“Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States. His unexpected win has finally electrified American liberals and leftists. They are busily planning what they term a ‘resistance’ to what he represents.” That may sound like a mission statement from a progressive activist organization, written the day after Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was defeated in the 2024 presidential election, but it is not.
It was the introduction to Mark Lilla’s book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, which came out the year after Republican nominee Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016.
Clinton detailed her defeat in a memoir simply titled What Happened.
Clinton stated she made a series of mistakes and confessed that she did not fully understand the American electorate. Following Harris’ 2024 loss to Trump, Democrats were once again wondering what happened, as to why their candidate came up short against the same Republican who had lost to the Biden/Harris ticket in 2020.
Evidently, the Democrats disregarded Lilla’s book, as Lilla clarified the issues the Democrats are currently grappling with.
The book begins with this 1985 quote from Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy. “We must see the distinction between being a party that cares about labor and being a labor party. Being a party that cares about women is not the same as being the women’s party. And we can and must be the party that values minorities without becoming a minority party. We are citizens first.”
Since 1985, the United States has gotten more diverse, with the Democratic Party using identity politics to win elections. The Democratic Party evolved into a coalition of minorities and White women, outnumbering White, heterosexual, Christian men in voter turnout. The Democratic Party was a coalition against conservatism, republicanism, capitalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on, but it was inevitable that each faction in the coalition would prioritize its identity group or ideological faction over their American citizenship.
The 2016 presidential campaign slogans emphasized the Democratic Party’s inward emphasis, while the Republican Party conveyed a sense of American unity. Clinton had three slogans. 1). Hillary for America—insisting that her ideological faction was best for America. 2). Fighting for us—but “us” referred to the democratic coalition she represented, not all Americans. 3). I’m with her—which prioritizes a specific identity. Trump campaigned around two slogans: “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Trump copied and reworded Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan “Country First” as well as Democrat John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign slogan “Let America be America again.”
Trump’s slogans inadvertently countered identity politics by appealing to civic nationalism.
However, Trump’s rhetoric was divisive. As a result, every faction of the Democratic Party saw Trump as the embodiment of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and fascism. They ridiculed the notion of civic nationalism, claiming that it was counterproductive in a nation whose diversity continues to increase, bolstering their devotion to identity politics. (The term “identity politics” was coined in 1977 by a Black feminist socialist group in the following statement: We realize the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us … This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.)
In contrast, Lilla’s book argued it was the Democratic Party’s obsession with identity politics that was counterproductive because the “politics of identity,” as Lilla put it, lost sight of what we share as citizens and what binds us as a nation.
Lilla compared identity politics to retreating into caves carved out for identity groups on the side of a once-great mountain. Lilla pointed to the Democratic Party’s webpage as proof of this retreat.
First, he observed that the Republican webpage prominently showcases a document named ‘Principles for American Renewal,’ a declaration of beliefs on eleven distinct broad political themes. The list begins with the Constitution (“We should preserve, value, and honor it”) and ends with immigration (“We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the laws, and boosts our economy”).
Lilla emphasized that the Democrats’ homepage does not contain such a document.
Instead, if one scrolled to the bottom, they would discover a list of links titled ‘People.’ Each link takes you to a page that focuses on a certain identity group, such as women, Hispanics, “ethnic Americans,” the LGBT community, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders.
There were seventeen identity groupings and seventeen different messages.
The problem here is that each identity group has turned inward rather than turning outward to the larger world. The politics of identity have rendered each group incapable of considering the common good and devising practical measures to safeguard it. Every advance in identity consciousness has signaled a retreat in liberal political consciousness, which is essential for envisioning America’s future.
Lilla asserted, “There can be no liberal politics without a sense of we—of who we are as citizens and what we owe one another. If Democrats ever expect to reclaim America’s imagination and become a dominant force in the country, beating Republicans at pleasing the vanity of the fictional Joe Sixpack will not suffice. They must provide a picture of our shared future based on one thing that all Americans, regardless of background, have in common. That is citizenship. We must learn to talk to individuals as citizens and to frame our pleas, especially those to benefit specific groups, in terms of universally accepted ideals. Ours must become civic liberalism.”
Lilla continued by underlining that citizens are not born but created. Sometimes historical forces do the work, but most of the time parents and educators must do the hard work of raising citizens. Only until we have citizens can we hope that they will become liberal. Only when we have liberal citizens can we hope to steer the country in the right direction. If you want to resist Donald Trump and everything he stands for, start here.
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