Liberalism in Decline
IN 1957, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. publiShed The Crisis of the Old Order, the first of three books on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. It chronicled the end of an era in American life...
...In the end, few went away satisfied...
...T HE NEW DEAL WAS AN ATTACK BY A coalition of the Left on the previous order of economic, politicAl and social privilege...
...Emerging victorious from its battles with the Left and Right, it now asserted that agenda as the dominant vision and program of the Great Age of American Empire...
...Liberalism had promised a place in the game, in time, to all those who organized...
...Right, which had been discontented and disorganized under Roosevelt, experienced a renaissance as the war ended...
...Liberalism mastered the art of defense spending as well as it had mastered red-baiting...
...Others refined it over the years...
...Liberalism has failed...
...By identifying itself with the New Deal, post-war Liberalism sought continuity and historic resonance for its -proposed political agenda...
...military presence and corporate investment...
...Big business, which had been political anathema after the Depression, regained much of its lost prestige...
...T HE THIRD CRISIS OF LIBERALISM WAS the crisis of equality...
...No historic necessity compels conflict over resources...
...Quoted in Kenneth M. Dobleare and Patricia Dobleare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1971), p. 7 5 . 16...
...7 15...
...For all their vast differences in values and objectives they end up tacit partners in a common assault on civility and democracy...
...Daniel Bell, one of the intellectual architects of Liberalism, projected the liberal vision onto the international stage when he wrote in 1960: "In the West, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of the Welfare State, the desirability of decentralized power, a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism...
...The United States represents its polar opposite and offers the world an alternative vision, which it must aggressively promulgate worldwide in order to contain Soviet influence...
...Fundamental questions entered the political arena for the first time...
...7. Ibid...
...wrote that locking the door against the communists "must be accompanied by the cleaning up of the house: our policy must secure the inhabitants against the desperation which breeds totalitarianism by seeking to restore them to a state of economic and political health...
...Post-war prosperity made their demands for reform seem irrelevant, and their own disillusionment with the Cold War caused them to withdraw from politics and reconsider their strategy...
...The threat was REPORT ON THE AMERICASE 0 0 S 0~ 0t A Moral Vision Compromised communism...
...Unrepresented sectors of American society won their first opportunity to shape a more egalitarian future for the United States...
...It chronicled the end of an era in American life with the Great Depression and proclaimed Roosevelt's 1932 election as the beginning of a new age...
...Again, Arthur Schlesinger, this time on the tumult of the late 1960s: "[T]he New Left and the New Right are agreed in their condemnation of the central institutions of American power...
...Liberalism defined international politics as a competition between two diametrically opposed systems...
...Norton and Company, 1976), chapter 16...
...Crisis management means overselling the remedy of the moment-Vietnamization, elections, aid to El Salvador-and remaining inflexible in its defense...
...24 The American Century lasted only two decades...
...With conflict over the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and with Great Britain and the United States in sharp disagreement with the Soviet Union over the disposition of Poland and a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Right heated up its anti-comSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 33Reo4t, o, th Americas Are the Democrats Different...
...Borrowing from the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, they devised strategies to manage demand through taxation, governmental spending and control of the money supply...
...The popularity of the witch hunts shocked the liberals...
...1 14...
...the feminist and gay rights movements challenged traditional definitions of male and female sexuality...
...now it ceased...
...The ancient myths of Liberalism are governmental economic management, social reform, the battle against the isolationist, provincial and racist Right at home and fascism abroad...
...Communism would shrivel before its brilliance...
...By the time of the Carter Administration, belttightening and restraint were the new slogans to encourage popular acceptance of harsh new realities...
...This translated into a clear message of liberals' basic loyalty to ,capitalism-but, they insisted, a form of capitalism that recognized the need for reform in the interests of social stability...
...Ibid...
...Policymakers conceived of each society on earth as the outcome of the play of plural interests, and demanded that each conform to their vision, no matter how great the gulf between rich and poor...
...As value conflicts grew more intense, the capacity to resolve them within the framework of interest group bargaining grew more strained...
...They worked-as in the United States-to create the conditions for economic growth and dissipate social tension by creating a middle class...
