Mark Lilla on Liberalism, Civic Education, and America’s Political Moment

Read The Forum's interview with Mark Lilla—political scientist, historian, and Professor at Columbia University.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Image Credit: Christophe Dellory, HarperCollins

Shiv Parihar: Hello and welcome to The Forum’s Interview series. This is Professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, one of the premier political theorists in America today, and in particular, an expert on religion and politics. He’s speaking here at CMC about another expertise of his: the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. 

Dhriti Jagadish: That is Shiv Parihar, and this is Dhriti Jagadish. 

Shiv Parihar: I think classical liberalism and its future is on the minds of a lot of people right now—yourself included. And we wanted to sort of take this another direction, particularly in the context of Tocqueville, and ask, do you think there are certain cultural prerequisites for the success of liberalism? And if so, what are they? Do we have them now and where do you see them evolving in the future? 

Mark Lilla: Well, we've got to be careful—especially these days—in how you use the word liberalism and to be precise about it. Do we mean liberal theory? Do we mean liberal government? Do we mean a liberal society? In which sense would you like me to answer? 

Shiv Parihar: We'll say in particular, liberal government. 

Mark Lilla: By liberal government, [if] we mean the idea that the state is constrained from doing certain things because of a certain sense of the inviolability of individuals, then sure, there are cultural preconditions,  they're harder to delineate a priori than they are to recognize in their absence. In the ancient world, for example, the sense of the individual's relation to the society was quite different from a society like our own, which is more liberal. 

If one is concerned about, for example, limiting the arbitrary power of authority, one has to come up with a vocabulary to talk about it. And vocabularies differ in different cultural contexts. If all you mean is liberal government in that sense, obviously Tocqueville recognized this cultural factor  at the beginning of Democracy in America when he talks about the Anglo-Protestant heritage and how it helped shape the conception of the first Americans in their relation to the environment 

Dhriti Jagadish: On that note of Tocqueville, J.D. Vance has been saying that Americans won't fight for abstractions, but according to Tocqueville, it seems that we didn't really need to. It was the Europeans that had a very romantic, noble notion of self-sacrifice, whereas Americans had “self-interest rightly understood,” right: daily acts of sacrifice and restraint that benefit both them and others. What does “self-interest rightly understood” look like today? 

Mark Lilla: Well, first, I'd like to question the premise of J.D. Vance. I wonder, has he seen Ken Burns’ Civil War? Has he ever seen documentaries about World War II? Has he ever looked at monuments devoted to the heroism of Americans in battle, in Iwo Jima and other places? No, Americans will fight for an ideal and for an abstraction. Democracy, in the popular sense, is an abstraction. 

Dhriti Jagadish: Does [self-interest rightly understood] accord with the kind of self-sacrifice and loftiness required to fight in the Civil War, the Revolutionary War? 

Mark Lilla: No. What Tocqueville meant by the phrase is that Americans had developed a way of thinking about their communal life, so that they understood there were benefits redounding to individuals who participate. But Americans had a less developed theoretical view of this relationship thana kind of instinct, about the relation between what they did for the common and what they did seemingly purely for themselves.   

The question, I suppose, is “What are people like today?” Is that what you mean? 

Dhriti Jagadish: Yeah. 

Mark Lilla: The closer you get to the ground, the more I think Americans seem like they always have been. Yes, it's true, we're bowling alone now and there's less participation in certain sorts of organizations. But in moments when it becomes necessary, it’s really extraordinary how the American people get together and accomplish things together. For example, when there's a natural disaster about to strike a community in Europe, citizens will wait for the state to interview. And, of course, we now wait for FEMA (longer and longer),but as a people we still have a capacity to come out and immediately help our neighbors and the community without prompting.

As you move up the chain from the local context, the local school, the sports teams your kids are on, there's less of a sense of the connection between our public participation and our private benefit. But that's been a long time coming because we became a gigantic country involved in all sorts of world affairs. The economy has become more complex. It’s hard to discern how our individual work contributes to anything. Frankly, in a globalized economy everything changes very, very quickly and you have to be adaptable.  You can imagine a past world where people could say, along with Martin Luther, that “Here I stand, I can do no other.” But that's not what life feels like for people today. It feels like surfing. And if life is surfing, and you're simply trying to prepare yourself for the next wave, [it] becomes harder to think about what one's public contribution ought or even can be. 

