Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of

"What they all understand—and what liberals like Beauchamp elide—is that this is really about power. They believe that the conservative movement can no longer achieve its ends within a liberal framework. Rather than abandoning these goals, or engaging in the hard work of democracy to persuade others to accept them, they have opted to quit that framework entirely. This sense of persecution may seem bizarre given that social conservatives currently control the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. But they seem to implicitly understand that they now owe their power to illiberal flaws in the system rather than any sort of genuine democratic mandate."

Matt Ford at The New Republic explores "the 'anti-liberal moment.'"

"The Political Is Personal"

"Conservatives complain loudest about today's campus follies, but it is really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.
"There is a great irony in this. The supposedly bland, conventional universities of the 1950s and early '60s incubated the most radical generation of American citizens perhaps since our founding. Young people were incensed by the denial of voting rights out there, the Vietnam War out there, nuclear proliferation out there, capitalism out there, colonialism out there. Yet once that generation took power in the universities, it proceeded to depoliticize the liberal elite, rendering its members unprepared to think about the common good and what must be done practically to secure it—especially the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort.
"Every advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of liberal political consciousness. There can be no liberal politics without a sense of We—of what we are as citizens and what we owe each other. If liberals hope ever to recapture America’s imagination and become a dominant force across the country, it will not be enough to beat the Republicans at flattering the vanity of the mythical Joe Sixpack. They must offer a vision of our common destiny based on one thing that all Americans, of every background, share.
"And that is citizenship."

The Wall Street Journal runs an excerpt from Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal.

As does The Chronicle of Higher Education.

And Rod Dreher at The American Conservative interviews Lilla.

As does Robert Siegel on NPR's All Things Considered.

As does Isaac Chotiner at Slate.

David Linker reviews the book at The Week.

And Jim Sleeper reviews the book at Democracy.