Liberalism's Road to Disaster

...Democrats had good reason to fear such confrontations...

...The new liberals, like so many others at the time, were internationalist...

...Of course, the Vietnam War intensified this separation...

...embraced a more radical agenda...

...These immensely topical questions inspired Brinkley's very interesting book...

...Indeed, both parties used to be more liberal in economic matters...

...The significantly original feature of Keynesianism was its understanding of the business cycle...

...And it was always clear that race would tear the Democratic Party apart...

...the grasshopper, not the ant, was the true hero of the modern economy...

...six months later, the economy plunged into a recession that was actually sharper, albeit shorter, than the 1929 catastrophe...

...Still, as the Keynesians saw it, Hoover had not spent nearly enough, and neither had Roosevelt, though he was sufficiently impressed with Keynesian arguments to authorize a "compensatory [countercyclical] spending" program in 1938...

...In 1937...

...Countercyclical public works and tax cuts would lift almost all boats higher, and a welfare state would take care of the rest, permitting affluence to "smooth over questions of class and power by creating a nation of consumers...

...The Democrats arc not being slaughtered by Keynesianism, or even the false memory of it...

...the opposition it evoked not only cared little about the class, religious and regional issues of the past but actually despised them—a mentality that later proliferated among moderate Democrats, many of whom, like President Bill Clinton, had entered politics as antiwar protesters...

...Modern American liberalism," as Alan BrinkJey observes in The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Knopf, 371 pp., S27.50), has proved to be a "weaker and more vulnerable force than almost anyone would have imagined a generation ago...

...Where did liberalism go wrong...

...Demand, contrary to all previous assumptions, would stimulate supply...

...Brinkley, however, focuses largely on their economic views, especially the way they proposed to use budget deficits—to be sure, vastly smaller than those piled up, for very different reasons, by the Republicans in the 1980s—to correct imbalances of the business cycle...

...Southerners began deserting to the GOP in 1952...

...For the parts of its agenda Brinkley largely ignores—minority rights and individual (notably sexual) rights—gave birth to a Left that, even in its moderate incarnations, had few ties to the traditional one...

...among Democrats, similar ideas inspired the National Industrial Recovery Act of the early New Deal...

...To many Americans, deliberately running a deficit is immoral...

...Keynesianism pointed rather to the importance of consumption...

...By the '30s, for the first time in history, humanity was theoretically capable of producing whatever it needed, in whatever quantities it required...

...In 1936, just before the era that forms the backdrop of Brink-ley's work, John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money...

...Keynesianism, in other words, was a retreat from more intrusive varieties of reform that had once been strong in both parties...

...The problem is not the wickedness of the new type of interest group politics...

...they were also preoccupied, as liberals had not been since the Civil War, with the civil rights of minorities...

...Catholics and Jews are still more likely than Protestants to vote Democratic, but the proportions doing so have fallen steadily and, in all likelihood, inexorably...

...KEYNESIANISM is today a byword for failure, a reputation Brinkley fails to challenge directly, although it is a myth...

...Moreover, a greater awareness of the evils of dictatorship had created, among liberals, a renewed wariness toward government interference with individual rights...

...Republican Senators Robert La Follette Jr., George W. Norris and William Borah were prominent trustbusters...

...When...

...Before the 20th century, governments obsessed by the continual prospect of shortages, particularly of food, thought it their duty to encourage production...

...In fact, Keynesian economics ended the recession of 1937-38 and also worked well when it was again put into practice in the 1960s...

...In 1938 the political winds started turning against them—for almost a generation, as it developed—and the President lost control of Congress to the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that dominated it into the 1950s...

...the Federal Reserve Board chairman...

...A political polemic is struggling to break out of The End of Reform...

...Democratic politics have thus come to revolve around two constituencies that only recently saw the light: black Americans, who until the 1930s voted Republican when they could vote at all, and middle-class reformers...

...The Keynesians reasoned that while serious inequalities in the distribution of income acted as a check on consumption, it could be manipulated upward through changes in the level of government spending...

...Not until his final paragraph does Brink-ley explicitly identify the new liberalism's "retreat from reform"—that is, interventionist economic reform—"as one major source of American liberalism's more recent travails...