Shiv Parihar: I wondered if I could challenge you somewhat on the JD Vance question, because you use the examples of Iwo Jima, of the Civil War. But it does seem to me that many Americans felt that they were fighting for much more than an abstraction, that they were fighting for democracy, but as it was practiced. Or on D-Day, [they] felt that even if they were fighting for liberation, they were also fighting for their homes, right? So, yes, there's the abstraction, but at least my understanding [of] Vance [is] that the soldier in the foxhole wasn't thinking of the abstraction. He was thinking of his home. And so the abstraction became secondary. 

Mark Lilla: Well, alas, I'm old enough to have known a lot of World War II veterans growing up. And they talked endlessly about the abstraction.  Remember, America has never had large, hostile neighbors, so our homeland has never been really threatened in the way others have in most places in the world. 

We both know where JD Vance wants to head with this.An idea of the homeland, an idea of this nation being like other nations that are bound by families being in places for a very long time – the whole nostalgic picture. He certainly has an agenda with that, [though] that doesn't mean that makes him wrong. But I knew people who were both World War II veterans and certainly Korean War veterans—my father, for example. Then, there was less of a sense of what the interest was. But certainly not in the Second World War. 

And especially after Pearl Harbor. My parents' generation talked about that often, about what that moment was like. For people who were living in the ‘30s an isolationist mentality came naturally. , But it ended abruptly after Pearl Harbor and didn’t return until recent decades.   In Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley, we learn that Buckley's brothers immediately signed up to serve, and [did] not listen to their isolationist father because they were so taken up by their sense of responsibility and the nobility of the democratic cause.

Dhriti Jagadish: I guess the question is, then, where does this instinct, this aspirationalism come from in Tocqueville’s view? Because he has this understanding that Americans can be very insular. That's the big risk with democracy—that there's this mediocrity that doesn't really reach that lofty level. In your experience, where does that kind of aspiration come from? 

Mark Lilla: It was only within America's encounter with the wider world that this became even a question, I think. People were fighting for many things in the Civil War, and there were certainly principles there having to do with slavery, for and against. But it really was after World War I that the country had to ask itself, “Why is this country different from every other country?” It’s striking when you think about it, but at Versailles  it took Woodrow Wilson no time at all to come up with his Fourteen Points. “This is what we mean by democracy. This is what it means to live a moral, political life as a nation.” He’s a good example of what a creedal nation we are.  

You know, it's funny. Coming of age during the Cold War, I [came] to the view that ideology is the source of most of our problems, and I wondered if only we could be more practical and empirical about things. [Ideology] pushes all the wrong passionate buttons. But I have to say, I have become a bit nostalgic for the age of ideologies. They are the fruit of the effort to see how things connect and put them together into a coherent moving picture.  And to ask what we might do, as human beings, to shape the world. But there are no significant efforts to do that right now.  Nothing. Nowhere in the world. 

Dhriti Jagadish: It seems like we need practice, right? Informal associations, where we're reminded of our obligations to one another. 

I also think about Spain, which had a very weak civil society, which decided, “Okay, we're going to be democratic after Franco.” As we were talking about earlier, [American] institutional norms that we've had in place, of what we conceive of as liberal democracy, have been falling. In the Spaniards’ case, they decided, “No, we're going to stick to democracy and forget about that era of Franco,” and they stuck to it. Do you think Americans are capable of that [ideological commitment], or do they need that kind of habituation and acculturation?

Mark Lilla: It's a very good question. You have to remember that in the Spanish example two people mattered. One was King Juan Carlos, the other was socialist Prime Minister Felipe González. Sometimes it just depends on the right kind of leader, someone with the right idea, that can have that sort of effect. But there's no way to predict this. You know, with Donald Trump essentially we're going through a stress test right now. We won't know the result until we're out of the test. 