...From this vantage point, it opened fire on communists, fellow-travellers, "pinkos" and "comsymps"-all those who launched the New Deal, repealed prohibition, got us into war or sold us out at Yalta-to name just some of the grievances that simmered while "that man"--one of the Right's more polite epithets for Roosevelt--sat in the White House...
...Liberalism dictated the framework of political debate in the post-war period, and was the glue that held together the disparate parts of the Democratic Party...
...6. Government regulates business and provides social assistance, either directly or indirectly through aid to the private sector (for example, in the form of housing subsidy programs) to ensure all citizens enough security to prevent social upheaval...
...Their political antecedents included Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" reformism and the populist and socialist politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to which the "progressives" also traced their heritage...
...3. Both in the United States and, to a lesser ex- tent, abroad, social reform is essential to preserve capitalism and prevent the triumph of communism...
...Liberals acknowledge that the law reflects powerful interests and that procedures create buClinton, Louisiana, 1964 reaucracies, but lament that no better way exists...
...The "New Economists" were at a loss to explain the continuing inflation that was further boosted by higher oil prices and fuelled by the lack of competition within the economy...
...A full-scale cultural revolution has occurred in the United States during the last 35 years, made possible in large part by the liberal promise of equality and the availability of new economic resources...
...One of the gurus of this New Economics, Paul Samuelson, celebrated what then seemed the absolute ability to control the crises of capitalism: "The New Economics really does work...
...the other was the Marshall Plan, a massive economic aid program to rebuild Europe...
...As Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1949, "[A] true progressive movement has no chance for success unless it rigidly excludes communists...
...millions of others had a new goal to strive toward...
...20 The booming economy sought new markets, resources and investment opportunities...
...11...
...Ibid., p.7 6 . 17...
...racism intensified group conflicts...
...Wolfe, America's Impasse, chapters 9 and 10...
...Hopes for that peace quickly soured...
...Without procedures to structure the bargaining, social harmony would be lost and class struggle would lead to crisis and be exploited by the communistswho, after eliminating capitalism, would substitute the domination of the working class for the competition of interests...
...2 If business plays by the liberals' rules, it will prosper, immune to threats from the extreme Right or Left...
...In the wake of the Depression, many of them were anti-capitalist and REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32internationalist...
...They were intrigued with-if not outright partisans of-the Soviet Union, influenced by Marxism and hopeful of a new era of peace and justice...
...Reconstruction aid, they reasoned, should not come unilaterally from the United States but through the newly formed United Nations, in keeping with what many of them believed was Roosevelt's desire to build a multilateral framework for post-war peace...
...They may be a long process...
...Unlike most immigrants who had come to America to seek their fortunes and escape injustice, black people had arrived-against their will-as slaves...
...If there was even one rebel who could be called a communist or Marxist, the resort to arms would be considered extremism...
...New ideas" were discussed and new policies proposed, but they lacked coherence...
...Its basis, less evident at the time than it is in retrospect, was the sustained economic growth which followed World War II...
...In that sense too, the ideological age has ended...
...Liberals date the birth of their doctrine to 1932...
...T HE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES IS a history of crusades and mission...
...The Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s are testimony...
...The counterweight to this strain of deep pessimism is an optimism that celebrates the uniqueness and transcendence of "America" and harks back to the older tradition of "American exceptionalism...
...Of eight post-war presidents, only three-Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson--could be labelled "liberals," and none of them was a bornand-bred member of the club...
...Phillips, Post-Conservative America...
...As U.S...
...At the heart of Liberalism, there ultimately lies a theological assessment of humanity and its prospects...
...Through a complex process of political negotiation that includes pressure, propaganda, lobbying, buying, intimidating and voting, these "interest groups" can participate in and add to the total power accumulated in the government...
...The keystone to foreign policy would, then, be the political, economic and military containment of the enemy-the Soviet Union...
...The Soviets did not modify their system, and Third World nations did not reach out to embrace the American way...
...Poverty in the United States would be eliminated to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism...
