“This is a classic ploy familiar to revolutionary leaders throughout history: the failure of the revolution proves the need to radicalize it. This is why, for decades now, Americans have been spectators at the dark comedy of Republicans running for… — Mark Lilla Copy Share Image
“Democratic politics is about persuasion, not self-expression. I’m here, I’m queer will never provoke more than a pat on the head or a roll of the eyes. Accept that you will never agree with people on everything—that’s to be expected in a democracy. One effect of engaging in social movements tied to identity is that you’ve been surrounded by the… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“The other component was to build cadres through political education. Republicans sought out wealthy donors to set up foundations and think tanks as safe spaces outside the university for elaborating the Republican catechism, a document that grew from a cocktail napkin to a vast library of popular books and academic policy studies. They set up summer camps where college students… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“The romantic wants to create a world where he or she will possess a fully integrated, unconflicted identity—where the answers to the questions Who… — Mark Lilla Copy Share Image
“How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy is already… — Mark Lilla Copy Share Image
“The universities of our time instead cultivate students so obsessed with their personal identities and campus pseudo-politics that they have much less interest in,… — Mark Lilla Copy Share Image
“The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. The result is that today certain swaths of the country are so thoroughly dominated by the radical Republican right that certain federal laws and even constitutional protections are, practically speaking, a dead letter there. If… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“Mary McCarthy, though, had it wrong when she wrote that “Madame Bovary is Don Quixote in skirts.” Emma’s suffering is Platonic: she searches, in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people, for an ideal that is only imagined. Until the end she believes that she will get the love and recognition she deserves. Quixote’s suffering is Christian.… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“You might have thought that, faced with a novel anti-political picture of the nation, liberals would have countered with an imaginative, hopeful vision of what we share as Americans and what we might accomplish together. Instead, they lost themselves in the thickets of identity politics and developed a resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference to match it. You might have thought… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“The Stillborn God is not a fairy tale. It is a book about the fragility of our world, the world created by the intellectual rebellion against political theology in the West. This may seem an unusual, even perverse, theme, given that Western nations are currently at peace with one another and that the norms of liberal democracy, especially regarding religion,… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least speak, about the common good. In movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
“Like any other political doctrine, liberalism makes assumptions about things human and divine, and these assumptions are, and ought to remain, open to disinterested reflection. Those who seriously question such assumptions are not wrong to do so and their arguments must be engaged. But for nearly two centuries now, the advocates of liberal ideas have also found themselves confronted by… — Mark Lilla Copy Share
