the American case I think provides a window into this larger phenomenon so let me go over the partisan argument which I first laid out in in rough form in an article which Joanne just mentioned which I wrote in two afternoons and created this enormous stir a little bit like Louisa May Alcott would you know in visiting Abraham Lincoln who said so you're the little woman who started this great war so the the response was extraordinary not only here in the states but also abroad and it got me to think that often you think that something you've written as an article would be a great book and it turns out to be a great article and not a great book but I thought it was important to expand on this and especially respond to the outrage that the article caused and which has continued in the response to this book so I wrote in response to the Trump election but I wanted to argue that its significance was not just limited to the election itself and that the caught the causes of not only the loss but the phenomenon of Trump himself needed to be searched much further back that the election was more than about Hillary Clinton it was about more than mr. Comey it was about more than the Russians that the defeat of the Democratic Party and the retreat of liberalism in this country has been going on for thirty years thirty to forty years and just to throw some numbers at you during the Obama years the Democratic Party lost between 900 and 1,000 seats in state legislatures in this country at this moment Republicans control two-thirds of all state legislatures they control two-thirds of all governorships and they control 24 states outright Democrats control 7 and if Republicans win one or two more state legislatures they could if they wanted to call a constitutional convention that's important and that message needs to be heard that there are parts of the country where it's simply a no-go zone for Democrats and for liberalism and nothing no demographic changes are going to change that picture it's a fantasy to think that because we may soon become a minority a majority minority country that somehow that means that this is gonna be a liberal or democratic country the data shows that as people become better off they tend to become more conservative as they get older as well and especially in economic matters as they do better as they do better economically and as you probably know Donald Trump won about thirty percent of the Latino vote and Romney had one more so there's no demographic fix for this Democrats liberals need to understand how we lost our grip on the American imagine why is it that were unable to project an image of the kind of country that we want to build together a vision that would draw people together where they would see themselves in the message and fill them with hope about building something together well there's several reasons I think why dis proximate reasons why the Democratic Party at this moment is unable to offer such a vision the first is that ever since 1972 and the nomination of George McGovern there we've been in a different universe in the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party used to have its roots in the white working-class of black and black voters and the party itself was sort of the muscle of the party were union officials and state and local officials who had automatic seats to Democratic conventions with the reforms of 1972 that was changed to things became more important than building up that base and that connective tissue one was movement politics and the other was presidential campaigns and so the Democratic Party now is driven mainly by people in the campaigns and people who are committed especially to particular movements now social movements have done a lot on this country it was a period in our history from the mid 50s I would say up until about 1980 where the real action in American politics was in social movements not only social movements for things like the environment and human rights but also social movements for various identity groups but ever since 1980 the ground has shifted and all and the rules of the game I think have shifted and I'll talk about that in a second but during that period group identity movement movements tied to group identity became increasingly important and in the past 20 years there's been a shift from group identity as a focus for building a Democrat Democratic coalition in the way that Jesse Jackson talked about a rainbow coalition the idea was that you would have various people and you had people in different groups but they would come together for some sort of common purpose with an understanding that the idea was to incorporate citizens of every group into the great demographic Emma Craddock we but over the past twenty years or so the shift is even then intellectually and you've seen the universities but even out there in the social movements a shift from group thinking about the group to thinking about personal identity identity understood now not as some result of a history that is for example there is no such thing as race rather there's a history that has produced a distinction of races and then around that things have grown but something happened in our society more generally where we became fascinated and fixated on our personal identities and identity now understood as a little homunculus a little person that lives inside of us the ghost in the machine so people will talk about their identities as if it's this little thing locked within my identity is not doing too well today it's got a cold or I'm discovering other parts of my identity and that was a shift and what's important about that I mean many things are important but is that there was a shift from groups that are involved in politics to the care of the self and one's own identity and one's feeling about who one is that shows up not only in our politics but in our culture everywhere and I don't have to elaborate on that you know that so well the third thing that happened is that as there was a shift from group to personal identity there also was a shift from focus on politics and winning elections to evangelism that the rhetoric of identity in this country has become that of the great evangelical movements of the past few centuries the fact that the word woke is being employed all the time is a dead giveaway that comes from the Great Awakenings how do you get woke you get woke by recognizing your sins falling on your knees confessing your sins being taken to the River Jordan and being dipped into it and