...instead, through investment, reforms and the eradication of those who did not play by the rules, a new Vietnam would shine, built in the image of America...
...There would be no obsolete colonial networks...
...Its values dominated elite and popular discourse in the media, the churches, the universities and the arts...
...But the pressure for solutions was mounting...
...HisSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 31Are the Democr Ats Different...
...But at the same time, they were exploited by commercial interests to create a mass culture of hedonism sharply at odds with America's Puritan past...
...Two foreign policy issues decided the outcome: one was the Truman Doctrine and the U.S...
...Ibid...
...L IBERALS RECOGNIZED EARLY ON THE need for Washington to take charge of global management in the post-war era, and led the efforts to create the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and the CIA...
...Schlesinger, The Vital Center, pp.150, 156, 161...
...Adjusting the bargaining process to meet these conflicting demands was a Solomonic task...
...Internationally, the platform proposed a "world federal law" and a "world federal legislature," and called for worldwide disarmament "through the United Nations . . . to outlaw the atomic bomb, bacteriological warfare and all other instruments of 34mass destruction...
...Government is the public conscience that watches over the interests of the entire society...
...In the 1960s, Democratic administrations launched dramatic new programs to feed the hungry, re-build the cities and empower the poor...
...On one side were the "progressives," an alliance of trade unionists, black and church leaders, intellectuals and politicians...
...7. There are limits on government power...
...But just eight short years after John F. Kennedy's triumphal entry into Washington, liberals realized that time and money had run out...
...It mobilized the disenchantment of lower middle-class people and blue-collar workers who felt abused by big government...
...The liberals promptly charged the PCA with being a communist front...
...Faced with bitter right-wing attacks on their loyalty and patriotism, and the progressives' con- tinued insistence on peace with the Soviet Union and the primacy of the United Nations, the liberals paused to consider their political options and weigh the relative strength of their adversaries...
...All aspirations for justice are tainted by the lust for power...
...Schlesinger argued that the fits-and-starts experimentation of the Roosevelt Administration was ideologically coherent...
...The progressives formed their own Progressive Party, with Henry Wallace as their presidential candidate...
...3 The Progressives' platform denounced Democrats and Republicans alike as the champions of big business and declared themselves the true "political heirs of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln...
...John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in 1952, "In the United States alone there need not lurk behind modern programs of social betterment that fundamental dilemma that everywhere paralyzes the will of every responsible man, the dilemma between economic progress and the immediate increase of the real income of the masses...
...Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes, key advisers to Roosevelt, the prophets...
...Social science is an important discipline, and the university an essential adjunct of government...
...And the resources needed to overcome injustice taxed the pocketbook and the imagination...
...INETEEN FORTY-EIGHT WAS THE watershed year for the competing forces within the New Deal Coalition...
...In 1967, under attack from both left and right, Lyndon Johnson continued to press the Vietnam War...
...Liberals supported both measures...
...This climate brought paradoxical results...
...The U.S.-Soviet alliance of World War II snapped under the pressure...
...At the grassroots level, the renewed business demand for laissez-faire economics joined forces with isolationism, ultranationalism and know-nothingism to give birth to an ugly new politics of the Right...
...Liberalism the best political and economic strategy to preserve it...
...instead, foreign policy management was dispersed through a broad and inefficient bureaucracy...
...Both flew in the face of the wartime U.S./Soviet alliance and set the stage for the first Cold War...
...You can bet that the statisticians of the Kremlin know it...
...Liberal foreign policy in the Third World followed the pattern laid down by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan...
...Ibid...
...Organized under a new political banner after World War II, they called their movement "Liberalism...
...2" Economic prosperity provided the resources to dream bold dreams...
...It too was a casualty of post-war prosperity: its apology for a program compared poorly with the promises of Liberalism...
...it is shared with "groups" in society organized according to their "interests...
...8 VETERANS OF THE LIBERAL-PROGRESsive wars still argue over how to characterize the Progressive Party...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...Wherever the system squeaked, a new program was put in place...
...Liberalism, its defenders declared, was "toughminded," with a firm grip on realism, a commitment to freedom and "an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism...
