Dissent from the 1950s to determine the failures and successes of cold war liberalism
Barkan, Joanne
NO SERIOUS American magazine of the early 1950s championed the blend of politics that the future founders of Dissent espoused: unwavering opposition to both Stalinism and McCarthyism along with...
...They broke off all collaboration with communists, purged their ranks of fellow travelers, and denounced utopian thinking of any kind...
...They were straining so hard to prove themselves the staunchest of anticommunists, realistic, and responsible that they regularly betrayed their own principles...
...Probably most telling from Dissent's perspective was Schlesinger's failure DISSENT / Summer 2006 97 to condemn the 1940 Smith Act, which outlawed teaching or advocating the overthrow of the United States government by force...
...Are there any pitfalls in their thinking or pressures they encountered that are relevant now...
...In 1956, the fight was over weakening the civil rights position, and it took place among the liberals...
...They gave up what they considered a romantic attachment to the working class...
...The second version is not primarily hawkish...
...During the postwar economic boom, the U.S...
...He stressesd using the ADAs founding meeting in 1947 as the model for cleaning house— for ridding today's Democratic Party of dovish activists just as the ADA rid itself of fellow travelers...
...And yet, in the last year or two, some liberals have been trying to sell the cold war warriors as the best model for reshaping today's liberalism...
...In those years, the lesser-of-twoevils argument—don't waste your vote on a third party candidate because electing the Democrat will make a difference for many people—didn't carry much weight...
...Not all prominent liberals failed the test all of the time, and Dissent reported on disputes among the liberals...
...Is "look at what cold war liberals said, not at what they did" a persuasive argument...
...When Senator Kefauver, who is a politician from Tennessee and not a statesman from Illinois, took a more forthright stand on integration than Stevenson, the New Republic complained that Kefauver was playing for and with the Negro vote...
...they sat through ADA and United Auto Worker conventions...
...Others, including Howe, voted for Stevenson (with many a qualifying adverb— hesitantly, conditionally, critically . . . ); they hoped to bolster any liberal-labor tendency hidden within the loose structure of the Democratic Party...
...Schlesinger's acclaimed 1949 book The Vital Center was the acknowledged philosophical and political manifesto for cold war liberalism Close to sixty years after its publication, Schlesinger's book has made a comeback— sometimes as an example of engaged but realistic left-of-center politics, sometimes (much less plausibly) as a blueprint for single-issue militancy...
...Autumn 1954] • On the Montgomery bus boycott: ". . . surely, one might suppose, on this matter the liberals would speak out clearly...
...At the time, excessive compromise on liberal values was disabling the United States abroad: support for Chiang Kai-Shek, a treaty with Spain's fascist dictator, sponsoring the overthrow of an elected government in Guatemala, financing the French colonial war in Vietnam—these U.S...
...Between article and book, Beinart moved from the first to the second version of a new liberalism...
...Max Awner, Winter 1957] • From a review of The Affluent Society by liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "Galbraith also contends that genuine inequality no longer exists...
...The second sentence read, "Hard-boiled eggheads of what might be called the devitalized center, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., have welcomed this work...
...Lewis Coser, Winter 1954] • After Congress passed the Humphrey Communist Control Act which outlawed the American Communist Party, Howe imagined how Henry Adams might have reacted: " . . . after August 1954 American liberalism could never again speak, except with the most vulgar of hypocrisies, in the name of either liberty or liberalism...
...an image of a problem-creating and problem-solving society...
...This contradictory stance had Dissenters playing the gloomy naysayer role unnecessarily...
...Howe responded—on the mark, I think—that there's a difference between blinking occasionally and keeping your eyes shut, "between expediency within the framework of principle and expediency that undermines and rots away principle...
...So Dissent was born in the winter of 1954...
...they understood the dangers of utopianism equally well...
...The sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience...
...The stance doesn't admit much doubt about how that power has been used in recent years...
...And then, to top it off, the New Republic proposed that the 'emotional race issue' be dropped from the political campaign . . . . And then Reinhold Niebuhr, a man of God...
...The new wrinkle is reaching back to the initial strategy of the cold war liberals—containment, reconstruction, multilateralism, and restraint on U.S...
...Of course, Dissent covered much more during the 1950s than the inadequacies of the liberals...
...He supported the war in Iraq and the thinking of the Bush administration that led to it...