finding a new life and so that is very you know a very American way of conceiving one's spiritual life one's psychological life this idea that you need a conversion and a kind of moral fanaticism that comes naturally to us I you know first I'd one day a historian is gonna have to sort of uncover how it happened that Europeans for example ever since the 18th century have thought of Americans as pragmatic people you know the people just care about what works when in fact we are the most fanatical least practical people on earth we love nothing better than to join a moral cause to denounce people put scarlet letters on them and pat ourselves on the back from world pure we think of politics in moral terms or moral but but we become moralistic and there's a difference between being moralistic and moral just as there's a difference between having an obsession with washing your hands off all the time and actually being clean and so this so this evangelical sort of fanaticism about identity that's been with us over the past decades for some reason since 2014 is just taken over our media and taken over much of our politics and among the problems with that is that when you're on an evangelical crusade with a social movement the first thing that matters is purity not victory they're keeping you apron clean getting your position right making sure everyone's speaking the same way and not using any words that ought not be used becomes more important than actually seizing power and the result has been that liberals the Democratic Party have become incapable of protecting the very people they say they want to help in these groups at the moment we have a constitutional right women have a constitutional right to have an abortion if there are large parts of the country where the right to abortion is being curtailed and there are places where you simply cannot get them and doctors take their lives into their own hands if they try to provide them in state after state voting rights for African Americans are being chipped away subtly not so subtly by gerrymandering and even jiggling around the hours that poles are allowed to be open that makes it hard for people who work late and say to go and to vote so all sort of and then there are cities that have passed legislation for gay rights and for dealing with trans under people and transgender children but in red states where the state government is Republican those laws have been overturned so politics and the need to exercise power needs to be paramount in the minds of American liberals and at the moment it is not it has become more important to speak truth to power than to seize power to defend the truth and it's that situation that frustrated me and got me to write the article and then the book and at the end of the book I talk about some things we might do or begin to do what it would mean sort of lay out what it would mean to reorient ourselves and so I suggest that we need to turn back and get back in touch with our basic principles as Liberal Democrats which I think are solidarity and equal protection under the law appeal to citizens as citizens and to help people in different groups see that the principles that we stand for address their problems there's a there that the problem of for example small towns former former formerly manufacturing towns that no longer have jobs and families have the problems we know the cities are shuttered windows are broken and on the out of Democratic solidarity we need to help our fellow citizens their citizens helping citizens similarly if a black motorist is being stopped all the time by the cops and sees those lights flashing in the rearview mirror we need to protect that person and we do it on the same principle on the basis of solidarity so if we can convince people of the principles then people who have different identities have different problems can see themselves reflected in that and in the party and hopefully we can build a coal it a build a party and a base that is is more cemented by this attachment to principle than two particular identities and the party needs to reach out to every state you cannot have a to coast strategy and expect to protect the people that you say you want to protect ok well that's sort of a precis of the polemical article argument but italy it rests on a history on a historical argument and I'll just lay that out very briefly how much time do I have ok good I argue in the book that you can divide up the past century of American political history back to the theories into two dispensations I call them dispensations as a theological term call one the roosevelt dispensation and the other the reagan dispensation and the roosevelt dispensation lasted from the New Deal 1930s down until 1980 and in this dispensation for the first time in our in our history I think they're developed a modern ideology that was democratic ideology that was based on the notion that government canons should be active at the national level and at the local levels for the public good that we were not a minimal state and that the failure of Republicans to face the two major challenges of the time fighting fascism abroad and fighting the depression at home opened up a new era when there was a new language for politics and a vision of what the American promise was and the watchwords of this era where solidarity opportunity and public duty and the thinking was that there are people in this country who were not fully enfranchised as citizens because of their poverty because of other disadvantages and that people needed to be incorporated around as citizens and what's interesting about political dispensations is when they happen they set the terms of political debate so that even the opposite party has to work within it and so you recall that it was Richard Nixon who was the first to propose a guaranteed minimal income in this country and national health insurance why because the expectations of the public were such that these are things we care about and Reagan wanted to steal the Nixon wanted to steal the Democratic Thunder provide a Republican version of it similarly during the Reagan dispensation which followed it was Bill Clinton who said we're going to end welfare as we know it and Barack Obama said the government can't solve all our problems so there's a dispensation that determines that sets the terms of debate after the failures of the Roosevelt dispensation and all the things we know about Vietnam Watergate and so on Reagan is elected and to my mind a new dispensation began and a