...its spokespersons seem nostalgic relics of another time, figures of dubious trustworthiness for an uncertain future...
...The accountants who have been chalking up record profits know it . . . and so do the school nurses who measure the heights and weights of this generation...
...humanitarian aid programs...
...But, for post-war liberal historians to trace their lineage back in an unbroken line to 1932 is a selfserving revision of history...
...For liberals and the Right, it was a Communist Party front...
...Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: W.W...
...Main Street, which has been enjoying 92 months of advancing sales, knows it...
...HE SECOND CRISIS OF LIBERALISM was economic...
...Without a sense of the tragic one can veer toward the extremes, especially what liberal prophet Reinhold Niebuhr called the "utopian" extreme, which claims to uplift the masses only to use them for its own ends...
...within two years a prolonged economic decline was underway...
...It was powerful history, but it was also a work of consecration, celebrating FDR and the New Deal and invoking that tradition on behalf of new political forces for which Schlesinger was a leading ideologue...
...22 In due course, the inefficiency of rule by bargaining generated an impatience with everyday procedures that became almost a positive preference for crisis management as the only time government "worked...
...Somewhere in Vietnam there should stand a memorial which reads, "Liberalism - Mortally Wounded Here - 1958-1975...
...planes laid oily fire on farmlands and Operation Phoenix turned CIA operatives into death squad killers, the moral vision of Liberalism was fatally compromised...
...Meanwhile the Right exploited the crisis...
...6 It opposed the Marshall Plan and called for the expansion of U.N...
...The Soviet Union is the principal example and advocate of totalitarianism in the post-war world...
...their angriest voices demanded the use of nuclear weapons...
...In the trade union movement, the media and the universities, these tendencies quarrelled, even as they supported the New Deal...
...Liberalism was the ideology that explained and legitimated post-war prosperity and U.S...
...where the Right leads, Liberalism follows...
...Ibid., p.79...
...IN THIS NEW AGE, PROGRESSIVES, Marxists and communists were irrelevant...
...At the same time, continued economic growth required stimulation of demand, which in turn meant increased consumption...
...In Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, one of the founders of the ADA, led the fight to drive communists from the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party...
...In 1984, one of the last knights of the liberal roundtable, Walter Mondale, will do battle-final battle, many say-beneath its tattered standard...
...MMEDIATELY AFTER WORLD WAR II, liberal intellectuals such as Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr and Sidney Hook evolved the liberal credo...
...Their equation of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany led them to see fresh Munichs in every challenge to U.S...
...5. Ibid...
...Quoted in Hodgson, America in Our Time, p.75...
...To make matters worse, the U.S...
...On one hand, the movements for social and cultural freedom opened the way for personal liberation...
...The period from 1946-1954 was a bitter one in U.S...
...IBERALS VIEWED THEMSELVES AS heirs not only to the New Deal but to 19th Century Liberalism-the doctrine which had justified the expansion of European industrialization and celebrated the virtues of individualism, empiricism and gradualism, due process and limited government (the last rather paradoxical given the liberal emphasis on expanding state power...
...With the progressives off the field, the liberals turned their attention to the Right...
...It favored repeal of the peacetime draft and amnesty for all conscientious objectors during World War II...
...4 Conflict, however, can arise not only from class interests, but also from racial, ethnic, consumer and entrepreneurial interests...
...In Europe, meanwhile, a "Cold War" poisoned hopes of a new post-war order of peace and progress as the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain quarrelled over the spoils of war and jockeyed for spheres of influence...
...It condemned segregaHenry Wallace REPORT ON THE AMERICAS tion and discrimination and called for fair employment practices, an end to the poll tax in the South and the passage of a voting rights law...
...Embassy pressed to have the local political system remade on democratic lines...
...Social change is possible if one plays by the rules...
...Although women and minorities made important advances under Liberalism, they were not enough to overcome the effects of years of discrimination...
...It has witnessed no royalty or landed aristocracy, no tyrants or dictators, no peasants, no clashes between the landed and the industrializing, between bourgeoisie and proletariat...
...For Vietnam was the liberal's war...