Shiv Parihar: I wanted to talk a bit about the academy. You do really wide ranging political science. You talk about all these different countries, you go over a wide period of time. This isn't really that common in the academy anymore; you find a lot of people that sort of really focus in one place or on various niche threads. Did you think that this [genre] is worthwhile enough to make a comeback? Do you think it's outmoded at all? Because there are certainly some quantitative folks that would argue it is. 

Mark Lilla: Well, the one factor that seems decisive to me is whether there's a large reading public. There was this tradition in the post-war period of very serious, very accomplished philosophers, historians, and literary critics who wrote their books tor each a wider educated public—where they didn't have to dumb things down too much. They developed a style that then had some grudging recognition within the academy. And my home institution [Columbia University] was a place that was home for a lot of such intellectuals; Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Daniel Bell, Peter Gay, [and] Richard Hofstadter were there. And all of those people wrote books that educated, non-academics read. 

I'm fortunate enough to have had for almost 30 years now, , a home at the New York Review of Books, where, with the help of the founding editor, Robert Silvers, I really learned how to do that kind of writing. And so, I'm still producing it. The Review is producing it. But who's reading it? I don't know. Who are we speaking to anymore? There is all this chatter out there, so you end up having to do it for its own sake. 

Shiv Parihar: I think that the question of whether civic education has declined is almost not worth asking: the answer is “yes.” But assuming that it has, how do you see a way forward to a revival of civic education in America and more broadly? 

Mark Lilla: Well, a few things are getting bundled together here, from my point of view. One is the idea of a general public that reads things about political affairs in order to be able to make decisions while voting or putting their efforts into things. The other thing is civic education in the sense of understanding how our system works, what our obligations are, thinking about the principles on which it is based, and so on. So let's take those separately. 

Regarding the first, I think we’re  actually in a much better position than in the recent past. When you look at the number of books written on public policies that come out every year, the debates that are on television about them, and then, the grand debates about what our foreign policy ought to be—that's reaching many more people than in the past. 

When you talk about an America past with lyceums and people going to William James’s lectures, you have to remember that 80% of the country was rural. So, most people were not seeing any of this stuff. They had a Bible and maybe a couple Shakespeare plays; that’s all they had. So one must pay attention to is what's happening to the elite, what's happened to everyone else, and the degree to which the barrier between them collapsed or disappeared. 

And so, on the one hand, I would say that you have to speak down more now, if you want to reach a lot of people, but you reach a lot more people than you did back in this so-called Golden Age. We were a much more aristocratic society in that sense, with an urban elite that was governing over a hugely rural population. 

Now, in the second sense, about civic education, there I am concerned. All you had to do was watch the Jay Leno Show back in the day when he would just interview people on the street and ask them things about American government, and they had no idea how it worked.

I'm also concerned because, however well-meaning, what goes under the rubric of civic education in the second sense today is based on presumptions about movement politics. So you have a class on civics, and you're all supposed to pick an issue, and you study the issue, and then you decide on your position, then you're supposed to write to your congressperson or you go to a demonstration, and so on. And so there's a kind of activist notion of what it is to participate. And certainly on the Democratic side—as you know, I'm a centrist Democrat—that leads to a skew in perspective so that the idea of civic engagement in “causes” takes precedence and not the acquisition of institutional power through parties and elections. And that's where the real power is held, not in causes. 

Shiv Parihar: On the note of you being a centrist Democrat, Professor Jon Shields here at CMC wrote a piece in the New York Times a while ago about how liberal professors can influence conservatism more positively by being mentors for conservative students who lack center-right figures in the academy and on college campuses. And in Shields’s view, these liberal professors can stop these conservative students from going off into…I think the example he uses [is] TPUSA [Turning Point USA], [but] a much darker example would be Fuentes [and] actual Nazism. Could you talk more about how you have seen yourself fulfilling this role [at] Columbia? 

Mark Lilla: You know, I feel like a lifeguard sometimes now. Because I do get these conservative students who come to me. Some of them, very few of them actually, are just ideological thrill seekers. They want to épater, you know: shock. But there are a lot of them who are just genuine seekers, also religiously, spiritually. And when they feel ignored or disrespected, and they don't have an education in the full range of conservative political thought, they often can just head off in the wrong direction. I have a couple cases of students where I felt like I just grabbed them by the collar before they jumped over a cliff, going into this stuff. 