different picture of what the country was not a nation of citizens engaged in a common project to help each other through government but rather a picture of the country is essentially an agglomeration of individuals individuals who live in their families engage in business are members of churches but there was no room in this picture for active citizenship as a way of people helping each other through government action and so there was an image of a new city on the hill that Reagan spoke about but it was not a political city the argument was that Americans American society flourishes best when people are left to their own devices and when the economy is allowed to grow and government and government no longer is the problem you recall that Reagan said over and over again that government is not the solution government is a problem a bad government not tyrannical government not particular programs but government itself and this radical anti political message became the basis of the Republican Party and it became increasingly radical over the years in in ways that bring and I think would not have recognized and but you can see the essence of it you know every Jesus has his own st. Paul and Reagan's st. Paul I think someone who radicalizes the doctrine is Grover Norquist who said about 10 years ago my ideal citizen is the self-employed homeschooling IRA owning guy with a concealed carry permit because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything that's some picture of what it is to be an American and it couldn't be more different from the picture that was aspirationally put forward in the roosevelt dispensation what happened to liberalism during the reagan dispensation well you will he might have thought that in the face of a challenge to political action as such as legitimate that liberals might have provided a political vision of the country to contrast with the anti political one in the reagan years that there would have been an effort to learn from past mistakes adapt the message to what the kind of country we were we are and reassert the importance of common political action and in filling people with hope and a mission to create something together instead the Democratic Party and American liberals fell into the rhetoric and the divisive rhetoric of identity politics first as I said focusing on groups and later on the idea of this unique self and so politics in the Reagan dispensation increasingly and especially in in recent years has become about self-expression politics is self-expression rather than persuasion or building something together and this identity ideology governs much of our educational system and if anyone becomes a liberal liberal citizen that person becomes it increasingly in college because we are a party of educated elites along with certain minorities and public employees and so there was an abdication on the liberal side an abdication of from the struggle for the American imagination the American political imagination and as a society as we've become more obsessed with our personal identities the notion of identity has even changed I talked about it in the book as the Facebook model of identity it's not that history has determined that I am considered black or white or Asian or a woman or Gabe but rather the self is this very precious things it's a mix of all these things I get to decide what my identity is and so I can like and and unlike things on my Facebook page they look today I see myself as bi sexual and I'm focusing on you know my ethnic background but then I might get more interested in other sorts of identities I was interviewed by a very interesting and intelligent woman who does a LGBT podcast in San Francisco and just before she has she interviewed me she had a little segment at the beginning she said you know much going on now this was after Charlottesville and all the rest she said you know I'm learning that I have more and more facets to my identity and that's what's giving me involved in all these issues as if this identity is this protein thing and that the only way you get engaged with politics is through your identity so the conception of politics is that's an extension of the self rather than it overcoming of itself in order to join in a common enterprise and so students are encouraged to be increasingly self-absorbed petulant and this has produced the campus Follies that are all too familiar to you and as this has happened as people across the country who are not part of our Blessed elite look at us they see us as a detached elite contemptuous of the rest of the country self-absorbed and not sharing any values with them so where are we now well where we are I think after these two periods after this past 30 years is that we are we have just seen the death of two ideologies that were about the unmaking of citizens on the right an ideology that denied the existence of a common good that pictured the country as a campsite where you just pull in your RV and you plug into the electric and the water and it the Wi-Fi password and you then you head off on the road right that's the kind of country we are and so you have a denial of citizenship there and then you have an ideology that tells young people that you are not equal citizens trying to do something together but rather essentially you are individuals with unique identities and to the extent that you get involved in politics that has to be in in 2016 we saw that both of these ideologies are exhausted and have been rejected because I do see the election of Donald Trump as the end of the Reagan dispensation Trump is not to the right of Reagan he's not to the left of Reagan he didn't come from right or left he came from below and well I mean this I mean this in many senses but he came from below and also in the populist sense of coming up and the opportunity was there because neither party and neither ideological camp was able to offer a vision of what we can to do what we can do together as a country we are officially now of visionless society now for the really bad news we're not alone there is now I think a crisis of democratic citizenship in all advanced democracies different reasons for that in different places but there are reason there are causes there that are shared and conditions that are can be found in countries democratic countries around the world because these two ideologies is individualistic ideologies of the right here of the brain ISM and the left identity individualism actually reflects something about our social reality in fact we