...One must resist both "sentimental moralism" and "complacent" realism, and follow the middle way with its balance of morality and realism...
...The United States, its mode of government and its free enterprise system are a clean break with the past, an inspiration and model for the world...
...The Roosevelts-Franklin and Eleanor-are the godhead...
...Writing of the rationale for the Marshall Plan in his 1949 book, The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...The progressives-particularly the communists among them--charged that the liberals would eventually stop short of a challenge to big business and abandon workingclass interests...
...Only the middle way can preserve the delicate REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36fabric of society, the center between two equally hostile extremes...
...The old promises of prosperity for all gave way to lowered expectations...
...The ultimate threat posed by "godless communism" to the "American Way of Life" has been a useful-and often necessarytotem for bringing together the wavering factions of the foreign policy bureaucracy...
...It was the age of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood blacklist, the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy...
...Women and minority demands ultimately challenged the nature of social and cultural life in the United States...
...It achieved this first by acceding (albeit with little grace) to New Deal reforms and regulations, and second, by giving whole-hearted support to the war effort against the Axis powers...
...the objective to create a reformist, but non-communist, alternative to the Right...
...A short time before, the progressives had formed the Progressive Coalition of America (PCA), which sought to sustain the broad base of support for the New Deal agenda of domestic reform and international peace...
...But these remedies-affirmative action, bussing-now antagonized other minority groups, many of them workingclass people of European-immigrant origin who saw no reason why special favors should be extended to others that had never been made available to them...
...For a time, it seemed an extraordinary success...
...Through the Democratic Party, they were united with traditional regional interests, the vestiges of earlier reform movements and sympathizers of new doctrines of social transformation...
...9. Access to resources and "log-rolling" are the most celebrated political skills of Liberalism...
...For New Deal Liberalism and post-war Liberalism were two quite different visions...
...With U.S...
...The New Economics did not master capitalism's unruly ups and downs...
...Under the leadership of former Roosevelt adviser Rexford Tugwell and former Vice-President and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, the PCA followed a policy of open membership and allowed communist participation...
...IBERALISM'S FIRST CRISIS WAS INTERnational...
...Though attacked (still) by the Right as socialist, Liberalism wants private enterprise to succeed...
...This is permissible in the short term so that the system can work in the long term...
...munist crusade...
...Lawyers are therefore very important...
...It expressed small-town, small-business America's fear of government and big corporations and its sense of intimidation by unions...
...It was the political center between the extremism of Right and Left...
...9. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 1 8 2 et seq...
...Into the 1970s, stagnation became a chronic feature of the economy...
...T HE FOURTH CRISIS OF LIBERALISM was cultural...
...In the 1950s there was little substance to the Right's program beyond raw anti-communism and laissez faire...
...global hegemony virtually unchallenged, Liberalism urged an international regime of free trade...
...Appliances, cars, the suburbs-these were the American Dream incarnate, and they profoundly changed the way life was lived...
...No matter how haphazard and improvised Vietnam policy seemed, there lay behind it-as behind El Salvador policy-the goal of creating a mini-America...
...6. Ibid...
...SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 98435 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 35JReport o4 4t Am'erC s Are the Democrats Different...
...Richard Nixon, elected in the Republican blitz of 1946, won his first national exposure as one of the foremost Red hunters...
...But Joseph Starobin, former foreign editor of the Communist Daily Worker, wrote in 1972 that the ill-prepared CPUSA had been dragooned into supporting Wallace...
...In the 1930s and 1940s, U.S...
...Few had ever heard of Vietnam in 1960, but 15 years later its towns and villages-My Lai, Hue, Saigon-were household words...
...Instead of creating a single "foreign ministry," they allowed foreign policy agencies to proliferate as if they were interest groups...
...The U.S...
...elites-if possible, non-communist centrists and reformers...
...progressives opposed both, arguing that the Truman Doctrine violated the principles for which the war against fascism had been fought and that the Marshall Plan was needlessly antagonistic to the Soviets...
...Its most radical domestic plank advocated the nationalization of the "largest banks, the railroads, the merchant marine, the electric power and gas industries," as well as the aircraft, synthetic rubber and synthetic oil industries...