...During the Depression, President Herbert Hoover had stepped up the pace of public works construction, one of the many idealistic notions he had previously advanced as Secretary of Commerce...

...Thomas Corcoran, an influential figure who held various positions on the staff of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation...

...For a generation, the elephants and the donkeys have been waging what is above all a culture war...

...Was the long-term disaster avoidable...

...Since the end of Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency, the social forces queuing up behind each side's banners have to a considerable extent been changing places...

...Nothing in the rest of the book suggests this...

...Was there an alternative...

...Their problem is identification with the rights of racial minorities, criminals, homosexuals, and social nonconformity in general...

...Still, the new liberalism has clearly failed as a political force from 1968 through the recent election...

...Two things derailed it: the inflation brought on by the Vietnam War—inflation follows all wars, no matter what economic theory holds sway in Washington—and the oil price explosion of the 1970s, which it did nothing to cause and no policy could have averted...

...As Stuart Chase, a liberal journalist, put it in 1943, countercyclical government spending to place money in the hands of consumers who lacked it would "reduce [italics in original] the bureaucracy, regimentation, and restraints on liberties from which we are already suffering in the War" and permit "a postwar economy with controls at the minimum...

...unfortunately, it never quite succeeds...

...As late as the 1930s, Congress and our state legislatures swarmed with members who flat out wanted the government to "microregulate" private business...

...Ranged on the other side, in its successively Federalist, Whig and Republican manifestations, were the educated middle-class reformers who are today's characteristic urban white Democrats, along with educated and professional people in general and Protestants in every region outside the South...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt, acting on his absolutely sincere belief in balanced budgets, cut the appropriations of New Deal agencies...

...the formerly substantial antimonopoly movement had disappeared, along with organized socialism...

...Nevertheless, nothing can ensure that a government's intake will cover its expenses...

...The "Roosevelt recession" convinced leading liberals—particularly Mar-riner Eccles...

...Roosevelt had gone so far as to refuse public support to a bill that would have made lynching a Federal crime...

...The principle of using Federal expenditures to counteract fluctuations in the business cycle had been kicking around since the late 19th century...

...Keynes argued that fiscal policy—spending and taxation—was a more effective way of stimulating or contracting an economy than the monetary policies conservatives usually favor as mechanisms of macroeconomic regulation...

...From our national beginnings to the late 1960s, the Democratic Party represented such overlapping, yet mutually antipathetic, communities as the poor, the less educated, subsistence farmers, Southerners, Catholics, immigrants, and the inhabitants of large cities...

...He maintains that the period of the later New Deal (1937-40) and World War II gave birth to a "new liberalism" that dominated the moderate Left after 1945 and led to the present debacle...

...Aggressive attempts to break up large corporations and cartels—the rival liberal policy of the day—seemed unrealistic...

...Writers & Writing LIBERALISM'S ROAD TO DISASTER BY ROGER DRAPER OVER the last three decades some of the most fundamental and long-standing assumptions of American politics have largely been inverted...

...More and more, the Republicans, as the party of whites, face a Democratic coalition organized along racial, ethnic and sexual lines, not the class, religious and geographical lines of the past...

...in the author's sole attempt to consider the possibility of a different course, he concedes that "it is hard to imagine labor faring very much better in the increasingly conservative climate of the 1940s had it...

...it is the fact that this kind of politics doesn't, and probably can't, speak to a majority of the electorate...

...This too was a novelty for the Democrats, the historic champions of people of modest means, averse to high taxes...

...The Republicans have won it, and so long as culture remains the battleground they will go on winning...

...Certainly, none of the alternatives has a record that can stand comparison with Keynesianism in the brief time it influenced policy...

...and Leon Henderson and Lauchlin Currie, two Administration economists—that a budget surplus was not a thing to be desired for its own sake...

...By then Keynesianism seemed to offer a great political advantage to the Democrats: the possibility of sidestepping the controversy that always attended efforts to meddle in the conduct of individual businesses...

...Was there a road not taken...

...As-sociationism"—the notion of harmonizing the interests of labor and management through industrial councils—was embraced by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in the 1920s...