Mark Lilla

“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…

— Mark Lilla

“The other component was to build cadres through political education. Republicans sought out wealthy donors to set up foundations and think tanks…

— Mark Lilla

“The romantic wants to create a world where he or she will possess a fully integrated, unconflicted identity—where the answers to the…

— Mark Lilla

“How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy…

— Mark Lilla

“The universities of our time instead cultivate students so obsessed with their personal identities and campus pseudo-politics that they have much less…

— Mark Lilla

“The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party…

— Mark Lilla

“Mary McCarthy, though, had it wrong when she wrote that “Madame Bovary is Don Quixote in skirts.” Emma’s suffering is Platonic: she…

— Mark Lilla

“You might have thought that, faced with a novel anti-political picture of the nation, liberals would have countered with an imaginative, hopeful…

— Mark Lilla

“The Stillborn God is not a fairy tale. It is a book about the fragility of our world, the world created by…

— Mark Lilla

“The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common…

— Mark Lilla

“Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts…

— Mark Lilla

“Like any other political doctrine, liberalism makes assumptions about things human and divine, and these assumptions are, and ought to remain, open…

— Mark Lilla

“Better the self-torture of a godless Protestant conscience than the fantasies of a modern Prometheus.”

— Mark Lilla

“Identity is not the future of the left. It is not a force hostile to neoliberalism. Identity is Reaganism for lefties.”

— Mark Lilla

Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach. But he will…

— Mark Lilla

“The most important lesson is this: that for two generations America has been without a political vision of its destiny. There is…

— Mark Lilla

“Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it…

— Mark Lilla

“Americans are a strange breed. We love to preach, and we hate being preached at. In one hemisphere of our brains the…

— Mark Lilla

“The Republican Party's gerrymandering efforts were also having unintended consequences. For years the party had poured resources into state legislatures in order…

— Mark Lilla

No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably…

— Mark Lilla

“Most foolishly, liberals grew increasingly reliant on the courts to circumvent the legislative process when it failed to deliver what they wanted…

— Mark Lilla

“This is a classic ploy familiar to revolutionary leaders throughout history: the failure of the revolution proves the need to radicalize it.…

— Mark Lilla

“Liberal political education now takes place, if it takes place at all, on campuses that are largely detached socially and geographically from…

— Mark Lilla

“There can be no liberal politics without a sense of we—of what we are as citizens and what we owe each other.…

— Mark Lilla

“But it was really the then-popular right-wing demagogue Glenn Beck who gave Republicans a taste of what was to come as the…

— Mark Lilla