Lilla in his new book issues an important, passionate and highly critical wake-up call to liberals who, he believes, are stuck in the mud. In its early stages, his argument is illuminating but then veers seriously off course before ending up focusing on the right goal ... What Lilla isn’t seeing is that we come to electoral politics in many different ways. Some people come to it through a desire for public service, bypassing social movements altogether. Others join social movements, get stuck in identity silos and ignore elections. This book is for them. But many others — like myself — were drawn to politics by participating in social movements ... Lilla’s message to liberals is timely and welcome. But he might better advise them: Go on your march. Join the marches of other groups, too. And continue to protest, above all. Then come home and organize that fundraiser for your favorite candidate for governor, the state legislature or Congress.

[Lilla] says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda 'emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.' Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today’s campus left ... All too often Lilla opts for attitude over substance. Though he calls for liberals to adopt 'a coldly realistic view of how we live now,' he spends much of his book jeering from afar at millennial 'social justice warriors,' whose 'resentful, disuniting rhetoric' supposedly destroyed a once-great liberal tradition ... Lilla’s labels can be slippery; he often conflates liberals, leftists and Democrats. By contrast he takes a rather narrow view of 'identity politics' as something practiced mainly by left-wing movements and not, say, by the Republican Party ... The Once and Future Liberal is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition.

Mr. Lilla’s analysis seems to me quite untrue. Even granting its premise, though, his book fails to address certain basic questions. Are we really supposed to believe today’s culture of narcissism has its roots in the Reagan revolution rather than in the counterculture of the 1960s? If Reaganism really made no room for national solidarity, why are those parts of the country most sympathetic to Reaganism, namely the Deep South and South Atlantic states, also the most patriotic—as evidenced by, say, the number of military enlistments? ... The larger problem with Mr. Lilla’s analysis is that he thinks politics drives culture. The truth is the reverse ... To renounce identity politics would require liberals to loosen their hold on our cultural institutions, especially the universities. Somehow I think they’ll keep dancing with the one that brung ’em.

Lilla rightly blames academia for converting universities into snowflaked sanctuaries, where deviation from political correctness constitutes sin punishable by banishment ... Ultimately, Lilla’s prescriptions are not a surefire remedy for a Democratic restoration. The party’s woes with white voters without a college degree go beyond just identity liberalism ... The Once and Future Liberal is a dead-on diagnosis of what ails the Democrats. The open question, however, is who will ultimately be listening to Lilla.

The Once and Future Liberal is an expansion on an op-ed piece that Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, wrote for the New York Times 10 days after Trump’s unlikely victory in the November election ...is only 160 pages long, buttressing the original argument with historical context. Lilla divides modern American politics into two 'dispensations,' as he calls them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government and Ronald Reagan’s little government ... Some of Lilla’s detractors have made him out to be a more articulate Rush Limbaugh. Anyone making this charge has either failed to read his work or to engage it with the intellectual dignity it demands ... In the America that Lilla envisions, economic security is the balm for all people, from all backgrounds.

In his book, he does acknowledge the benefits of the civil rights movement...He is also correct that the left needs to focus a lot more attention on winning elections, especially at state and local levels, and he properly criticizes progressives for their eagerness to condemn their own, particularly in attacking Barack Obama. But then the tunnel-vision of his campus experiences kicks in, leading him to say things which are half-true, untrue, false or just completely meaningless ... Lilla does mention the main cause for our current predicament – the investment of billions of dollars in thinktanks, radio talkshows and TV networks to move the center of political thinking sharply to the right. But for some reason he thinks all of this has been much less important in alienating voters from liberalism than a noble effort to extend the basic protections of the constitution to women, African Americans and gay, lesbian and transgender people.

Lilla proposes that the left abandon this self-defeating discourse and reinvest in reasoned appeals to the common good ... While there is much to commend in this book — Lilla’s wide-ranging expertise, his good humor and sharp wit, his moral seriousness — it is not without its faults, the greatest of which is Lilla’s failure to press his critique to its logical limits ... As could be expected of so sweeping a narrative executed in so few pages, Lilla is correct in broad-brush while fumbling many of the particulars ... Lilla’s recognition of the deep affinity between Reaganite economics and left identitarianism is the most profound aspect of The Once and Future Liberal.