...The non-communist Left and the nonfascist Right must collaborate to keep society free...
...Business urged cutbacks in federal social spending...
...paredness that had haunted the Allied Powers at the outset of World War II...
...sin and evil are a part of history...
...Two tendencies competed for dominion within the coalition...
...By the time the Carter Administration took office, the rhetoric of those who defended liberal ideals sounded more and more like the clattering of empty cans...
...Today, the old order is again in crisis...
...This is "pluralism" in action...
...AS THE 1948 ELECTION APPROACHED, the liberals supported Harry Truman, though at first without enthusiasm...
...If interest groups are well-organized and well-advised, each can win some share of the pie, playing the complex game of bargaining through the legislatures, the courts and the bureaucracies...
...Quoted in Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals 1947-1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), p.65...
...1. Post-war American capitalism is the best economic system in the world...
...8. Ibid...
...It reflected historic Western and Midwestern resentment of Eastern and urban domination of political life and the bitterness of White AngloSaxon Protestants at their political and cultural displacement by immigrants, Jews and blacks...
...dominance...
...history, charged with bitter political rancor and irrational vendetta...
...See, inter alia, Hodgson, America in Our Time...
...O THESE CULTURAL CHANGES, LIBeralism-more concerned in the final analysis with process than with values-had little to say...
...The middle way shrank...
...Their organization demonstrated to other victims of injustice--Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and women-the need to persevere in their quest for the rights that Liberalism had promised but then denied: equality, autonomy and respect, justice under the law, a share of power...
...2. Communism threatens capitalism and-like fascism-threatens economic and political freedoms with totalitarianism...
...8. When power is shared in this way, there will be no harsh conflict between capital and labor, or other fracturing social conflict, but only the bargaining of interests...
...Declaration of Independence to support the right to rebellion...
...Meeting the liberal challenge directly, the Progressives declared that the party would "fight for the constitutional rights of communists and all other political groups to express their views as the first line of defense of a democratic people...
...The war would demonstrate the superiority of the American way and serve as an object lesson to the Third World...
...It cannot and should not be entirely eliminated...
...In an atmosphere of constant crisis, the "rhetoric of victory"--to use Theodore J. Lowi's phraseforces an imperative style...
...Their call was total victory over the communists...
...Its mission was to civilize the world to the middle way...
...T HE GENERATION WHICH SHAPED LIBeral foreign policy was obsessed with the appeasement of Hitler at Munich and the lack of preSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 198437 37 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 Report on the Americas Are the Democrats Different...
...4. Class struggle is a reality in capitalist societies, including the United States...
...What follows is an attempt to define the basic tenets of Liberalism...
...Post-war planners approached the management of foreign policy rather as they would approach the management of society...
...They asked the hard questions: who held power and who did not...
...America defies the laws that have governed Western civilization and its sordid past...
...Texas, 1939 tory condemns the failures of Liberalism...
...This post-war Right, incarnated in the Republican Party, blended characteristically American elements of anti-communism, anti-intellectualism and provincialism...
...On the other side were the "liberals," an amalgam of socialists, ex-socialists, John Dewey pragmatists, trade unionists associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), reformist clergy and others whose philosophical roots lay in American idealism, reformism and exceptionalism-the belief in the uniqueness of the American experience...
...They then turned on their erstwhile allies and began their own anti-communist crusade...
...the solution, the liberal middle way, even if it had to be built from scratch...
...The U.S...
...pledge of support for the right-wing Greek government against a communist-led insurgency...
...Yet Liberalism's influence did not come from a permanent hold on the heights of power...
...The American Congress on Cultural Freedom, led by Irving Kristol (today a leading neoconservative supporter of Ronald Reagan) drew together former communist and anti-communist authors and intellectuals to speak out on the evils of communism and rally elite opinion behind anti-communist Liberalism...
...As the economy declined, the quarrel over fewer resources worsened...
...New arguments-often from ex-liberals who had now discovered "neoconservatism"--drew a distinction between equality and equality of opportunity...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...First, choose the host country's pro-U.S...
