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(Before the Harper's letter appeared, this guy destroyed the premises it
was built on.)
New Republic
Osita Nwanevu/July 6, 2020
The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism
The critics of progressive identity politics have got it all wrong:
They’re the illiberal ones.
It was always a given that 2020 would be a year to remember. Even so, it
continues to surprise. It seems likely that June will go down as one of
the pivotal months of our political era, a period when our streets, our
press, and some of our major institutions were rocked by the force of
progressive identity politics. Conversations over the implications of
all that’s happened in recent weeks will continue for some time. One of
the more active debates is whether our recent social controversies
should be seen as further evidence for the advent of what the writer
Wesley Yang has called a “successor ideology” that might supplant
liberalism altogether.
This was the conclusion of an essay on upheaval in the media from
journalist Matt Taibbi. “The leaders of this new movement are replacing
traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even
racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew
debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation,” he
wrote. “They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature
of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for
themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.” In another recent
essay, New York’s Andrew Sullivan charged that progressives now believe
“the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy” and that
“liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can
only be dismantled.”
Versions of this argument have been circulating for over half a decade
now. In a 2015 piece, New York’s Jonathan Chait warned readers to take a
series of then-recent campus controversies seriously. “The upsurge of
political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a
bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and
over,” he wrote. “It’s the expression of a political culture with
consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be
incompatible with liberalism.”
Now, it really would be quite remarkable if American students and
activists had, within the space of five or so years, constructed or
wandered into a real and novel alternative to the dominant political
ideology of the last few centuries. But they haven’t. The tensions we’ve
seen lately have been internal to liberalism for ages: between those who
take the associative nature of liberal society seriously and those who
are determined not to. It is the former group, the defenders of
progressive identity politics, who in fact are protecting—indeed
expanding—the bounds of liberalism. And it is the latter group, the
reactionaries, who are most guilty of the illiberalism they claim has
overtaken the American Left.
The word “liberalism” has grown many bizarre and contradictory
appendages and meanings over the years, particularly in the United
States, but the original ideas central to it are fairly clear.
Liberalism is an ideology of the individual. Its first principle is
that each and every person in society is possessed of a fundamental
dignity and can claim certain ineradicable rights and freedoms. Liberals
believe, too, in government by consent and the rule of law: The state
cannot exercise wholly arbitrary power, and its statutes bind all equally.
Associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse
about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals
have come to take it entirely for granted.
Overall, the liberal ideal is a diverse, pluralistic society of
autonomous people guided by reason and tolerance. The dream is
harmonious coexistence. But liberalism also happens to excel at
generating dissensus, and some of the major sociopolitical controversies
of the past few years should be understood as conflicts not between
liberalism and something else but between parties placing emphasis on
different liberal freedoms—chiefly freedom of speech, a popular
favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the
under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in
alignment with a particular set of values. Like free speech, freedom of
association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here
and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John
Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet
associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse
about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals
have come to take it entirely for granted.
For instance, while public universities in America are generally bound
by the First Amendment, controversial speakers have no broad right to
speak at private institutions. Those institutions do, however, have a
right to decide what ideas they are and aren’t interested in
entertaining and what people they believe will or will not be useful to
their communities of scholars—a right that limits the entry and
participation not only of public figures with controversial views but
the vast majority of people in our society. Senators like Tom Cotton
have every right to have their views published in a newspaper. But they
have no specific right to have those views published by any particular
publication. Rather, publications have the right—both constitutionally
as institutions of the press, and by convention as collections of
individuals engaged in lawful projects—to decide what and whom they
would or would not like to publish, based on whatever standards happen
to prevail within each outlet.
When a speaker is denied or when staffers at a publication argue that
something should not have been published, the rights of the parties in
question haven’t been violated in any way. But what we tend to hear in
these and similar situations are criticisms that are at odds with the
principle that groups in liberal society have the general right to
commit themselves to values which many might disagree with and make
decisions on that basis. There’s nothing unreasonable about criticizing
the substance of such decisions and the values that produce them. But
accusations of “illiberalism” in these cases carry the implication that
nonstate institutions under liberalism have an obligation of some sort
to be maximally permissive of opposing ideas—or at least maximally
permissive of the kinds of ideas critics of progressive identity
politics consider important. In fact, they do not.