...Dissent's editors didn't find their role as "radical gadfly to the labor-liberal movement" an intellectual thrill, but, as Howe wrote in Spring 1955, "the sad truth is that within the next few years the problem of civil liberties, if it is to be met at all, will have to be met primarily by the liberals, for it is they rather than the socialists who will be in a position to take decisive action...
...NO SERIOUS American magazine of the early 1950s championed the blend of politics that the future founders of Dissent espoused: unwavering opposition to both Stalinism and McCarthyism along with a commitment to the socialist ideal...
...The book's later chapters review the rise of jihad, liberal responses, shifts in conservative foreign policy, war in Iraq, and the 2004 presidential race...
...I'm not convinced...
...From Dissent's viewpoint, liberal intellectuals had thrown away their leverage by making support for the Democrats almost a matter of principle...
...Yet one of the most prominent ADA founders, Eleanor Roosevelt, not only approved the plank, she called on blacks to adopt "the wisdom of leadership for the whole country, and not for any particular group alone"—a woeful shift from her previous pioneering support for black civil rights...
...power—for the model...
...For some, voting for Democrats required too great a compromise...
...The new publication did fill a void...
...Elven Adams, inured as he was to the ways of the world and the ways of Congress, felt himself a little dismayed, a trifle shocked that not one of the liberals in the Senate —neither Douglas, who was reputed to be a scholar, nor Lehman, whom he had taken to be a man of integrity, nor Morse, who had preened himself on being a man of courage— dared, or desired, to mention the simple fact that the law their clever colleague [Hubert Humphrey] had initiated was not merely absurd but monstrous . . . . And then when Adams read that the association of intellectual liberals [Americans for Democratic Action—ADA] declared through its spokesman, a distinguished professor of history at Harvard [Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.], that 'it took no position' on the idea of 'outlaw,' he felt a sickening at heart...
...Along the way, he decided that supporting the Iraq War had been a mistake...
...Written by Bernard Rosenberg, the review ran under the telling title, "The Economics of Self-Congratulation...
...Galbraith proposed that bigness generated counter-bigness: powerful private interests bred the organized countervailing power of those who were subjugated...
...The review analyzed inconsistencies and lapses in logic to the point that anyone might have wondered why the theory enthralled liberals...
...I find myself cheering the passion with which the magazine tried to safeguard liberal values...
...I am not engaged in the game of berating the liberals for not being socialists...
...On civil liberties, however, Beinart does describe several instances when the liberals betrayed their own fine pronouncements...
...Midway through the century that produced communism and fascism, they wanted to salvage a democratic socialist vision...
...Howe made a succinct comment about the dilemma in Dissent's inaugural issue: "[I]n the absence of any significant socialist movement, it is a problem of tenth-rate importance, almost a matter of personal choice...
...In The Vital Center, Schlesinger used similar notions of creative tension and never-ending change to describe what the good liberal society would look like...
...In return, according to the plan, Democrats would win national elections with the votes of securityminded Americans...
...It contains Beinart's proposal for a new liberalism —a proposal like the second version I've sketched above and one that I find for the most part compelling...
...The Vital Center does include a few hints at future shortcomings...
...Among cold war modelers, the New Republic's Peter Beinart stands out for having promoted both versions...
...The witch-hunting atmosphere did create constant pressure to conform, but that didn't excuse the public intellectuals, whose only job was to speak out, or politicians, whose job was to lead...
...The liberals maintained that they, unlike their left critics, had serious responsibilities in the real world...
...In the Spring 1955 issue, he stressed, "One thing should be clear...
...Dissent reported on this conflict in Autumn 1956...
...Racial segregation at home further eroded America's reputation as "leader of the free world...
...We can not dodge this challenge without renouncing our highest moral pretensions...
...Of such stuff were American heroes made in the middle of the twentieth century...
...In 1948 Hubert Humphrey led the successful battle against the Dixiecrats for a strong civil rights plank—a victory so important that the ADA features it on its Web site today...
...Occasionally, however, they allowed this to undermine their argument that the liberals could do much more...
...This worked as long as the utopia wasn't too utopian—that is, as long as it wasn't perfect or static...
...Beinart never explains why today's Americans—by his lights, insular, fearful, prey to manipulation, and tax phobic—would join the liberals' new good fight...
...Dulles attempts to influence the outcome of the German elections or when Mr...
...the economy had achieved a balance of "countervailing powers...
