Excellent article from "The Baffler" about the effort to dump civil rights by Mark Lilla

Mark Lilla has written a book in which he says the Democratic Party should reject what he calls "identitarian politics." Which means dropping the issues of race and civil rights.

This is the link to the article.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mark-lillas-comfort-zone

The Baffler has an excellent article on this and shows the historical background to this thinking. The author Kimberle' Williams Crenshaw shows its origins going back to Reconstruction.

This critique of identity politics is not new. Indeed, it can be traced to the repudiation of Reconstruction itself. The lethal critiques trained against the shortlived Freedmen’s Bureau and congressional efforts to create a national commitment to eliminate widespread discrimination against former slaves sought to discredit and dismantle equality projects by framing them as dangerous pandering and insidious favoritism. It was, in effect, a critique of identity politics, with the Supreme Court intoning that black men should relinquish the status of special victims and stop making a federal case out of every slight they might encounter. Being told to live lives like everyone else while barely emerging from a status that was not like everyone else was a tough-love repudiation of a reform-oriented identity politics. Of course, the politics that underwrote white supremacy were as untamable as ever, but these were not the conceits of identity that troubled the ruling elite nor its white clients.


The Centrist Democrats and neo-Liberals are frantic over Trump winning the 2016 election. Rather than critique themselves, they are looking at who they can throw overboard to win the next elections. They reason I think that racial minorities and gays have nowhere to go, and they can depend on minority members of the Democratic Party to make rationalizations to justify voting for Democrats in elections even though the neo-Liberals are proposing to drop  civil rights.

This argument to drop identity politics of course includes dropping the issues of Confederate monuments and flags.

What doesn't occur to the Democrats is that they themselves might be dropped by large section of the public. The Democrats don't control either house of congress nor the white house nor many of the state houses. They are not in power largely as a result of their own strategies. The current situation is fluid. They still think they will dictate the future.

What also needs to be observed is that various establishment Democrats in urban centers have attempted to do some type of rationalization for Confederate monuments. It hasn't worked well. The core locations of Democratic Party strength are rejecting Confederate monuments everywhere.

Mark Lilla and his supporters need to be dump and not racial justice if we are to progress on removing Confederate monuments.

The Baffler has some wickedly delicious send ups of various elites' reasoning. It is very intelligently written. It is one of the few magazines I subscribe to in print.