...The liberals-particularly after the 1940 Hitler/Stalin pact-feared that the progressives were more committed to the Soviet Union and its international agenda than to working people in the United States...
...investment if they agreed to "necessary reforms" that would allow them to be more effectively integrated into the U.S.-dominated world economy...
...By the late 1970s, the liberal elites had lost their self-confidence and vitality...
...In 1968, increased deficits began to meet the millions of dollar bills that had been transferred overseas to support the U.S...
...Communist Party (CPUSA), numbering betwen 75,000-100,000 members at its peak after World War II, was their best organized force and an important influence on their political direction...
...Only in moments of crisis was the bureaucratic torpor broken...
...Ibid., p.206...
...Meritocracy was a fashionable new word...
...Burnham, The Current Crisis, Wolfe, America's Impasse...
...0o In the New Age, the federal government would manage the excesses and uncertainties of free enterprise and mediate the class struggle between capital and labor...
...The alternatives of organization and protest . . are open and effective...
...There was no centralized control...
...Wall Street knows it...
...The U.S...
...It also means overselling the enemy, who is invariably possessed of a "singleness of purpose" and a "perfection of rational means to achieve it...
...It proposed a food stamp program, hot school lunches and a public housing program...
...Americans had become accustomed to burgeoning economic growth...
...But they can produce lasting results," said former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas...
...Tolerance is a respected liberal value, but the passions around cultural questions became polarized...
...By the early 1950s, the progressives were exhausted and discredited by the anti-communist crusade...
...The ambassador, the corporate executive, the agricultural technician, the Peace Corps volunteer, the Green Beret, the CIA agent: each carried the glad tidings of prosperity and the witness of private enterprise to the world...
...world power...
...5. The instrument to manage conflict and guarantee the survival of capitalism is the federal government...
...The American Century would at last be born...
...It united Jewish intellectuals, Irish, Italian, Polish-American and other immigrant communities, some organized through urban political machines and others through the Catholic Church...
...It had also devised remedies to compensate for the structural inequities that inhibited individual opportunity...
...Wallace's fate was just one result of a grand liberal effort to purge former communist allies and their sympathizers from all positions of influence in political life...
...The point is not that conflict is bad, but that it must be managed and kept within bounds...
...Today, where the Right is assertive, liberals are of uncertain conviction...
...then offer them aid and U.S...
...The question with which liberals had challenged communists-how could the end justify such means?-was turned back upon itself...
...Class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved...
...Here, the liberal worldview paid scant attention to the peculiarities of local societies...
...The bargaining process itself-and especially its arbiter, the federal government-forfeited legitimacy...
...9 Whatever the truth, Wallace and the Progressive Party were fiercely red-baited in the electoral campaign by both liberals and the Right, and lost badly...
...political life was organized along a much clearer polar axis of Left and Right, quite distinct from the Left-RightCenter politics of the post-war era...
...They oppose capitalism and believe that class struggle is ultimately unmanageable and leads inevitably to the destruction of the existing order...
...Meanwhile, as the war ground on, talk of reforms and winning "hearts and minds" infuriated the Right, for whom Honor and the Fatherland were at stake...
...It advocated "negotiation and discussion with the Soviet Union to find areas of agreement to win the peace" and denounced "anti-Soviet hysteria" as a mask for "monopoly, militarism and reaction...
...Philip Murray, president of the CIO labor federation-which Communist Party, Trotskyist and other radical organizers had built in the 1930s-joined forces with Walter Reuther of the United Autoworkers and James Carey of the United Electrical Workers to "clean up" the unions...
...arm and train them to prevent communist subversion...
...Violence, though, is never permissible...
...Ibid., p.81...
...As early as World War II, black people had begun to organize in defense of their demands...
...They may be difficult...
...Together, they can offer "rational" solutions to harmonize competing interests and provide new systems, methodologies and techniques to manage class conflict...
...On the final night of its convention in Philadelphia, 32,000 spectators assembled in Shibe Park to hear Wallace express his belief in "progressive capitalism" that puts "human rights above property rights" and his hope for "a new frontier-across the wilderness of poverty and sickness...