...It rejects the hubristic thinking that led the U.S...
...Liberal intellectuals preferred not to rock the boat when dealing with the Democratic Party: pushing hard would have violated their cold war identity as realistic and responsible— the identity so carefully elaborated at ADA's founding meeting in 1947 and so clearly documented in The Vital Center...
...Under the influence of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, they made human imperfectability (sinfulness for Niebuhr) and irrationality inescapable factors in politics...
...the writing is repetitious...
...Joe Rauh of the ADA called the new, weakened plank "a step backward...
...The argument is for a very hawkish liberalism that embraces U.S...
...the actual tone throughout the decade was mostly harsh, but it wasn't self-righteous...
...Chastened by the rise of fascism and the advance of communism, the cold war liberals placed the struggle against totalitarianism at the center of their politics in the late 1940s...
...He argued for the first in an article called "The Fighting Faith" (Dec...
...And it doesn't explore the fact that the cold war liberals didn't win the cold war...
...W]e should at least avoid the double-talk and word-magic that is so popular today...
...To vote for the bourgeois candidate or not— the question is probably as old as the socialist movement, and the basic arguments have never changed...
...Howe, Winter 1954] • On American imperialism: "Most liberals profess to believe that one can speak only of imperialism when referring to the bad old days...
...The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress for six of the eight sessions from 1945 through 1960...
...Dissent didn't set the bar for principled action for liberals...
...The final chapter has the most to offer...
...Dissent writers paid attention to party platforms, union documents, and the statements 96 DISSENT / Summer 2006 of organizations identified with liberals, such as the American Committee on Cultural Freedom...
...JOANNE BARKAN is a writer who lives in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts...
...The Democratic Party leadership would adopt a foreign policy much like the neoconservative policy adopted by the Bush administration after the attacks of September 11, 2001: aggressive efforts (including the use of military force as in Iraq) to defeat Islamist totalitarianism and to bring freedom and democracy to the Muslim world...
...I found The Vital Center a more repetitious and less invigorating read than Mattson did, but I was struck by how left-leaning its tone and program are...
...Labor leader and ADA founder Walter Reuther described it as "a broad sociological observation robbing America of the credential it needs to lead in the free world...
...and that radiant belief permitted some of them to slide over into the inevitable next step—that is, to believe that they, at least, were already perfect...
...They had proposed "a frank and friendly dialogue with liberal opinion" in the inaugural issue...
...It sees Islamist fundamentalism as a dire threat in a globalized world but not the only terrible threat...
...After winning back both the Senate and House in the 1954 midterm elections, the Democrats announced they would adopt an attitude of "coalition" toward the administration...
...For example, both Dissent and the liberals supported a large-scale aid program for Asia...
...Rosenberg concluded, "Galbraith's voice is but one in a mighty chorus of affirmationism that swells sonorously as it drowns out dissent...
...Schlesinger's comment in The Vital Center about nineteenth-century utopians applies to DISSENT / Summer 2006 99 utopians in general: The Utopians believed man to be perfectible...
...Rosenberg showed how Galbraith introduced so many exceptions to his theory in sector after sector of the economy that very few cases conformed...
...Liberal intellectuals—primary among them, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—had done so in the early postwar years...
...It would be more useful if Beinart had analyzed why the liberals didn't adhere to their principles and original strategy...
...an overview of the era comprises the first three chapters of his book...
...13, 2004...
...One can almost hear the 1950s Dissenters groaning, "If only the liberals were half . . . no, even a quarter so true to their principles...
...some political expediency was the price of getting candidates elected and legislation passed...
...And in the decade that produced the great American celebration of prosperity and freedom along with McCarthyism, they needed to take on the liberals...
...I don't think this is an adequate position in most elections, but in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration wasn't challenging the New Deal, and the Democrats weren't challenging the Eisenhower administration...
...Howe wrote in the Spring 1955 issue that "people like Senator Humphrey have the ADA over a barrel: they know they can do or say almost anything and still be sure of its support...
...What they actually did, in the heat of the red scare," he writes, "was not always as admirable [as what they said...
...For Peter Beinart of the New Republic, Schlesinger's vision of an anticommunist politics works as a model for the struggle against Islamic totalitarianism (more on Beinart later...
...But Reuther and his followers have, temporarily at least, taken a back seat in the union omnibus...
...Big business spawned big labor...