are more independent than we were back in the 1930s or the 1940s or 50s we are more independent because of Technology because of economics because of changes in society changes in the family the decline of authority of parents technology that allows us to choose what our sexuality is going to be even our sexual organs and more individualistic ideologically on top of that we live in a period which a sociologist once called liquid modernity that things are changing so rapidly that that that conditions in society are changing more rapidly than social structures that help us make sense of the changes economic change and technological change in particular and so people feel lost they don't know how they connect to each other and we are finding in country after country that we are democracies with fewer and fewer Democratic citizens that I think is at the bottom of a lot of instability in liberal democracies today and certainly at the bottom of this rise of populism which is in in in certain respects I think a kind of understandable surge of a desire to belong and to be something as a nation so what's to be done that's a very American question it's very hard to write a book in this country because you have to finish with a five-point plan it's going to make everything right you tie it with a bow and you put it under the Christmas tree and if you don't do that it's like with our movies both the movie goer and the reader is is very unhappy and I would have liked to end the book without the last chapter but I'm not allowed to do that but but nonetheless there are things we can start to think about and one is that no matter how atomized we become as a society the fact is there is always a common good there are problems that are common to us the environment international relations obviously health education the economy so we do have common problems what we is a way of articulating that and articulating away which we can meet them together in a way that's consistent with the fact that we live in a more atomized Society without denying that and having a romantic notion of going back to the New Deal that's the challenge to articulate this vision because the problem with politics is that you go into it with the country you have the country politicians themselves they can raise money so when you ask people to think about our common needs which with the government they just see that as well suggesting we tie ourselves into the politicians who don't have that kind of common vision that you're talking about yeah well I'm not sure that was ever much of a golden age in which politicians were not self-interested that seems to be a constant in human affairs just reading any book of Roman history and and certainly throughout our history politicians have been self-interested right however when you have an ideology that people find attractive or a vision that you can offer the country that will get people to vote for you then politicians will go home on to it because it will help them get elected right so the thing to be explained is not why we have politicians who are self-interested they always are but why there isn't being articulated on either side of the ideological divide a vision of what we can do together that pictures is not just as an agglomeration of elementary particles zipping around in space but as a country and so we don't need to it's in the question is not the words you should be disappointed with our political leaders for that on top of everything else but rather to ask ourselves what's missing and that requires intellectual labor and it requires certainly education Peter Russell thank you as I listen to you I wonder if there are other mediating institutions other than political parties that we should look to or we could expect to find this kind of common purpose and I'll just throw out two it's part of the question one is community colleges distinct from some parts of higher education and the second is the military and should we have the universal draft right oh I thought I guess we use the word differently mediating institutions I was thinking more of churches community groups and so on you recall that George Bush was elected on the basis of what he called the compassionate conservative which is kind of a cynic version of republicanism in which he was saying there are certain things that we need to provide but we need to do it in a Republican way and we can do that by engaging all these mediating institutions these local things that exist in civil society and not only use them to give us information but also to deliver services and that picture that had a progressive picture of what the Republican Party was and could do died at 9/11 yeah there are Republicans now who want to focus right on this those so-called reform Mekons and in Washington very interesting smart and committed people who want to develop that and they've I are also interested in things like mediating like community colleges and doing things at the local love doing at the local because half of our students go to community colleges right it's it's not just the elite institutions the military on the other hand is an institution that is a political institution and a national institution and not I would say a mediating institution in the way I've usually used use the term and what's fascinating is that it's not the children of Liberal Democrats educated liberal Democrats who go serve in the military right it's the children of Reaganite Republicans who go do it so go figure that out yeah yeah no I mean in principle I've always been forward not only military sort of but national service some sort the problem is we're no longer that Society right and that we are simply too individualistic our expectations are that were to be left alone that we need to develop our careers that if you don't start early and you have to deal with that so one needs to take small steps to engage people in a civic way because I don't think that would trying to hit a home run like that so to speak I don't think would happen and so one has to find small ways to appeal to young people in particular for example Teach for America what liberal parents do is they don't send their kids to the military they send them to things like teach in America which is a kind of civic service so even to talk about different ways in which you can serve that you aren't just asking what your country can do for you but what you can do your country there are small ways to start doing that but you have to begin by talking about us as a country of