Associative freedom is no less vital to liberalism than the other
freedoms, and is actually integral to their functioning. There isn’t a
right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment that isn’t implicitly
dependent on or augmented by similarly minded individuals having the
right to come together. Most people worship with others; an assembly or
petition of one isn’t worth much; the institutions of the press are,
again, associations; and individual speech is functionally inert unless
some group chooses to offer a venue or a platform. And political speech
is, in the first place, generally aimed at stirring some group or
constituency to contemplation or action.
Ultimately, associative freedom is critical because groups and
associations are the very building blocks of society. Political parties
and unions, nonprofits and civic organizations, whole religions and
whole ideologies—individuals cannot be meaningfully free unless they
have the freedom to create, make themselves part of, and define these
and other kinds of affiliations. Some of our affiliations, including the
major identity categories, are involuntary, and this is among the
complications that makes associative freedom as messy as it is
important. Just as the principle of free speech forces us into debates
over hate speech, obscenity, and misinformation, association is the root
of identity-based discrimination and other ills. The Supreme Court’s
decision in Bostock v. Clayton County banning employment discrimination
on the basis of LGBTQ identity last month was a huge step forward, but
in practice, workers of all stripes often lack the means and opportunity
to defend themselves from unjust firings—all the more reason for those
preoccupied with “cancel culture” and social media–driven dismissals to
support just-cause provisions and an end to at-will employment.
What about the oft-repeated charge that progressives today intend to
establish “group rights” over and above the rights of the
individual—that, specifically, minorities and certain disadvantaged
groups are to be given more rights than, and held as superior to, white
people? If this were the case, the critics of left “illiberalism” would
truly be onto something: Individual rights are, again, at the center of
liberal thought.
The goal is parity, not superiority.
But that divergence isn’t anywhere to be found in any of the major
controversies that have recently captured broad attention. A minority
chef who says she wants to be paid as much as her white colleagues has
not said that white people are inferior; an unarmed black man under the
knee of a policeman and begging for his life is not asking to be
conferred a special privilege. The goal is parity, not superiority. The
heart of the protests and cultural agitation we’ve witnessed has clearly
been a desire to see minorities treated equally—sharing the rights to
which all people are entitled but that have been denied to many by
society’s extant bigots and the residual effects of injustices past.
Ultimately, it’s the realities of our collective past that make the
notion that progressives are dragging the country toward illiberalism
especially ridiculous. Over the course of two and a half centuries in
this country, millions of human beings held as property toiled for the
comfort and profit of already wealthy people who tortured and raped
them. Just over 150 years ago, the last generation of slaves was
released into systems of subjugation from which its descendants have not
recovered. August will mark just 100 years since women were granted the
right to vote; Black Americans, nominally awarded that right during
Reconstruction, couldn’t take full advantage of it until the passage of
the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The litany of other inequities and crimes
our country has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Native
Americans, immigrants, religious and sexual minorities, political
dissidents, and the poor is endless. All told, liberal society in the
U.S. is, at best, just over half a century old: If it were a person, it
would be too young to qualify for Medicare.
Critics of progressive identity politics frequently argue that
progressives seem congenitally incapable of recognizing the progress our
country has made. But to take that progress seriously is to recognize
that much of what has recently been dubbed progressive illiberalism
these past few weeks and years has been the stirring of a diverse nation
at what is inarguably liberalism’s zenith. Any given vandal taking down
a statue of Grant or Lincoln or Washington is more committed to the
cardinal liberal principles than any of those leaders were; most
Americans today take the rights and autonomy of minorities and women
entirely for granted, and they simply did not. Our noble defenders of
historical statuary will continue to argue loudly that they could not,
and issue complaints about holding the major figures of our past to
today’s standards, our need for heroes to venerate, and all the rest.