...Much of the material is too familiar to be very engaging...
...Shortly before the presidential election in autumn 1956, Howe wrote, "Not so long ago, Walter Reuther said that 'you cannot have Mr...
...Irving Howe (one of six editorial board members) wrote in the inaugural issue, "American radicals can do at least this much: . . . try to raise the traditional banner of personal freedom that is now slipping from the hands of so many accredited spokesmen of liberalism...
...Eastland [segregationist Democratic senator from Mississippi] and have us at the same time.' Well, Stevenson has them both, and on terms that hardly do credit to the fighting spirit of anyone but Eastland...
...But does this new liberalism need the cold war as a model...
...When it railed against McCarthyism and berated the waffling liberals, no one could dismiss it as soft on communism...
...Naturally, they insisted on the heed for radical change—beating that druni was part of their mission...
...Rosenberg's answer, echoed in other Dissent articles, sounds right: the theory affirmed that the United States was unique, strong, and secure—a stable society of wrangling but equal interests...
...The article generated a wave of commentary —favorable from foreign policy hawks, critical from those who considered what happened during the cold war...
...they celebrated the glories of American capitalism while millions of citizens lived in poverty...
...But in the 1950s, he and other liberal intellectuals championed a more static, complacent interpretation of American reality: ideological struggle in society had ceased...
...they accepted a reactionary foreign policy that had the United States supporting dictators around the world while peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America struggled for liberation...
...But they have not...
...The fact remains that the voice that is speaking for labor today is that of George Meany...
...The New Republic in its infatuation with Adlai Stevenson . . . has been visibly suffering in its efforts to evade recognizing the fact that its candidate has irrevocably disgraced himself on the Negro question...
...They did not defend civil liberties vigorously during a time of witch hunts and manipulated mass fear...
...DISSENT / Summer 2006 95 the term elicits for them an image of the marines landing in a Banana Republic or British troops lording it in India...
...John Kenneth Galbraith (also an ADA founder) developed the theory of countervailing powers to explain why the U.S...
...Reading those back issues, one gets the impression that the editors tried not to miss a beat (not easy for a quarterly...
...In its first issue, Dissent carried a detailed review of Gailbraith's 1952 book American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power...
...his American admirers might at least have raised a whisper, or a whimper, of protest when he came out with praise for Chiang Kai-Shek (which led one political wag to remark: keep that man away from Madrid...
...power...
...Long before the Vietnam War, their actions betrayed their principles so often that one would not expect them to be resurrected as heroes...
...The liberals had to wrestle with the party's Dixiecrat wing, but they had the numbers and weight to put up a much better fight...
...For example, waffling on civil rights for blacks and acquiescing to Eisenhower's foreign policy get no mention...
...It doesn't factor in any of the significant differences between communism and Islamist totalitarianism (the role of state actors, the nature of the ideological appeal, and so on...
...The Dissenters saw the left wing of the labor movement getting into the same bind under Walter Reuther's leadership...
...It didn't make sense for Dissenters to exaggerate the difficulties of positive change in "actually existing" America...
...Defeating Islamist totalitarianism, he wrote, must be "liberalism's north star" just as defeating Soviet totalitarianism once was...
...IT'S IMPORTANT to recall that the liberals had considerable political leverage as well as responsibility...
...For Dissenters, imagining a "world more attractive" was a useful tool for measuring political choices in the real world against the highest standards...
...fighting communism abroad required compromises...
...Put into practice, the liberalism of The Vital CenterSchlesinger's "fighting faith"—would have been welcomed, for the most part, by the 1950s Dissenters...
...The policies it chose instead —for example, financing France's renewed colonial war in Indochina (begun under the Truman administration)—cost immea98 DISSENT / Summer 2006 surably more in the long run...
...BY THE 195os, the founders of Dissent had no illusions about the impending demise of capitalism...
...each got at least some of what it wanted, while society as a whole prospered...
...They were entirely right to worry about the link between utopia-building—be it superrace empire or worldwide cooperative of equals—and totalitarianism...
...The pitch comes in two versions...
...He illustrated his point with a Hasidic tale: Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me, `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?' " In its demands upon the liberals, we may assume, heaven will be similarly modest, But it is a modesty that is also profoundly exacting...
...102 DISSENT / Summer 2006...
