In 2016, ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the historian of ideas and professor at Columbia Mark Lilla published an article in the New York Times : “In recent years, the American left has given in, regarding ethnic, gender and sexuality identities, to a kind of collective hysteria which has distorted its message to the point of preventing it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing .” If he was saddened by Donald Trump’s victory, he hoped to see the end of the “diversity left”.
It took almost ten years and a second victory for… nothing! Mark Lilla, born in Detroit in 1956, worker father, nurse mother, scholarship student at Harvard, assertive center left, sharp pen with vitriol – “identity politics is Reaganism for leftists” – has certainly spent the last ten years to wonder why the Democrats have sunk deeper every day into the sterile identity synthesis which has taken them towards an even more bitter defeat than the first (Donald Trump this time also won the vote popular). And how commentators, in the United States as in France, can continue to embroider without blinking on the racism and misogyny which prevented the victory of Kamala Harris – who was just content to run a very bad campaign – without noticing the percentage of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, young people and women who voted for the outrageous, crude and most certainly dangerous Republican for liberal democracy.
America’s shift
The spectacle is fascinating: a large part of the media, political and intellectual elite (don’t get me wrong dear reader, I am one of them, I participate in it, I am not exonerating myself or turning opportunistic populist) meets with a serious expression , with tears in his eyes, his voice straying into hysterical high notes, to describe the shift of virilist-masculinist-racist-ultraliberal America into the most extreme fascism blatant. It is rare to hear a thin trickle of voices, intimidated by so much unanimity no pasaran, discreetly observing, without insisting, that social origin certainly played a greater role than racial, ethnic or sexual origin. It is even rarer to recall the careful analysis and constructive proposals of Yascha Mounk, who noted, a little over a year ago, that “the trap of identity undermines important values, including freedom of expression. Its misguided applications have proven to be counterproductive, as with education. They do not lay the foundations for a fairer and more tolerant society, but for zero-sum competition between groups. mutually hostile identities.
What has Elon Musk, Trump’s noisy and omnipresent supporter, repeated about freedom of expression or, ad nauseam, about educational and security abuses, pointing to the dissolution of the American community for the benefit of disparate groups? What did Donald Trump do, if not address Americans, all Americans, talking to them about their wallets, their daily lives, their future and their fears? The Republican candidate managed to impose his authenticity (fabricated, staged, artificial) against a Democrat aligning Hollywood stars and millionaire pop stars who, if they are appreciated for their works, exert absolutely no influence on the anxieties of a citizen who works three jobs without being able to save enough to send his children to university.
There is an infuriating inevitability in Donald Trump’s resounding victory. Everything was nevertheless available – the analysis of the phenomenon which from a symptom transformed before our amazed eyes into a state libertarianism under the powerful influence of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the ideas to curb it, the political perspectives which included the questions that stupidly irritate the left (security, immigration, minorities, inflation) – to write a new page of powerfully inclusive liberal universalism. The Democrats can only note that the Republican Party has become the popular and multi-ethnic party, while they have settled into a bourgeois and moralist environment. What do Western democrats have left, besides their tears, to cry?
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