...because it is the only barrier to class domination...
...Millions of working-class people became accustomed to a middle-class lifestyle...
...Only if the enemy is painted as more purposeful and capable than the United States can the bureaucratic interests be enlisted to defeat it...
...Major inflation followed, and SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 39Are the Democrats Different...
...4 The platform-considered quite radical at the time-included many proposals which would later be advocated by the liberals...
...women's demands met the resistance of patriarchal attitudes in the family and on the job...
...LIBERALISM IN DECLINE 1. Siegel, Troubled Journey, chapters 2 and 3. 2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), p. 3 6 . 3. National Party Platforms 1831-1980 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc...
...And a slowgrowth economy did not welcome all those who had shared in the former prosperity...
...F OR THE LAST 40 YEARS, LIBERALISM has been the dominant ideology in the United States...
...Liberal values-respect for individual life, rationalism, due process, peaceful resolution of conflict- had little meaning when "our boys" laid waste to peasant villages each night on television...
...Fearful of further controversy if he were to seek appropriations to fight the war and anxious not to scuttle a major liberal initiative to wipe out poverty in the United States, Johnson invoked his executive authority to fight the war on borrowed money...
...Although ideology was supposedly dead, Liberalism was the new ideology...
...The liberal crusade was to vanquish injustice, poverty and communism, not only with the sword, but with reforms...
...The New Deal coalition brought together trade unionists, Northern blacks, old-time populists, the South, Teddy Roosevelt progressives, socialists and even-indirectly- communists...
...Some groups may be unable to compete and may require extra help in the form of legislation or special privileges...
...2 In 1947 many of Liberalism's most prominent leaders-Reinhold Niebuhr, Hubert Humphrey, Schlesinger-founded Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a determinedly anti-communist policy caucus and lobbying group...
...In an unexpected Republican victory in 1946, the Right won control of key committees in Congress...
...Liberals' influence derived from their dominance within the Democratic Party and the control that Democrats have enjoyed in the Congress, statehouses, state legislatures and municipal government...
...The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted hearings on communist sub- version in the State Department, the churches, the schools and the media...
...Liberals were sensitive to slavery's heritage of injustice, discrimination and racism, and recognized that societal harmony was at risk unless the problems were addressed...
...But this time, the old order is Liberalism itself, and it is the Right which is ascendant...
...That imperative often meant urging major economic changes as a precondition for industrialization and new outside investment...
...Finally, the fabric of social harmony that Liberalism had promised to preserve was rent apart by conflict, whose principal victim was the legitimacy of Liberalism itself...
...Triumphant, the liberals rode into Washington in 1961 with Jack Kennedy at their head...
...history cannot be described by any doctrine or ideology...
...Procedure is the key: knowing the rules of the game and playing by them...
...Then, presidential intervention, often working through special extra- or inter-departmental task forces, effected a true concentration of power...
...9 Spending schemes included enormous peacetime defense budgets, which successfully defied conservative wisdom and had the added political advantage of keeping the Right on the defensive by coopting its agenda...
...Prosperity continued, however, for business and professional classes...
...its visions and values have penetrated every institution of society...
...economy, fine-tuned through increased military spending and the occasional fiscal or monetary intervention, would yield unending prosperity which would dazzle the world...
...WITH ROOSEVELT'S DEATH IN 1945 AND the growing crisis of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the quarrels between the two tendencies worsened...
...p. 9 2 . 4. Ibid...
...Ibid., p.169...
...Liberals oppose "business control" of government but offer themselves as willing government partners to the "modern American capitalist" who shares their values...
...Liberal economists, anxious to prevent another Great Depression but also hopeful of avoiding inflation of the sort that had contributed to the rise of Hitler in Germany, thought they had the solution to the periodic crises of capitalism...
...Communists and Marxists are, by definition, out of the game...
...One of the principal rules of liberal foreign policy was that rebellion had to be met by force, no matter how rigid the society, how evident the exhaustion of all other remedies, or how sincere the invocation of the U.S...
...The particular target was the CPUSA...
Vol. 18 • September 1984 • No. 5