...Here, unfortunately, he has taken up the myth of the rich, happy and powerful worker, a myth that now flourishes in the best places . . ." [Ben B. Seligman, Winter 1959] THE VOICE OF DISSENT in the 1950s on civil liberties, civil rights, social justice, and foreign policy sounds first-rate to me—uncompromising and pointed...
...When Mr...
...Many of the magazine's founders had dedicated themselves earlier to building socialist organizations...
...But cold war liberalism as the model to follow might be more of a controversial distraction than anything else...
...Liberal intellectuals felt completely at home there: it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's party...
...In Spring 1954, Howe and Stanley Plastrik described their utopianism in an essay called "Images of Socialism": Today, in an age of curdled realism, it is necessary to assert the utopian image...
...The one time he mentions it, he notes only that the American Communists hailed the law when it was used against the Trotskyists but denounced it when it was used against them...
...Perhaps such a process is going on...
...It acknowledges that the United States must earn the esteem of other nations and rebuild its legitimacy as a world leader...
...Beinart quotes some effective rhetoric from Schlesinger, Niebuhr, and Harry Truman...
...In the 1950s, they envied the British their Labour Party: now that was a party worth arguing about...
...government to invade Iraq...
...Yet they continued to believe that imagining "the good society" was an intrinsically human impulse, that it probably coincided with human history —a credible intuition, I think...
...economy worked so well despite the fact that huge oligarchic corporations were in control, and competition had largely disappeared from major economic sectors...
...In short, it's a position that many liberals and leftists (including many Dissent writers) have held since September 11, 2001...
...Here is a sampling of its politics: • "The job of liberalism . . . was to devote itself to the maintenance of individual liberties and to the democratic control of economic life—and to brook no compromise, at home or abroad, on either of these two central tenets...
...He passes too lightly over liberal shortcomings in the 1950s...
...He also looked more closely at the cold war...
...In the 1950s, however, liberals rarely underscored the inequality and injustice that marred American society...
...The present design of our foreign policy, then, is to carry out the reconstruction/containment policy in Europe and to develop some more complex and limited equivalent in the underdeveloped lands...
...Historically, the road between them had run straight...
...The Dissent socialists were as antitotalitarian as the liberals...
...they had supported socialist candidates...
...Nixon warns the Indonesians against "premature" independence, it is inexcusable to deny that these acts constitute imperialist intervention in the affairs of other nations...
...Consider the taxation, upon the population at large or the corporate interests or both . . . Consider the competitive danger a vigorous industrialized Asia might then present to the American capitalist economy . . . It is here that the liberals . . . fail to think through the implications of their ideas . . . . They fail to see that the battle for the mind of Asia can be successful only if and when Asia is presented with an image of a radically different America .. . This reasoning put the liberals in a no-win situation: what they wanted (in this case, aid to Asia as soon as possible) required something they couldn't possibly do (create a radically different America in the short term...
...the law should never have been passed and warranted immediate repeal...
...This would require breaking with the Democrats' dovish base—just as the cold war liberals broke with communists and fellow travelers...
...Whenever an infringement of civil liberties goes unchallenged, it sets a precedent...
...The circumstances required relentless critique...
...It served as a litmus test, as Michael Harrington pointed out in the Spring 1955 issue: "The kind of anti-Stalinism which follows from supporting the Smith Act, or even from supporting it with numerous qualifications as [liberal philosopher] Sidney Hook does, is fundamentally different from that which follows from condemning the Smith Act...
...acquiescence becomes the norm...
...individual acts of illiberalism finally add up to an illiberal age...
...UDGING COLD WAR liberalism by its laudable goals set in the late 1940s, one has to conclude that it failed in the 1950s...
...The reasons for the liberals' capitulation look shabbily mundane to me: political expediency, compulsive anticommunism that obliterated other crucial concerns, fear of the consequences of looking soft on the enemy...
...the struggle between two major classes simply didn't apply...
...It does not rule out the use of force but prefers containment and diplomacy over war...
...they sat out elections in the 1950s...
...For Schlesinger in The Vital Center, the party was also home to the postwar "noncommunist left," where a new generation of leaders such as Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson could carry forward what FDR began...
...Their Marxism had become largely vestigial...
...Writing in the New Leader, he granted that 'We can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel of patience . . . Yet, Stevenson is right [in offering such counsel].' " [Howe, Spring 1956] • On the newly united AFL-CIO and threatened civil liberties: "It might be expected that men like Walter Reuther and others of the former CIO, plus a handful of the more enlightened leaders of the old AFL, would recognize the dangers in this trend and exert their influence for more political balance in the labor federation...
