THE PROBLEM INCLUDES US: Professor Lilla's strange remarks!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2017

Part 1—Strange, but perhaps instructive: In mid-December, as the year neared its end, it seemed to us that Professor Lilla made some strange remarks.

Back in November, the Columbia professor turned heads with a front-page piece in the New York Times Sunday Review—with an essay concerning a practice he called "identity liberalism."

In our view, the professor made one blindingly obvious statement in that November piece. (If you're going to name some groups, you'd better name them all.) For our money, much of the rest of what he wrote at that time was a bit unclear.

That said, Professor Lilla had seemed to criticize the practice of "identity politics." Inevitably, one of his colleagues knew what that heresy meant.

With lightning speed, Professor Franke produced a piece which linked her colleague to David Duke. So it currently tends to go over here in our part of the world.

Just like that, Lilla became a running dog accomplice of the Klan! At Vox, Sean Illing decided to check him out.

Illing interviewed Lilla at some length; if you want to read the full interview, you can do so here. But during that exchange, Professor Lilla said some things which struck us as strange—and perhaps as instructive.

Illing and Lilla were discussing Those People, the white working class. At one point, Lilla warned against "writing off a whole group of people that you need to reach if you want to be elected."

To us, that seems to make obvious sense. Soon, though, Lilla seemed to state a somewhat condescending assumption. ("People in these communities" are "voting against their own interests," he seemed to say.)

And then, the professor made the remarks shown below. These remarks strike us as strange, but also perhaps as instructive:

LILLA (12/16/16): The bottom line is that we can't win without these people. And when I'm talking about winning, I'm not just talking about presidential elections—we pay too much attention to that. The things that get done in this country are done through legislation, which means you have to win the Congress and you have to go every state in the country. The laws, moreover, get enforced in state governments, and so you if you're not competitive there, you can't guarantee that the laws you pass will get enforced.

So if we care about the people we say we care about—African Americans, women, LGBT people, Latinos—if we want to protect them, symbolic victories won't do. We have to be competitive and we have to win at every level of government, and that means sucking it up and getting the votes of everyone.

Can that be what the professor meant? On its face, he almost seems to have said that we liberals care about African Americans, women, LGBT people and Latinos—apparently full stop.

Based on what the professor said, we don't seem to care about "these people" (his term), the white working class! But since we can't win elections without them, we have to "suck it up"—degrade ourselves—and go after their votes too.

That's what the professor seems to have said. Can that possibly be what he meant?

As Professor Lilla continued, he almost seemed to express this general viewpoint again. We liberals may have to "get dirty" pursuing the white working class, he repeatedly said:

LILLA: There are all sorts of ways we can work to make America more tolerant and inclusive. But we can't confuse that work with political work. Political work is only about acquiring and using power to protect the people you want to protect.

An election is not a seminar. It is not a therapy session. It is not a chance to rewrite history. An election is only about winning, and you do what you have to do. And yes, that doesn't mean you have to pander to people, but it may mean you have to be silent about certain things and get your apron dirty.

If you want to reform the American soul, become a minister. But if you're serious about politics, you have to go where the people are and find a way to reach them, and not be afraid to get dirty.

In context, he almost seems to have said it again. "We want to protect" African Americans, women, LGBT people and Latinos. We don't seem to want to protect the white working class. Talking to them may make our aprons dirty!

That's what the professor seems to have said. Can that possibly be what he meant?

Briefly, let's be fair. In at least one basic respect, Professor Lilla's formulation doesn't exactly make seems to make sense. So maybe it's not what he meant!

What doesn't make sense in Lilla's remarks? Roughly half the members of the white working class actually are women! Meanwhile, a smaller proportion of "these people" are LGBT—and we do care about such people, according to his remarks.

Such apparent contradictions may arise when we start picking winners and losers—when we start saying we "care about" certain people and groups, but not about certain others. This may suggest that the things we seem to have said may not quite be what we meant.

In these exchanges, Professor Lilla doesn't sound a whole lot like David Duke. He does sound like the kind of figure who signals to folk in the white working class that they should listen to and vote for Republicans, right on down the line.

We liberals frequently send these whistles, perhaps not realizing that we do so. This calls a basic fact to mind as we enter a troubling new year:

Our journalistic and political systems lie in shambles. As Paul Krugman noted in yesterday's column, this state of affairs has been developing for decades.

Our journalistic, intellectual and political systems lie in ruins. All month, we'll discuss a basic point, a basic fact which can be hard for us liberals to see.

Here is the point we plan to discuss, though we know such discussion is bound to be fruitless:

A significant amount of this terrible problem may perhaps lie with Us.

Tomorrow: Should we "want to protect" this person?

Dramatis personnae to date: According to the leading authority, Professor Lilla is a political scientist, an historian of ideas, a journalist and a professor of humanities at Columbia. In the 1990s, he wrote widely on twentieth-century European philosophy, at least to the extent that such a critter exists.

During that period, he wrote The Reckless Mind, a meditation on the "philotyrannical" bent of twentieth-century continental philosophy. His most recent book, The Shipwrecked Mind, is a study of how nostalgia has shaped modern politics, from Middle America to the Middle East.

According to her Columbia Law School profile, Professor Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. It seems to us that she serves on a large number of steering committees, but that could just be us.

By Columbia's admission, she is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. With intellectual leaders like Lilla and Franke, it's hard to see how we liberals and progressives ever find ways to lose.