Making Sense with Sam Harris - #99 — What Happened to Liberalism?

Episode Date: September 28, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Mark Lilla about the fate of political liberalism in the United States, the emergence of a new identity politics, the role of class in American society, wealth inequality, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Mark Lilla. Mark is a professor at Columbia University and a prize-winning essayist for the New York Review of Books and many other publications. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, and his latest book, which is what we discuss, is The Once and Future Liberal. And Mark and I talk about essentially the nature

and history of liberalism in the United States and how identity politics has changed it. We talk about the ways in which identity politics may or may not be legitimate. We talk about the role of class in American society, wealth inequality. And we disagree about a few things. We agree about others. But it was a very enjoyable conversation and one that many of us who care about the future of politics have been having more and more. So now, without further delay, I bring you Mark Lilla. I am here with Mark Lilla. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to be here.

So we have a mutual friend in Andrew Sullivan. I think that was our connection. And Andrew is someone who I have sparred with to our mutual amusement and benefit. And he's the great example for me of someone who you can disagree stridently with and still become friends. This is really the what I aspire to have all disagreements become, but it doesn't usually work out that way. You have the two of you have been going at each other for quite a while, haven't you? Yeah, yeah. So you've written this wonderful new book, and it's wonderful also in part because it's so short. It really is one of these books that you can pick up and finish, no matter what your bandwidth problems are. And the title is The Once and Future Liberal. And it's really this elegy for a real liberal politics that we seem to have lost. And in its place, we have this

horror show of identity politics. So before we get into this, perhaps you can just summarize your background as a writer and political scientist and journalist. How do you describe what you have done and focused on as a writer? Well, the stuff that's relevant to this book, I think, in my biography is I grew up in a place called Macomb County, Michigan, which is a blue-collar county bordering on Detroit. Eminem grew up on 10-mile road. I grew up on 12 mile road. So Macomb County used to be in the early 60s, the most democratic, lopsidedly democratic county in a suburban county in America. By 1972, George Wallace won the Michigan primary and the county went for Nixon. And ever since, political scientists have been studying it and pollsters

have been studying it as the home of Reagan Democrats. And I saw this change happen in my life. I saw it happen with my neighbors. I saw it happen within my own family, extended family, not my close family. lost the affection and the enthusiasm of what used to be their base, their white working class base, and what might bring us back on course. So I got a, just a, I started at Wayne State University, commuting, putting myself through school, got a scholarship to Michigan and went off to the Kennedy School to study public policy. And when I was done, I was offered a job on the public interest by my professor, Daniel Bell. And the public interest was known as the first neoconservative magazine. But what neoconservative meant back in the 70s is that you were, as Irving Crystal liked to put it, a liberal who had been

mugged by reality. And what that meant was that you were still a liberal, but you realized that a lot of the solutions that, or rather programs that we thought would solve social problems didn't do so well, and some of them were counterproductive. didn't do so well, and some of them were counterproductive. I realized that no one was paying attention to economic growth and also not paying attention to the white working class. So it was people in the working class more generally. And so it was that the party had been sort of captured by the activist class. So people who had been involved with, you know, the, I forget what it was called, the Coalition for Democratic Majorities. So people who had been involved with, you know, the, I forget what it was called, the Coalition for Democratic Majorities. So Bill Clinton came out of that. Pat Moynihan was part

of that. He was on our board. And so being a neoconservative meant being a kind of reform liberal, while liberalism sort of took off in its own direction after McGovern. And so ever since I've watched these various, you know, the lines between right and left and liberal and conservative move around, I don't feel I've moved that much. I've moved some, but essentially I'm still the kind of pre-McGovern liberal that I was back then. And so, you know, I've been writing in the New York Review books about American politics, the American right. And then in my more scholarly work, I've been writing about attacks, modern attacks on the Enlightenment. Well, let's define a few terms here, because there's these key words that you use in the book. So let's start with liberal. How do you

define liberal? What does it mean? And perhaps you could disentangle it from, if it can be disentangled, from the word left. Well, I think we have to talk about those two terms in the American context. The word liberal means something else in England. It means something very different on the continent, Else in England, it means something very different on the continent, where it essentially means just radical free market views. American liberalism was always, I think, founded on or developed around two fundamental principles from the progressives through the New Deal. And the first was social solidarity, that we stuck together, that the Hoover Republicans were happy to let people fall off by the side of the road. And the other is that there should be equal protection under the law.