...In his 1981 memoirs, Galbraith reevaluated his theory of countervailing power: "I made it far more inevitable and rather more equalizing than, in practice, it ever is...
...Here are a few characteristic samples of Dissent as gadfly: • On the occasion of Adlai Stevenson's 1953 world tour as the emissary of American liberalism...
...Kevin Mattson, for example, reconsidered the book in Dissent (Winter 2005) and found it a powerful account of nonhubristic, pluralist liberalism...
...Consider the conflict over civil rights in the Democratic Party platforms of 1948 and 1956...
...It emphasizes foreign aid for development in Muslim countries and cooperation with allies...
...As the Dissenters saw it, the liberals were simply not doing their job...
...Men in a conviction of infallibility can sacrifice humanity without compunction on the altar of some abstract and special good...
...government could have financed a useful aid program for Asia...
...It did not seem to occur to the NR that Stevenson might be playing for the Southern vote...
...Magazines like the Nation, still tainted with the politics of communist fellow travelers, couldn't play that role...
...Dissenters, meanwhile, longed for a left alternative to the Democratic Party...
...I]t is in the revival of the free left, in America and through the world, that the answer to Communism lies...
...Not having a comfortable home might make any group of like-minded intellectuals dream of its own magazine, but actually founding one—taking on the work, the responsibility, the headaches—usually requires more motivation...
...The future Dissenters had their motivation...
...the power of retail suppliers spawned supermarket chains and mega-stores like Sears, and so on...
...In the 1950s, Dissent's founders saw no good reason why their liberal contemporaries couldn't be true liberals...
...Those were not the glory days of "the fighting faith": the warriors were neither valiant nor victorious...
...Dissent, however, considered the Smith Act a proven menace that limited the rights of free speech and free association...
...policies made the communists look like the better ally to oppressed peoples around the globe...
...THE ONLY MAJOR political vehicle for change in the 1950s was the Democratic Party...
...But this can be done meaningfully only if it is an image of social striving, tension, conflict...
...If the cold warriors had been as "profoundly exacting" with themselves as Rabbi Zusya expected heaven to be with him, we'd be living in a very different— and most likely better—world today...
...It links the expansion of democracy and equality abroad to their improvement at home...
...When the editors defended the civil liberties of leftists like Paul Sweezy, whose politics they disliked intensely, no one could accuse them of shielding an ally as opposed to upholding a principle...
...There is no 'clear and present danger' resulting from the political agitation of Communism which cannot be handled by constitutional methods...
...But if you read through one issue after another, you get an ongoing account of the moral blunders and failures of nerve of intellectuals, politicians, and union leaders...
...By the 1950s, the liberals were championing the end of ideology...
...American society had become a lattice of productively contending interest groups— from business and labor to farmers, veterans, minority groups, and seniors...
...It calls for replicating the single-mindedness of the cold war liberals but ignores what they actually did...
...Some eighteen months later, Beinart has come out with a book: The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again...
...They questioned the relevance, even the existence, of social classes in the United States...
...Yet, at the same time, the magazine's writers maintained that responsibility for decisive action on many issues rested with the liberals...
...When Dissenters argued along these lines, they condemned liberals to the political wilderness where some socialists languished: nothing worthwhile can be done without changing the system...
...But Howe argued in Summer 1954 that an effective program, costing $30 billion or $40 billion, would require structural reforms that the liberals wouldn't, or couldn't, contemplate...
...they equivocated on civil rights just when southern blacks were building a movement...
...The first is an argument that today's liberals should make the war against Islamist totalitarianism 100 DISSENT / Summer 2006 as central to their ideology and politics as the crusade against communism was for cold war liberals...
...And several early cold war policies—the Marshall Plan and the founding of the United Nations among them— DISSENT / Summer 2006 101 should be precedents...
...Understanding why the old one faltered in its first decade might generate ideas for a more successful politics...
...Consider how different the whole politicalsocial atmosphere in this country would have to be before such a proposal could even be seriously discussed...
...Politicians could have sold aid for Asia to voters the same way they sold the Marshall Plan for Europe—as the most effective option to combat communism abroad...
...they were the minority party only in 1947- 1948 and 1953- 1954...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
