In 2016 Columbia professor and historian, Mark Lilla, published an opinion piece in The New York Times. The piece quickly became the “most-read” article of the year and sparked an instant controversy and conversation regarding what he termed “our age of identity liberalism”. In the body of the piece Lilla argued that one of the hardest lessons of the 2016 presidential election was the fact that a fixation on “diversity” and “identity politics” had culminated in the irreparable fracturing and weakening of the Democratic Left; writing “national politics in healthy periods is not about “difference” it is about commonality” and “embracing difference . . . proves disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age”.
The piece met with predictable applause and outcry. What remains relatively remarkable, however, is the extent to which Lilla’s narrative has been adopted as a truism. Indeed, arguably the most acrimonious component of the left’s post-election self-vivisection has been the debate about the role of identity politics played in the run up to the election. How, then, to make sense of the interminable shelf-life of Lilla’s commentary? How should we position and analyze Lilla’s comments as a themselves a product of the current political climate, rather than simply arbitrarily and neutrally commenting upon it?