But whether or not one agrees, our social tumult should be seen, on
balance, as evidence of our country’s movement forward—toward the
liberal ideal and not away from it. One cannot claim otherwise without
doing violence to a morbid, violent history.
That history isn’t finished with us; the material disadvantages facing
minorities remain grotesque. The net worth of the median white family
was roughly 10 times the net worth of the median Black family in 2016;
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote recently that the wage gap
between white and Black men remains roughly as large as it was in 1950.
Then there are all the challenges that sit atop material disadvantage,
which shouldn’t actually imply that they are prior in importance, even
if they appear to occupy the bulk of the media’s attention at times. But
until policymakers get serious about making them economically whole, and
inevitably long after they do, minorities making their way through the
world will have to contend with an inescapable reality: Even absent
conscious animus, white people can be blind to the way their actions
impact minorities and the barriers they continue to face.
That isn’t a problem that can be addressed by law or within formal
politics: All we can do here is think critically about our personal
lives, our culture, and the places where we live and work and consider
how we might make them more equitable—from making meaningful efforts to
hire, admit, or represent the historically underrepresented to
establishing norms that ensure they can be heard and respected.
Obviously, these are the subjects most grating to critics of progressive
identity politics; at this point, their grievances against affirmative
action, in particular, are both well-known and well-worn and will not be
relitigated here. Far more interesting is the reactionary turn against
etiquette.
Not long ago, conservative columnists moaned endlessly about the decline
of manners and patriarchal chivalry—killed off, they grumbled, by the
feminists and “relativists” of the left. Naturally, now that we’ve
arrived at what is functionally the Appomattox of the twentieth
century’s culture wars, we’re urgently being told by a new set of elite
thinkers that customs and mores are inherently dangerous and
incompatible with the liberal project.
If Twitter were to shut down tomorrow, most of their political world and
its concerns would simply vanish.
In his essay last month, Chait charged that progressives now “interpret
political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather
than opposing ideas.” But that, at bottom, is what political debates
are. Ideas don’t float into the political arena on their own. They’re
advanced by people shaped by particular backgrounds and a thicket of
material and social interests. That doesn’t mean that ideas can’t be
knocked down on their own merits or that truly individual selves can’t
be recovered or created when people are unburdened from the weight of
limiting circumstance. What it does mean is that people should not be
pathologized or condescended to for banding together to make particular
claims or defend particular values. This is the root of not only
identity politics but all political activity. It is what we are all
doing all the time.
Inevitably, the new wave of progressive identity politics has produced
and will continue to produce overreach and excesses. Will there be
genuine crises? Well, within living memory, the fringes on the left and
within the civil rights movement took up arms to make themselves ready
for a hot war with the rest of American society. It seems likely that
society can sustain toppled statues and rechristened institutions.
How should we refer to these new, committed critics of progressive
identity politics? A few weeks ago, The New York Times’ Bari Weiss
included many of them in the discourse in a three-tweet thread
recommending writers and thinkers for those “looking for people to
explain this moment.” It was Weiss who famously dubbed a particular
cadre of these figures the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018. That name, a
clunker even then, simply won’t do for the group as a whole now. For
starters, there’s nothing particularly dark or inaccessible about major
publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, where their
writings or the substance of their opinions are often found. The phrase
also seems to imply it’s merely describing a scene or a location for
certain debates, when Weiss had actually identified the leading lights
of a particular ideological disposition—one we might call “reactionary
liberalism.”
It’s “reactionary” liberalism not just because many of the figures in
this sphere happen to be right of center on certain social issues, but
also because they are incredibly reactive. Viral stories and anecdata
that people focused on the major issues of our day might consider
marginal are, for Weiss and her ideological peers, the central crises of
contemporary politics: If Twitter were to shut down tomorrow, most of
their political world and its concerns would simply vanish. That’s not
to say that their preoccupations now aren’t undergirded by certain
fundamental commitments—for one, they are devoutly attached to
distinctly American speech norms, which they understand as essential to
liberalism and the main barriers separating free society from
Stalinesque repression.
