Mark Lilla took his career, if not his life, into his hands by writing an op-ed that he knew would make people’s heads explode. Even worse, his break from the progressive orthodoxy would mean that he was now a shitlord, racist, sexist, neo-Nazi, dog-killer and glutton-eater. Come up with a name that would make a progressive ball up in the corner and cry, and that would be LIlla.

For those of us who, like Lilla, realized that the politics of identity would never succeed, dooming us to the rule of Darth Cheeto, he looked a little too much like Gertrude. But then, he was trying to make a point, and a point is of little use if the people who need to get it won’t consider it.

But instead of crying about all the really mean names he was called, he wrote a book. Because they love us, the New York Times had Yale history prof Beverly Gage review it.

Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.”

Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly meanspirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

While the first reaction of some will be to question the efficacy of Lilla’s effort, given that his message is directed toward progressive captors of the alternative to Trump, the second is to see the conundrum. How does he tell the true believers that their god is dead?

With “The Once and Future Liberal,” Lilla expands his scope to include the last 80 years of American politics, a period when the liberal “Roosevelt Dispensation” gave way to the conservative “Reagan Dispensation” (with deleterious consequences). He also fleshes out his vision of what should lie ahead — not just “the end of identity liberalism” but the start of a new liberalism focused on citizenship, duty and shared purpose. All too often, however, Lilla opts for attitude over substance. Though he calls for liberals to adopt “a coldly realistic view of how we live now,” he spends much of his book jeering from afar at millennial “social justice warriors,” whose “resentful, disuniting rhetoric” supposedly destroyed a once-great liberal tradition.

For anyone who’s enjoyed a first year law student admonishing a senior federal judge not to be “condescending,” but to respect his opinion, this comes as no surprise. There is no means by which one can challenge the empty platitudes of youth, because they’re right, truth and justice. If you don’t appreciate intersectionalism, it’s not because it’s nonsensical but you’re just not sufficiently woke.

Ironically, the very same tabloid that proffered this deeply triggering review simultaneously proved Lilla’s point.

For the past week, I have seen hate thriving in plain sight. I am disgusted. I am angry. I am worried. And I keep thinking about how different things would be if Hillary Clinton had been elected president. I was, like so many of us, wildly overconfident about her chances. Her presidency was a certainty in my mind and in my heart. And then, it wasn’t.

Did she mention how she felt? Yes, it’s none other than the putative puppy-killer, Roxane Gay. In contrast to Lilla’s call to stop being a flaming narcissist because “no one is interested in your personal testimony,” All About Me is all she’s got.

I don’t think that I, as an individual, could have swayed the election in a meaningful way but I know I could have done so much more and I did not. I hold myself accountable for that. I am increasingly concerned with accountability because our country is being led by a man who believes he is accountable only to himself and enriching his coffers rather than the more than 300 million people he was so narrowly elected to lead and serve.

It pains me to think about what could have been. It is even more difficult to face the way things are. Every single morning, I am tense as I check the news, wondering what the president has tweeted overnight.

One thing is indisputable. The “I” key on her computer is working. And there is nothing she believes more convincing to you than her feelings. Don’t you want to know what Roxane Gay feels? Once you hear her tell you all about her, how can it not dictate your beliefs? And lest you think this is due solely to some horrible kiln accident, bear in mind that somebody in the editorial department of the New York Times totally agrees with Gay, that you need to read all about her feelings so you will learn how you are supposed to feel as well.

We are on a precipice. What happened in Charlottesville is not the end of something but, rather, the beginning. And it is from this precipice that I am reminded of everything I did not do during the 2016 election. Hindsight reminds me that resistance must be active, and constant. Resistance is the responsibility of everyone who believes in equality and demands the eradication of racism, anti-Semitism [?] and the hatred that empowers bigots to show their truest selves in broad daylight. I am reminding myself that I should never allow my fears to quiet me. I have a voice and I am going to use it, as loudly as I can.

And this is exactly what Lilla contends hands a nation over to Darth Cheeto, because the louder a narcissist like Roxane Gay screams all about Roxane Gay, the more people back away. The narcissist is certain that their feelings are not merely absolutely right, because no one could possibly disagree, but are themselves sufficient to direct a nation of good thinkers to the promised land.

Does that put Lilla in a Catch-22, arguing that salvation lies on a path in the opposite direction of Gay, but that the Gays of the world can’t possibly grasp any possibility that all paths don’t lead to them? Gay has the answer that Mark Lilla lacks.