Identifying the Problem

I was in the car, listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I do this rarely, mainly because I'm not enough of a Lefty to find the show all that interesting. David Remnick may have been an excellent staff writer and he might now be a standout editor, but he seems to have the understanding that Liberal politics is self-evidently correct, and thus have difficulty with the idea that a worldview may be both rational and at odds with liberal orthodoxy. An interview that they recently re-aired with Mark Lilla drove this point home for me. Mr. Lilla made what I think is a very good point:

There’s a difference between speaking truth to power and seizing power to defend the truth. And those require very different things, right?

Mr. Remnick seemed very reluctant to say, "Right," and then proceed from there. Instead, he seemed to be surprised that anyone felt that dialing back the focus on specific group identity was even helpful, let alone necessary.

In my own understanding, the issue that often comes up with identity politics is that it demands that people who do not share a given identity understand their obligations to the people who do. And when those perceived obligations are not fulfilled, they are simply repeated, louder and more stridently. As I took his points, Mr. Lilla was saying that if you're going to ask (let alone demand) that someone do something for you that they're disinclined to do, you're better off approaching them with "Here is what's in it for you, as well as us," rather than "You owe this to us." This strikes me as perfectly logical; after all, had people been inclined to act on such an obligation, they'd have done so once it had been pointed out to them. If they are instead recalcitrant, shouting louder will not change that.

To be sure, Mr. Lilla missed some opportunities to really make his case. At one point, Mr. Remnick asked:

But [the legalization of same-sex marriage] also happened because you had people in the streets shouting, “We’re here. We’re queer.” Which is something that, in the book, you say will only get you a pat on the head. Didn’t that help get power, too? Didn’t Stonewall help get power, the civil-rights movement help get power?

Mr. Lilla pointed out how these things were focused on a particular group. Fair enough. But I think that I would have liked to seen him really engage with the question and ask: "Whose mind was changed by "people in the streets shouting, 'We're here. We're queer'?" That is to say: Who saw people marching in the streets, and because they'd seen those people marching, changed their voting patterns? A related question could be: Is it then true, that without, specifically, the public protests and marches of the Civil-Rights era and the LGBT movement, that power could not have been attained? Personally, I felt that Mr. Remnick missed some of what Mr. Lilla was attempting to convey. There is footage from the Civil-Rights movement that, as near as I can tell, moved people to say: This should not be happening to Americans; rather than: This should not be happening to Black people.

And I believe that Mr. Lilla's point was that this broader focus is what drives success. Now, to be sure, that's a debatable point. But it can't be debated until it's understood.