Ask them to explain how liberal democracy has managed to thrive in
Europe, a continent where laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial
are common, or how New Zealand has retained a “chief censor” for decades
without becoming a totalitarian state, and they’d likely be unable to,
if they chose to respond at all. The point here is not that the speech
regimes of other countries are better than our own—there are, in fact,
many reasons why contemporary American permissiveness may indeed be the
best—but that reactionary liberalism denies nuance and the very
existence of other reasonable perspectives on these and related
questions, hence the charge that their progressive opponents are, again
in Chait’s words, pushing ideas “incompatible” with liberalism.
Slippery slope thinking, fallacious to most, is the reactionary
liberal’s primary means of understanding the world around them, and
their tendency to catastrophize produces a state of alarm about the
spread of dangerous ideas as constant and hysterical as the
stereotypical liberal arts student’s. Thus, White Fragility, the widely
criticized and lampooned book by social justice educator Robin DiAngelo,
can be characterized by Matt Taibbi as not merely counterproductive,
misguided, or even harmful but actually “Hitlerian.” More broadly, the
attention we’re now paying to the legacy of bigoted laws and
institutions and inadvertent slights against minorities can be described
by Andrew Sullivan as utilizing arguments “incredibly close to the
language once used against Jews,” transmogrified by bad faith into the
notion that all white people are intrinsically and immutably evil.
Reactionary liberals are actually no more invested in the ideal of a
marketplace of ideas governed wholly by reason than anyone else.
This isn’t a mindset conducive to rational discourse. And reactionary
liberals are actually no more invested in the ideal of a marketplace of
ideas governed wholly by reason than anyone else. All of their supposed
enthusiasm for debate and heterodoxy is typically marshaled in defense
of a handful of opinions—on transgender identity, feminist sexual
politics, and the nature of racial disadvantage—which, far from having
been chased into some intellectually “dark” corner, are relatively
common and largely shared by the most politically powerful people in
America today.
They also share an incuriosity about history and its actual
implications. At times, it can seem that the past is useful to them
primarily as a source for wild allusions: to the Spanish Inquisition,
the Salem Witch Trials, and so on. It would be a bit more difficult to
carry on as they do if they were genuinely informed by it. For
instance, the idea that a cluster of controversies at college campuses
here and there could foretell the end of the liberal university, or
liberalism, or the West simply isn’t credible to those who understand
the remarkably cyclical nature of student unrest and protest in this
country over the last century.
Similarly, the residual effects of systemic bigotry are easier to
understand and take seriously if one appreciates how historically recent
straightforward racial subjugation and discrimination are. The efforts
to hand-wave that history away can be unintentionally enlightening. Five
years ago, the Times’ David Brooks wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s
then-recent memoir Between the World and Me—one of the works shaping
the latest installment of our ongoing National Conversation about race.
The column itself was, from its very title (“Listening to Ta-Nehisi
Coates While White”), an early example of a now common discursive mode.
Brooks began his review generously, writing that the book had been “a
great and searing contribution” to race discourse and “a mind-altering
account of the black male experience.” But he came away with
reservations. “I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make
sure the testimony is respected and sinks in,” he wrote. “But I have to
ask, am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to
respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person
have standing to respond?” This last question was almost surreal in its
condescension—what should one make of the notion, presented several
paragraphs into his twice-weekly column for the paper of record, that
David Brooks would have to request permission to enter a debate simply
for being white? He didn’t, of course, so his response shortly followed.
This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame.
There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone
for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is
embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America....
The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more
perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons
old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.
This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known
divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social
reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive
realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star
that points to a better future.
“Excessive realism”—a remarkable phrase in the service of a remarkable
argument. Visceral and unsparing accounts of American history and
contemporary inequity are condemnable not because they are wrong per se,
Brooks suggested, but because their accuracy might be disillusioning.
Historically and empirically grounded as they might be, they risk
attenuating our sense of ourselves as already liberated individuals
ready to scale the meritocratic ladder capitalism has set out for us.
