The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, called for an end to ‘identity liberalism’. The American left had ‘slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message,’ he wrote.27 Moreover, if the Democratic standard-bearer insisted on namechecking different groups at her rallies she had better mention everybody, otherwise those left out would feel resentful. Lilla also took issue with the liberal post-mortem on Mrs Clinton’s defeat that laid the blame on a racially charged ‘whitelash’ against multicultural America – a verdict that was at odds with the revealed motivations of many Trump voters. ‘This [post-mortem] is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority,’ wrote Lilla. ‘It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run – which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps.’ As a professor of humanities in Manhattan, Lilla has impeccable liberal credentials. A colleague at Columbia nevertheless wrote a riposte to Lilla’s piece that branded him a white supremacist.28 Yet Lilla was on firm ground. Fascism is based on group rights. Liberal democracy is founded on individual rights.