And so those two principles were the principles that liberals professed. They didn't always live up to those principles when it came to practice. And then I think what was added onto that was liberal anti-communism and no illusions about Marxism and especially communism as both in theory and in practice. communism as both in theory and in practice. And so there was a kind of liberal anti-communist consensus, certainly that continued from the New Deal down into the 1980s. And the left, I suppose you could say, includes some of those liberals, but there are people on the left who, while they accept some of those two principles of solidarity and equal protection, have always had a soft spot, if not for communism, then for Marxism, for movement politics, for radical movements seeking some sort of imaginary change, in my view. And so, you know, on the left, I would say there were the sober people who were the liberals and then everyone else.

And what about the term progressive? Well, the word progressive, you know, originally was sort of the foundation of liberalism, you know, but progressivism was also very patriotic. It's very interesting now to return to the writings of Teddy Roosevelt and to read his attacks on monopoly and his fight for protecting American workers, which was wrapped up with a kind of optimism about the country and the experiment that it is, of optimism about the country and the experiment that it is, and a defense of America as a nation and as one nation, without denying the, you know, the kind of social diversity that we have. He believed in a kind of unifying citizenship. And people who call themselves progressive,

you know, have held on to the economic message, but they've lost that sense of the nation, and that's what I'm trying to bring back in in my book. Yeah, you describe a time when liberals could salute the flag without embarrassment, and I must say that is a time before my time, or certainly before any time I can remember. time before my time, or certainly before any time I can remember, liberalism, at least in my experience, has always been associated with a kind of cynical distance from anything that could be called patriotism without any kind of self-consciousness. And I'm wondering when that happened. I mean, is this what Watergate in Vietnam did to liberalism? and when that happened? I mean, is this what Watergate and Vietnam did to liberalism?

Well, I think it begins with the civil rights movement and the recognition that Democrats, in particular, had allowed Jim Crow to continue and flourish in the South. And that seemed to be a violation of what the country stood for and what liberalism seemed to stand for. And then, of course, Watergate, I think, was less important than Vietnam, which really broke the contract between the American government and the American people. You know, I saw this quite intimately where I grew up. Where I grew up, a lot of kids served in Vietnam. And I had a paper route, and in the afternoons, I'd drive by at dusk, and I would see these stars in the window. Do you know what a star in the window used to be? No. Well, it used to be that if you had a child in the military, that the army or whatever the service was would send you a little flag with a star on it.

And what people would do, they'd hang them in the window with a kind of Christmas light around it. So you could see that they had someone there. And the flags came in two colors. There was one color if your child was alive, and there was another one if he or she had died there. And so you could just drive by, you know, I drove by on my bike and I would just see all these lights and the two colors and know when it was that someone lost somebody. And I was an altar boy. I served at funerals of families that lost their sons. And, you know, those people felt on the one hand betrayed by the government because it was clear that their sons were dying to no purpose. But they had even deeper anger at the elite class of journalists and writers and activists and kids on campus who were spitting on the flag that they had just used to drape the coffins of their sons.

And I saw that happen before my eyes. And so it both disaffected these people from other liberals and also from the government itself and made them, cut them loose in a way for whoever came along. And Nixon came along promising to end the war. Reagan came along promising to make everything better and on and on. And now Trump. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about anger at the elites eventually, because that is at the center of so much of what's going on in our politics now, and really on both the left and the right. Before we press on, what is identity politics? left and the right. Before we press on, what is identity politics?

Well, I think the meaning of identity politics has changed. So I need to distinguish the kind of identity politics that began in the 50s and what we're living with now. You know, with the civil rights movement, you had a movement that was focused on one identity group, and then you had the women's movement that did the same and the early gay rights movement. And those identity movements, in a sense, weren't about identity. They were about groups. But they weren't about so much about the inner experience of an identity. Rather, they were about making America fulfill its promise to make everyone an equal citizen. And so those movements were really about enfranchisement, that you say we're citizens and we're not full citizens. And so that is very consistent, to my mind, with the older liberal tradition.

But then what happened in the 80s and on is that people who were wrapped up in the country, but rather became a kind of way of reflecting on difference. And a lot of social movements broke apart on the basis of identity resentments. for all kinds of reasons. But one of them is that African Americans complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which is true. Women complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which was true. Lesbians complained that feminists were normalizing heterosexuality, which was also true. And so the United Front of the left broke down over these identity issues. And then what happened is that there was a retreat to the universities. And so people on the left really abandoned electoral politics in these groups and instead developed this idea that all social change happens through social movements that are tied to identity. And you end up with gender theory, you end up with race theory, you end up with feminist theory, and you end up now with maybe three generations

