A Columbia professor named Mark Lilla has been getting a lot of air time blaming "identity politics" for the Democrats' losses in 2016. In a New York Times editorial called "The End of Identity Liberalism," Lilla writes that celebrating our differences has been "disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics." And given the open-ended opportunity in an NPR interview to name liberal groups the Democrats appealed to that were "counterproductive," Lilla responds, "the whole issue of bathrooms and gender."
LILLA: Is that really the issue we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.
INSKEEP: I'm just imagining some of your fellow liberals being rather angry at you saying such a thing.
LILLA: Well, those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats.
Man, if only Hillary hadn't given "The bathroom speech.” (No, you didn't miss it—Hillary's bathroom speech never happened.)
First of all, let me just say: leave it to an intellectual who talks about his year on sabbatical in Europe deliberately consuming only European news to lose touch with how change happens in America. “Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life,” he writes. Wow. And here I thought it was generations of activists and lawyers and millions of kitchen table conversations that made the difference.
Anyway, while Lilla's been buzzing around in his thought clouds, the rest of us have been mucking around in our real worlds. It's difficult not to just do a point/counterpoint on Lilla's entire misguided essay—not as a defense of identity politics so much as the fact that his argument is incoherent. (Diversity is great, he declares! But talking about the differing experiences of blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ individuals, and women has ruined politics.) But since Lilla is primarily attempting to make a political argument, let’s return to his contention that transgender issues and same-sex marriage (which he mentions later in the NPR interview) are great examples of where Democrats lost America this cycle.
As I facetiously noted above, Hillary never gave a bathroom speech. She gave shout outs to gay and transgender Americans in various speeches, as did Barack Obama and Bill Clinton before her. But if anything, same-sex marriage and LGBT issues vastly receded in prominence in 2016 as compared to 2012, when Obama's evolution on same-sex marriage became a national television event, and 2008, when the issues became a centerpiece of the battle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination. For example, I did two interviews with Obama in the ‘08 cycle for The Advocate—aspects of both were picked up widely by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, the Associated Press, Politico, and others. The issues were hot. That type of mainstream urgency on the Democratic side this cycle seemed to be lacking even though Clinton did grant interviews to the The Advocate and the Washington Blade. If anything, Donald Trump made perhaps the biggest news when he stuttered out the acronym “L-G-B-T-Q” several times. Mainstreamers even said his pro-gay stances “set him apart” from the rest of the GOP field (even though the reality of his governing will clearly be at odds with that assertion).
As for Democrats, far from queer rights being a pillar of Clinton's campaign, the few times she made national headlines on them was when she slighted the community. Most notably, her 2014 explanation to NPR's Terry Gross of her evolution on marriage equality and her assertion earlier this year that the Reagans started a "national conversation" on AIDS were both stumbles—gaffes—not a championing of issues. Clinton did mention transgender individuals in several tweets and their fight for “equal rights and dignity,” but she seemed to avoid bathroom talk specifically, even as Bernie Sanders took it up.
In short, Lilla's fixation on LGBTQ issues demonstrates that he has no idea how they actually arose this election cycle (or in others, for that matter). It's also a perfect example of how his essay is an object lesson in victim blaming, among other things.
He’s correct that we've been having a national conversation about who gets to use public restrooms, but that's not because Democrats have spearheaded the discussion. It's because Republicans have been using transgender issues as a wedge to turn back progress on LGBTQ freedoms. And when you're under attack as a people, you can either cower or fight. The movement is fighting these efforts state by state, measure by measure, just like it slowly but surely waged a fierce battle against the rash of anti-gay marriage amendments of 2004 and 2006.
In fact, North Carolina became ground zero for the bathroom wars this cycle because GOP lawmakers passed an abhorrent law that both targeted transgender bathroom use and prohibited local jurisdictions from passing LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections. This wasn't some Democratic scheme to play identity politics, it was a GOP assault, plain and simple. So Lilla’s contention that gay and transgender issues are the culprits is a suggestion that LGBTQ advocates shouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to both get and preserve basic protections. (I encourage Lilla to spend one week without using any public restrooms and then get back to us about whether it’s an urgent need.)
Now, somehow, an issue that appears to have provided Democrats with one of their only bright spots of the election—North Carolina's gubernatorial seat—is responsible for Hillary Clinton's and Democratic losses. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory likely lost his re-election bid in a state Trump won handily for no other reason than the fact that he signed the discriminatory HB2 law that made North Carolina a pariah for businesses. Yet, Lilla is pegging the very same issue—one that Clinton spent very little time emphasizing—for Democratic losses on election night. Color me baffled by this illogical leap with absolutely no factual underpinnings. The national bathroom conversation has been a function of self-defense, not Democratic overreach, beginning with the GOP assault on transgender people in Houston last year. Lilla clearly believes the victims of this assault should just take it silently for the betterment of the Democratic party and democracy itself. Thanks, but no.
At the end of his NYT column, Lilla waxes nostalgic about FDR's 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, recalling "Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear." That was his capper to an entire essay charging that any minority group who has actually demanded those freedoms for themselves has helped distort liberalism and ruin the Democratic party. Essentially, all of those freedoms were aspirational ideals in theory, but now that they've been made actionable by the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and others, they've been sullied so badly that they've backfired.
I do not mean to saddle all intellectuals with the shortcomings of Lilla's argument. But his critique, in particular, reeks of someone who doesn't seem to understand how change happens. You can't declare diversity "beautiful" in one breath and then ask that eclectic array of voices to just shut up in the next. That prescription of invisibility is nothing but a recipe for the status quo in which the needs of minorities go unmet precisely because no one knows what they are. There's a reason AIDS activists in the '80s and '90s adopted the slogan "Silence = Death." It's because silence of the kind Lilla is prescribing so we can all just get along literally killed a generation of gay men while the federal government looked the other way.
Part of the bargain of diversity is that everyone gets to speak up even if—and especially because—they disagree. Lilla claims to cherish diversity while telling everyone to just stop talking about it.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of “Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.”