One testament to the power of those accounts is that they’ve worked on
David Brooks. He wrote a column endorsing reparations for slavery and
explaining his conversion on the issue last year, and in a piece last
month titled “How Moderates Failed Black America,” he recommended the
work of writers like Frank Wilderson—who has argued that “the spectacle
of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world”—for
insight as to how deeply and justifiably faith in the American dream has
collapsed among many Black people. “The gospel of the American dream
teaches that as people make it in America they will feel more accepted
by America, more at home in America,” Brooks wrote. “This is not
happening for many African-Americans.”
Reactionary liberalism offers us few useful ideas for how we might truly
move the country forward.
It isn’t happening because the ladder of American meritocracy is, in
fact, a busted drainpipe. And reactionary liberalism offers us few
useful ideas for how we might truly move the country forward. While
progressive activists believe American society comprises intelligible,
if often hidden, systems of movable parts, the reactionary liberal urges
us to see it instead as a jumble of bits and pieces—a muddle that
defies both systematic understanding and collective action, and which
the atomized individual is better off wading through on their own. This
is the suspicion of collective consciousness seemingly at the heart of
elite preoccupation with “tribalism” and “polarization”; it is the
source of the universal tendency of reactionary liberals to label the
criticisms they face on the internet as the work of rampaging “mobs”
animated by “groupthink.”
The ideological implications of this mindset can be read between the
lines of Andrew Sullivan’s recent piece on the Bostock decision, which,
he argued, toppled “the last major obstacle to civil equality for gay
men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.” “This comprehensive
victory obviously presents the major institutions of the gay-rights
movement with a dilemma,” he mused. “What do they exist for after this?
What conceivable project is now worth the huge amounts of money that
sustains these groups?”
Well, for starters, the problem of nonemployment discrimination against
LGBTQ people remains unresolved even if Bostock makes it likely that the
courts will continue to expand protections over time. And again, even
those who would have solid standing in suits over LGBTQ discrimination
might not have the means to actually bring those cases. All of this sits
atop other material and social inequities LGBTQ people will surely
continue to face for some time. Nevertheless, in Sullivan’s view, the
work of activists is essentially over, and the problems that remain are
trivial.
Bullying will never go away; nor will calling people names; nor
grotesque generalizations about an entire group of people. Nor, for that
matter, personal insecurity and self-doubt. But the answer to this is
not deepening an embrace of victimhood, but developing the strength to
withstand these slurs, to pity the bigoted rather than be intimidated by
them. As Eleanor Roosevelt is believed to have said: “No one can make
you feel inferior without your consent.”
One of the remarkable truths of gay history is how so many, under social
and legal pressures exponentially greater than today, were able to
withhold that consent. They were objectively victims, but subjectively free.
Here again, as with Brooks, we see the “objective” and materially real
supplanted by a putatively productive idealism. Those who felt inferior
even when civil equality was a distant dream, it’s implied, simply
lacked individual resolve. For Sullivan, the problems of identity are
primarily matters of individual grit—struggles that can be overcome
largely by mental exercise. And efforts to construct or draw upon a
politics of mutual empathy should be understood as signs of
weakness—hence his lament, elsewhere in the piece, over the possibility
that the major LGBTQ advocacy groups “will simply merge into the broader
intersectional left and become as concerned with, say, the rights of
immigrants or racial minorities as they are with gay rights.”
The general tenor of these arguments should be familiar. The rhetoric of
toughening up and relying on individual willpower also features not only
in our discourses about racism and sexism but in our debates about the
plight of the working class and the poor. This is the ideological ground
reactionary liberalism emerges from, and given this, the folly of
believing identity politics can be conceptually detached from our other
concerns should be plain. What is ultimately at stake in our debates
about identity is the very principle of solidarity.
One might imagine that opposing the reactionary liberal project would
unite the American left. But the last several weeks of identity
political debates have led some to odd places. Much of Matt Taibbi’s
essay on the recent controversies in journalism, for instance, is spent
berating staffers at various publications for launching “internal
uprisings” against their bosses. “The New York Times, the Intercept,
Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Variety, and others,” he noted
ominously, “saw challenges to management.” It would be a strange thing
for the left if its major thinkers got used to deriding workers
demanding changes to how their firms are run. Giving workers the power
to democratically establish what is important to them and run firms
themselves—goals of the democratic socialist project—would mean giving
workers the power to make firm-level decisions, including identity
political decisions, with which outside observers might disagree.