of young people, liberal elites, who've been brought up in the university to think about politics in terms of group and their own individual identities, rather than of the common good and a message that might bind us together as a nation. You have a nice passage here on what happened to the new left. I'm quoting you. The new left was torn apart by all the intellectual and personal dynamics that plague every left, I'm quoting you, were complaining both about the sexism of radical black men and the implicit racism of white feminists, who themselves were being criticized by lesbians for presuming the naturalness of the heterosexual family. What all these groups wanted from politics was more than social justice and an end to the war, though they did want that. They also wanted there to be no space between what they felt inside and what they did out in the world. They wanted to feel at one

with the political movements that mirrored how they understood and defined themselves as individuals. And I love that. I mean, that picture of fragmentation seems exactly what has happened. And you have this, you know, what has been described as the oppression Olympics, where there's an economy of victimhood where certain identities trump others. And if you are a black lesbian, you're somewhere near the apex of grievance. And therefore, more or less anything you say is undeniable by someone who doesn't share your identity. If you're a black, lesbian, Muslim, well then, better yet. So I've been paying a little attention to the reception that your book has gotten. And so I noticed, for instance, the review in the New York Times, which had to be annoying to you. It was annoying to me. I hadn't even read your book,

and it was obvious that that review was silly and unfair. And then I also saw the interview you did with David Remnick in The New Yorker, and he seemed, again, desperate to shore up some concept of identity politics. What has been your experience thus far in making your case post-publication? And why do you think people are not readily seeing what is wrong with identity politics, both politically, as a matter of just political pragmatics, but also intellectually and morally? Well, I think one of the reasons, well, there are two reasons, I think. One of the reasons is that identity politics has really become an evangelical project and or it has all the all the markings of American revivalist religion. You know, the fact that we use the word woke, which comes from, you know, which comes from conversion, from conversion, the great awakenings in this country. And especially over the past three, four years, for some reason, we've gotten into a panic about a lot of these issues that are real issues, but they've been around for a long time.

And suddenly, there's developed a hypersensitivity about certain things. And there are reasons for that. developed a hypersensitivity about certain things. And there are reasons for that. You know, what's happened with African-Americans and the police and various other things, Charlottesville, you know, there are reasons for that. But it's also become dogmatic in the sense that it's not that people want you to agree with them or even just to work with you. They want you to believe, they want you to accept their version of American history, their critique of American society, their particular critique of the police. And while you may agree with some of those things, what you look for in

politics is kind of common ground, what you can agree on, like police mistreatment of African-American motorists, for example. And you can work on that together. So, you know, they become people who won't take yes for an answer, I think, often. But the other thing is I have felt in the reaction to the book that I put my finger on a real nerve or a sore spot. And that is that I keep saying in interviews, as I say in the book, that protecting minority groups is what we do as liberals. That's what we're about. You cannot protect anyone if you don't hold institutional power. Institutional power in this country is not just held in the presidency.

It's held in the courts, Congress, and especially at the state and local level. If you are not competitive at the state and local level or the congressional level, you cannot protect anybody. Now, the only way to be successful at those levels is to have a message that reaches beyond your identity group. Therefore, if you want to actually protect African-Americans, gays and lesbians just walking down the street holding hands, women who are being paid less than men. You need to hold power. And you have to find a new message, not one based on yourself and your feelings and your identity, but a message about certain principles that you hold and that inform your political commitments, but that other people

can also hold. And so these big themes of solidarity and equal protection, I think, just as principles, most Americans hold to if you just ask them. But then once you get down to cases, then you're going to have disagreements so you can persuade people. But if you say to someone, you must understand me, but you cannot understand me because of who you are, you completely hermetically sealed yourself and you're unable to persuade anyone else. And so your politics become expressive. And you fall in love with noble defeats. You become a bully too. I mean, that is what is left for you to do

by way of persuasion because a reason has failed there is to just bully people with, in this case, the threat of being called a racist. It's interesting. What you just said strikes me as a fairly complete recapitulation of what I recall Hillary Clinton saying when

confronted by some Black Lives Matter people at one of her events. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned it briefly in the book. And, you know, she, I forget if it was at that time or not, but they were just, they weren't letting her speak. You know, they had adopted these Mao Mao tactics of breaking into meetings, not letting people speak. were it not for the practical politician LBJ, who was willing to cut deals, cut deals with Dixiecrats and to make the civil rights legislation happen, the Great Society programs. Movements alone cannot achieve anything. And institutional politics can always trump what movements have achieved. I mean, look what's happening at the state and local government in this country. The Democratic Party and feminist groups fought for a constitutional right for a woman to get an abortion. That was achieved. But in large parts

of this country, a woman de facto cannot get an abortion. That is not because we haven't marched enough. It isn't because we haven't had enough court cases. It's because Democrats and liberals do not hold power at the state and local level where in subtle and not so subtle ways, it's become impossible for people to run clinics where a woman can get an abortion. And they also feel under a threat of violence. And the only way to change that, the only way to make that right actual is to go out to the South and the Southwest and find a way to convince those people to come over to your side. There's no other way. You got to get out of your bubble. You've got to get out from behind your laptop. And you've got to go and meet people and talk to them. Just to reach your ends, not because you need to genuflect to the white working class or