citizens and not just people with very special cells and that begins in our educational institutions that's why it's crucial and that's why I focus so much on them in the book Helena Finn let's leave the climate debate aside but don't you think that the devastation wrought by these ferocious hurricanes and the forest fires in the northwest would lead people to understand that we are a country that in which all of us are responsible for what happens and that is a counterpoint to this extreme individualism which you describe so accurately thank you you would think you would think right I mean I was I was half tempted you know after the Houston hurricane just to write a piece for the onion which is the one saying publication in our country and and the most realistic you know the least farcical simply saying that it's time to get the government off the back of the people in Houston right now is the time to do it we don't want any government interference in there right getting in the way of all the flood waters and things like that right you would think but you know the human capacity for cognitive dissonance is extraordinary right but as a certain point it has to give you would think right and for example no one seemed to notice that in fact Donald Trump was talking a lot about on the campaign trail what government needed to do for people government needs to protect you in your job as a worker we need to stand behind our workers and when he said that the Republican debates everyone else is looking at their shoes because there was no way of talking about that you know in the Reagan dispensation right even said that we need to get rid of Obamacare but we still need to provide something in these little ways and people know this right so that's why the one thing that makes me a little hopeful is that there's a vacuum there right now and there are crises that we face that are common and it seems to me that whichever party whichever ideological formation manages to develop an articulation of how we can do that together it's citizens that the near future will belong to them hi I'm Christian media mr. mr. Trump is going to address the United Nations tomorrow and for the first time in recent history I'm not looking forward to it as and it's not because I have Democratic sympathies but because I'm I'm an American and an immigrant American and I feel that the vision of the American promise has been violated not just in this country but abroad if be assume that this is not a passing phase what can people of our ideological sympathies do constructively to ensure that that vision is restored to the kind that we all cherish and have appreciated what Americanism is all about yeah well as I said I I think it think it has to begin in the schools and especially in the universities and that's why as I say I focus on that in the book and I'm about to go on a college tour and go into the belly of the beast and because what happened is that our you know the president the ideological climate in our universities is actually a product of a particular moment in our history that has passed that from the late 50s through the seventies movement politics is where it was at and then the Republicans ended up seizing control of our political institutions by focusing on electoral politics and not on moving politics but this idea of movement politics and people being separated into groups than individuals has been preserved as if in amber in our colleges and universities and children young people are socialized in this even though the reality they're trying to reshape is being determined by electoral politics and not by these things and so you know you have a essentially a very conservative faculty class in our states in our universities and colleges conservative in the sense that they're still doing the same thing they were doing in 68 you know and then you know as you know one definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing to expect different results and so there's something geriatric about the ideology in our colleges and universities and that's why it's important to confront that and to confront the educators were there and try to convince them that they are unmaking citizens they are not preparing their students for actually changing things politically and to try to reach the students themselves I see nowhere else to begin Ron Berenbaum let's go back to electoral politics I'm glad you mentioned that in your last comment because it's good opening for this question if you talk about the dispensation years the New Deal and Reagan and so on arguably maybe not even arguably a great many more congressional districts were competitive and so that in a sense the country was up for grabs from time to time in terms of different kinds of Appeal that is not really the case today I think about 90% of the constituencies are where the worst fear a Republican or Democrat can have is to be challenged by someone with more extreme views second the disproportional disproportionality of the electoral college where I think every member has probably failed his or her SAT scores but anyway that's another issue but the the point being that we have had two of the last four elections or something like that where the winner of the popular vote has not won the presidency you go back to the 1880s in the coast reconstruction years in the United States you get a similar similar situation perhaps there's an answer there but the bottom line is I'm not sure that it makes that much difference when we have this debate because each particular representative in each consists of rye and they are not involved in these kinds of discussions no no no it's very good point and look it took us 35 years to get where we are right now and it will take just as long to get back and the only thing you can do is buy you can do is to try to change hearts and minds and try to get out there and argue and convince people and you don't do that by hectoring them you reach out to people by trying to find common ground you know the government you know the people who are engaged in identity politics or idea of what it is to do electoral politics is a knock on the door and say we have an election coming up on from the Democratic Party I'd love to talk to you but first I need to give you a ticket for your racism I need to give you a ticket for your privilege and I need to give you a ticket for your homophobia hope to see one Tuesday yeah so given this you know what's been called the big sort that is that people are more and more separated