Within the present economy, more and more companies are beginning to
make strategic and superficial concessions on race and other issues. How
important can a movement be, it’s often been asked, if the most heinous
corporations and institutions in the world can glom onto it and earn
praise for meaningless statements and gestures? But it’s not obvious why
those efforts should call the value of identity politics into question
any more than panels on inequality at Davos, or the right-wing
presidency of a man who ran on protecting workers from the predations of
financial and corporate elites should raise doubts about the legitimacy
of class politics. The powers that be wouldn’t attempt to take advantage
of and redirect the energies of these ideas if they weren’t already
potent and compelling.
It should be said that when driven by activists and their communities,
even symbolic action can be productive. For one, it can help groups
understand and organize themselves as political constituencies with a
certain amount of power. And the ideas driving symbolic action matter.
It is true, for instance, that pulling down a Confederate monument does
absolutely nothing in itself to improve the material position of any
struggling person in this country. But our debates over monuments have
really been debates about how we should understand our history, and they
seem to be succeeding in advancing a sense that the roots of racial
disadvantage are very old and very deep—undermining arguments that
inequality can be meaningfully addressed by incremental economic policy
and individual determination.
Socialists have always been best positioned, ideologically, to test the
commitments of liberals to their own first principles.
Socialists have always been best positioned, ideologically, to challenge
those arguments and test the commitments of liberals to their own first
principles. While it may be just to posit that each person has a
fundamental dignity and certain rights, they contend, true autonomy, if
it is possible at all, is surely a fiction under the domination of
capital. Moreover, they argue, the democratic rights that we tell
ourselves we possess in the political realm are nowhere to be found in
the places where we spend most of our lives and attempt to secure the
material resources our lives depend on: at work under the arbitrary,
unaccountable authority of bosses and managers.
As such, leftists are the very last people who need to be reminded that
corporate P.R. is just P.R.; press releases are not actually going to
satisfy those intent on fully remaking the economy, and socialists who
take the concerns motivating Black Lives Matter seriously have been
among the strongest critics of what some have called the “anti-racism
industry” that suggests inequality can be remedied primarily by
self-help—the nicer side of the same small coin as grin-and-bear-it
individualism. That realm of discourse can be challenged without
belittling underrepresentation and personal indignities or denying that
they can have material consequences.
As we work through what to make of the successes of progressive identity
politics, we shouldn’t forget that progressive identity politics were
not supposed to succeed. Not long ago, critics predicted that as
legitimate as the core grievances motivating activists were, dust-ups on
campus, rhetoric condemning “white supremacy,” and property destruction
accompanying protests against police violence would ultimately alienate
the broader public and prevent ordinary people from joining identity
political causes. It is empirically plain now that these arguments were
wrong and that the past several years of activism have produced a large
and rapid positive shift in American public opinion. We will spend many
years working through how it happened, but one factor already seems
crucial: The critics of progressive identity politics were not only
unpersuasive but fundamentally uninterested in persuasion. Even now,
white liberals sympathetic to Black Lives Matter are disdained and
mocked, and those most committed to denouncing the zealous rhetoric of
progressive activists have never paused to assess the effectiveness of
their own histrionics.
The failure of these critics has only deepened their sense of themselves
as martyrs—the last disciples of the one, true liberalism, who will be
vindicated once a grand backlash against progressives finally arrives.
There are good reasons to believe it won’t: Cultural antagonism on the
right will continue to drive middle-of-the road Americans away, and
progressive millennials and Gen-Zers will continue aging into the center
of American politics and American life. But for all the positive changes
we’ve seen and will continue to see in the consciousness of the American
people, progressives are still far from being able to declare victory.
The material work of creating a just society has barely begun.
Osita Nwanevu @OsitaNwanevu
Osita Nwanevu is a staff writer at The New Republic.
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