Joe Sixpack as if he's some sort of special figure to achieve what you want to achieve. You've got to get out there. Now, you have argued that, I think you say this in your book, perhaps this was just an interview, but I believe you've argued that there's an asymmetry here between the right and the left. There's an identity politics of the right as well, but where identity politics is a losing strategy for liberals, it isn't necessarily a losing strategy on the right. That's right. I mean, you know, it's hard to know what to say about this subject at this moment, because 10 years ago, when researchers would ask white people in surveys, how important is your

white identity? And you feel whites are being discriminated against, you get maybe 5%. important is your white identity and you feel whites are being discriminated against, you get maybe 5%. Now the figures are up over 25%. And why is that? Well, it's not that people have always felt that way. Rather, you know, we have a right-wing media, almost monopoly on news in parts of this country that have been able to play this up. And they've been able to play it up in part because we on the liberal side keep talking about identity. That's not to say that identity politics creates racism. It is to say that it can make it more salient at different moments. And, you know, the rise of this white consciousness, you know, it's tied to all sorts of things, including social changes that have happened in the country, economic changes, you know, the rising, the rise of a black middle class, the fact that,

you know, women are in the workplace and the, and also the growth of a non-working white male population. But so, you know, we're in a funny moment right now, but in this moment, at least, it's certainly clear, and Steve Bannon said this himself, that the more we talk about difference and engage in sort of campus opera buffa, the more we help recruit people to the other side to say we have an identity too. You know, Breitbart ran an article about my book saying we've been saying this stuff for years and it's been working for us. And Steve Bannon said that in his famous interview with Bob Kuttner that got him fired. He said, keep talking about that issues. It's working for me, man. Just keep talking about them. Yeah. And on one level, it's just, if you're going to practice identity politics,

you shouldn't be surprised when white people eventually practice identity politics of their own. But is it a consequence of the fact that whites are still a majority in the country, that the identity aspect of it doesn't prove to be a liability in the same way? I mean, actually, to give you just a little more material here, I wanted to read another passage which points up, again, I don't know if this is the same asymmetry, but it certainly is an asymmetry. When you talk about how the web pages of the two parties differ, and you talk about on the Republican site at the time you wrote this, there was essentially a white paper titled Principles for American Renewal. It was just a statement of positions

of the party and just a vision for where the party wanted to take the country. And then you said on the Democratic website, there was no such document. Now I'm quoting you. There's no such document to be found on the Democrats homepage. Instead, when you scroll to the bottom of it, you find a list of links titled people. And each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity. Women, Hispanics, quote, ethnic Americans, the LGBT community, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. There are 17 such groups and 17 separate messages. You might think that by some mistake you've landed on the website for the Lebanese government,

not a party with a vision for America's future. I mean, I don't know if that's the same geometry of weakness there, but you can see how that kind of fragmentation, where we means nothing but diverse groups, each of which is solely empowered to attest to its own grievances by virtue of its identity, that's not a moral or a political foundation from which to argue in ways that will attract people from outside your group to form a common cause with you. Yeah. One thing I've learned in talking about the book is that I should have emphasized one thing more that I say, but I needed to put it front and center. And that is that you cannot understand any social problem in America without talking about identity. You can't understand poverty. You cannot understand unemployment. You can't understand incarceration policy if you don't address how these policies affect many of these different groups.

That's absolutely right. And we're more aware of that now, and that's a good thing. But when it comes to addressing those problems and building a common vision for the country that will appeal to people who aren't members of those groups, that's the time to employ a different kind of rhetoric. And so often the response I'm getting from people is, but how can we not talk about identity because identity is important in all these ways? That's true. So when you analyze a problem, you know what your commitments are once you understand the role of identity in this country. know what your commitments are once you understand the role of identity in this country. But in order to follow through and achieve a result out there and not simply express yourself and make yourself heard, politics is not a speech act. Politics requires a common effort and persuasion, not self-expression. And so it requires a kind of double-mindedness,

I would say now, about identity, recognizing it to understand the country, speaking in a different way in order to try to do something about it. I guess I'm going to sound more skeptical of identity than you do, at least in this moment. I hear you arguing that it's politically imprudent to emphasize identity as an opposite matter. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Thank you.