into ideological camps gerrymandering has also made for single party districts but the biggest thing is that people are moving to parts of the country where there are just people who have shared their views in fact there's a website somebody just sent me a link there's a conservative real estate company in Texas that will help you relocate from a liberal part of the country and move to Texas so you can bring up your family properly people are making money off of this the big sort yeah well that requires a very very big change and there's no easy fix for that it's not just political it's ideological its intellectual it means starting at the bottom and re explaining to people what we are as a country I was a depressing question but you're absolutely right Susan gitelson you mentioned that there are other countries in the world would you like to briefly compare what's going on in England and France and and so forth you see similar trends yeah well I do and I would say Eastern Europe is it's an even a better laboratory for this and let me start with the Eastern Europe because what happened after 1989 is that the countries of Eastern Europe God democratic institutions but without democratic citizens that you produce citizens over generations citizens are made they are not born and so without a deep sense of what it requires to be a citizen at the first you know when the wins of problems you know flow in people tend to hit the reset button and go back to you know they're the kind of political thinking they had earlier and it's not so long ago 1989 and so the rise of populism there has a lot to do with the fact that there that citizens were never made add to that the fact that with the internet with a consumer society that people in Eastern Europe as well are living you know sort of daily lives much like our own and in situations that do not bring them together into common purposes in the way that societies used to before this sort of you know new individualism that came along with our new economic and technological world in front in in France Germany in England I think the issue there is that there is a mismatch between the party structures and the cleavages in society so that you know you have a healthy party system normally when it's clear what one party stands for and it represents one part of society and the other one not but the parties that exist in the countries you just mentioned are the legacy of a century century and a half from 1945 a party's the distinctions between which no longer represent the distinctions or cleavages in this society and so you have these legacy parties that are full of elites who talk to each other but they don't have a basis in the rest of society and at the same time you have a more individualistic society you don't have unions that bring people together you don't have a labor movement you know and so therefore for instance in the northeast of France people went from voting for the Communist Party to voting for the National Front yeah because what they what they're experiencing what they think they're experiencing is no longer represented in these parties and the same is true as Britain that's how you get Briggs it Germany's an interesting case because you have the problem with the legacy parties and the western part of the eastern part you have the problem you have in Eastern Europe which is that you never made citizens yeah and so there's a crisis of citizenship an ideological crisis where it's very hard to articulate what we share and what makes us a nation in ways that address the real cleavages that are there in society thank you professor thanks for the comment on the national service it didn't make me appreciate how much of a home run this would be in absence of that do you think engagement with organized religion and leveraging their culture of service is something that the secular liberals have to do right if you can't hit a homerun hit a single bit least there's guys on base right right well that in fact was the original reagan version right and and so and so people sort of the enlightened part of the republican intellectual establishment their notion was look we're not going to just get rid of everything in the welfare state but rather we're going to engage all of these groups and moral education in civic education will take place in the home and in our churches that's where the moral fiber of a country is developed not through federal dictates right what they did not count on was the change in American religion that in fact American religion has been affected by the same individualism and self-centeredness that is affecting every other aspect of our societies the success gospel is being preached in the Protestant churches is all about how God's grace to you is manifested in your success out in the world these are no longer gospel suddenly the Bible is not about charity you people ties to their churches but they don't want to pay taxes which is just a democratic tithe people no longer even go to the same churches of it not the you know the less and let's go to its old institutionalized churches they go to newer ones that come and go and they engage in what's called grazing that one Sunday they feel like they want to hear the message at one church and the next weekend they feel like maybe they'd like to hear the other one people go to multiple churches where they're hearing a kind of sort of paper-thin psychological boosterism and success gospel just after you watch Fareed Zakaria on CNN on Sunday stick around for an hour and watch and Joel Osteen if you don't know Joel Osteen is that's our problem he is the most important TV evangelist in America if you haven't watched him just as if you're not watching Fox News at least once a week you can't talk about this country you need to see these things and be in touch with them so the Bible has changed charity like tipping is now being left at the discretion of the consumer and that's why we can't rely on them either [Applause]

Channel: Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Views: 15,485

Keywords: Mark Lilla, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, The Once and Future Liberal, After Identity Politics, liberal, conservative, idenity politics, Democrat, Republican, Democratic Party, Republican Party, 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, Donald Trump, President Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, liberalism

Id: QVXbw7gSgpk

Length: 58min 27sec (3507 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017