About the author
American historian of ideas (b. 1956), professor of humanities at Columbia University and a longtime essayist on political and intellectual history. A self-described liberal, Lilla provoked sharp debate with his post-2016 argument that identity politics had become a liability for the American left.
Synopsis
Lilla traces a shift from a 'Roosevelt' liberalism of shared citizenship and common projects to a 'Reagan' individualism and, on the left, to an identity-based politics of self-expression. He argues this turn is electorally self-defeating and civically corrosive, and calls for a renewed liberalism organized around the duties and solidarities of common citizenship rather than the celebration of difference.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workLilla argues that a liberalism fragmented into competing identity groups has lost the language of shared citizenship it needs to build majorities and govern.
Lilla's claim is strategic and civic at once: that emphasizing what divides citizens, however justified, costs the left both elections and a shared 'we.' Whether common citizenship is a unifying ideal or a way of silencing particular injustices is exactly what his critics contest.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with defenders of identity politics (from the Combahee River Collective tradition through Coates) who argue that 'universal' citizenship has historically masked exclusion, and that naming group-specific injustice is not a distraction from solidarity but a precondition for it.
Reading note
Brief and pointed. Read it as a left-liberal counterpart to McWhorter's critique and against defenders of identity politics, so the debate has all its sides.
Best paired with
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me; Francis Fukuyama, Identity.