Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times just after the election that it was not class at all that lay at the root of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. He blamed her defeat on a Left-friendly version of identity politics. Trump’s rise was not about class-inflected racism or “whitelash,” he insisted, but served instead to expose liberals’ obsessive need to grant anyone who wanted it membership in a disadvantaged group: black, gay, female, and others. He argued that the Democrats, by their reductionist tendency, had caused “white, rural, religious Americans” to
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Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times just after the election that it was not class at all that lay at the root of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. He blamed her defeat on a Left-friendly version of identity politics. Trump’s rise was not about class-inflected racism or “whitelash,” he insisted, but served instead to expose liberals’ obsessive need to grant anyone who wanted it membership in a disadvantaged group: black, gay, female, and others. He argued that the Democrats, by their reductionist tendency, had caused “white, rural, religious Americans” to see themselves as ignored, even threatened. The liberal agenda was fueling a hostility toward political correctness; therefore, if the Democratic Party wished to do better, it would have to recover a “pre-identity” politics and reemphasize Americans’ shared values.