So my job is to just provide the alternatives and, at the same time, [take] them seriously. [I take] their questions very seriously and often [show] that they can be reformulated in a more moderate way—trying to shift the discussion from the culture of complaint to one of constructive projects for the future. I do feel sometimes like a lifeguard or a goalie. 

Dhriti Jagadish: Can you describe your concerns with this cliff that people are jumping over? Because I think [for] a lot of students here, when they think of conservatism on college campuses, they automatically assume it's some kind of TPUSA, YAF: very showy, very activist-y. But there are lots of these intellectual circles at these elite colleges that are becoming extremely reactionary, extremely insular. A lot of these elite circles are being captured. 

When you see your students heading for this cliff, what exactly are you worried about? 

Mark Lilla: Well, it's mainly being in an echo chamber. The term in French is surenchérir which means to keep outbidding someone, but it's used metaphorically in the sense of one-upmanship—[so there’s] a kind of one-upping each other for attention, ideologically. 

And there's a ton of money around. If you are so inclined, you can go off and study in the summer, you can get internships; no one ever ended up in the poorhouse by working in these organizations. They are plush and there are fancy lunches, and some rich guy will invite you to his penthouse in New York. You can have fine wines and sherry and cigars, and look out over the city from his balcony.  It goes to your head. I saw that when I was at the Public Interest already starting back in the '80s. I worked for Irving Kristol at the Public Interest, and essentially, it was a kind of brown bag institution, nothing fancy, just good talk. I've often told people who run these conservative institutions: stop putting on these fancy lunches. Give them a sandwich.

Dhriti Jagadish: [There are these Great Books camps: Hudson Institute’s Political Studies, Hertog Foundation’s Political Studies, the American Enterprise Institute’s Winter and Summer Honors Programs, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Honors Program. Do you think they're doing the kind of wining and dining to make students a bit more reactionary against their campuses and what they've been learning? Or do you think that, potentially, they're moderating and tempering some of the darker Nick Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, online Right? 

Mark Lilla: I just don't know. And that's why I'm interested in talking to students and teachers who've been involved. 

All of [these programs] have been founded in my lifetime, and I saw some of them come to be and knew the people who were running them and teaching in them. In the 1990s, I think part of the motivation [was that] this was the first wave of a kind of PC, anti-Western mood that took over campuses: “Ho ho, Western Civ has got to go,” at Stanford. There was a congruence between a small-c conservative desire to maintain a certain kind of education that they worried would be disappearing and a more political conservatism that you could start educating young people as cadres. 

But my sense had been, and you can correct me, that at places like Hertog and AEI, that it was the Great Books-y side—and defending that—that came first and still comes first. And that the “cadre part” comes second—but maybe I’m wrong about that. And that also comes from people who taught there. But so much has changed, especially in the Trump years, that I don't know. 

Dhriti Jagadish: You wrote in the New York Review of Books [in November 2025], the storm is coming. Where are we at now, a couple months later? 

Mark Lilla: The interview was really about what I call these chthonic forces that are at work ideologically on the right now—which are coming from, in some sense, below, and not from right and left. There's an ambient apocalypticism, and apocalypticism is something that I've studied and thought a lot about in a religious context and also in relation to communism in the 20th-century: transpos[ing] messianic fever into politics. But the word apocalypse doesn't mean that everything just gets destroyed; it means the dawn of the new era. What I feel as ambient now, [is a] kind of nihilistic urge. [There’s] no sense of what it takes to build, [no] sense of the fragility of things. 

It's one thing for that to exist in Trump and Trumpian followers, and the Peter Thiels of the world, and so on; it's another when that exists without a huge cultural pushback. But there's something about it that seems weirdly in tune with the times, in a way I can't put my finger on. And for me, that's the most unsettling. 

Dhriti Jagadish: Thanks so much for your time.

Mark Lilla: This was terrific.