The unsolved mystery of American politics is: who killed liberalism? The decease is undeniable (even if, like the passing of Elvis, it is occasionally denied). During the 1960s, liberalism permeated American political life; it was in the very air, supplying the optimism and energy that allowed Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society Congress to declare war on poverty and inequality and believe they could defeat those historic foes of human happiness. But by the mid-1970s the liberal dream had died, and by the early 1980s “liberal” had become an almost-actionable epithet. Subsequent sightings of liberalism’s ghost were occasionally mistaken for the real thing, but after a feckless attempt by the first Clinton administration to refashion national health care, even the ghost was rarely seen.
Yet if liberalism is indubitably dead, much doubt surrounds the cause of death. Conservatives contend natural causes—not excluding the natural results of self-inflicted wounds. Liberalism, in this view, misread human nature, promised too much, and suffered the righteous wrath of a disillusioned electorate. Not so, reply liberals: the death was foul play. Liberalism was done in by its enemies, who pandered to the fears of a public alarmed by economic insecurity, itself largely the work of elites who managed to decouple their own fate from that of the masses increasingly left behind....
A meaningful debate on any topic must commence with definitions acceptable to both sides. In the context of contemporary American politics, few liberals or conservatives would dispute that whatever else it entails, liberalism is premised on a prevailing confidence in the ability of government—preeminently the federal government—to accomplish substantial good on behalf of the American people. This confidence, abundantly evident during the 1960s, was what made possible the elaboration of the Great Society; the withdrawal of this confidence was what caused liberalism to wither and die.
Liberalism is dead, but liberals survive. This isn’t a paradox, merely a consequence of the electoral arithmetic of American democracy. The difference between glorious victory and ignominious defeat is almost never more than two votes in 10, and those two unfailingly come from the fluid middle territory between convinced conservatives and determined liberals. Even in the heyday of lbj, conservatives weren’t hard to find—for instance, among the 39 percent who voted for Barry Goldwater. At the height of Ronald Reagan’s conservative restoration, tens of millions of liberals, and 41 percent of voters, lined up behind Walter Mondale.
The critical consideration isn’t what the zealots think but how far their thoughts influence the polity as a whole. In this regard the change between the 1960s and the late 1990s is unmistakable. During the 1960s the Johnson administration proposed, and Congress adopted, scores of ambitious and often expensive new federal programs; during the 1990s the trend was in just the opposite direction, with federal programs, often of long standing, regularly being dismantled, discontinued, or devolved to the states.
The connection between popular desires and political outcomes is rarely direct and never perfect; money and other forms of unequal influence skew the process. But it is fair to say—and public-opinion polls do say—that the anti-liberal sea change since the 1960s reflects a disenchantment among voters at large with the idea that government can accomplish much of benefit to them. They haven’t insisted on rolling back every government program—not least because in their general skepticism many middle-class recipients of Social Security and other transfer payments have adopted an attitude of holding on to whatever they have. But they have stoutly, and successfully, resisted efforts to expand the scope of government....
The problem with nearly all post-liberal postmortems is that they lack historical perspective. The argument put forward here is that the liberalism that characterized the period from 1945 until the early 1970s was anomalous by the standards of American history. Moreover, this anomaly was chiefly the consequence of the predominant feature of global politics at the time—the Cold War. It states the matter only a bit too strongly to say that modern American liberalism was an artifact of the Cold War. It is not too much to say that without the Cold War, liberals would never have achieved the success they did. Nor is it too much to say that the collapse of the Cold War consensus in America was what doomed liberalism. Liberals lost not because they were wrong about American society, but because they were wrong about the world.
This argument may appear provocative, even perverse, in that it turns upside down conventional wisdom regarding the relative positions of domestic and international affairs in American politics. It is also likely to annoy many liberals by reminding them that the Cold War was originally their idea. But the point is that Cold War liberalism was a seamless conception of the nature of the world. Americans saw themselves locked in a global struggle with communism; this struggle was partly a matter of military power, but increasingly it became a struggle for the hearts and minds of the billions of people who would choose democracy or communism based on their perceptions as to which system was more likely to improve their lives. To defeat communism required powerful weapons; it also required the powerful example of a society that offered hope and opportunity to all.
Of equal importance, the Cold War fostered a mindset that caused Americans to put aside their traditional distrust of big government and allow the public sector to grow at the expense of the private sphere. In this regard the Cold War was quite similar to each major war in American history, when the needs of national security had seemed to dictate an expansion of the powers and institutions of government. Moreover, the peculiar nature of the Cold War amplified the normal wartime willingness to defer to Washington’s judgment. Military secrets—now including nuclear secrets—were more sensitive than in any previous war. And because much of the Cold War was waged covertly, presidents depended on the willingness of Congress and the people not to inquire too closely into certain government activities. Finally, the very basis of American Cold War policy—the idea that a protracted containment of communism would lead to its eventual demise—was a proposition that had to be taken on faith.
For a generation the Cold War went well for the United States, and the popular trust in government the Cold War engendered seemed well placed. It was under this aegis of trust that the major reforms of the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s took place, for even as the contest with communism appeared to make extra efforts to perfect American society necessary, the atmosphere of trust in government made them possible.
But then the Cold War went bad in Vietnam, and suddenly the official wisdom of a quarter-century didn’t seem so wise anymore. And just as popular confidence in government had previously extrapolated from foreign affairs to domestic, so now did popular distrust. Americans who discovered that their leaders had been tragically wrong about Vietnam began to wonder whether those same leaders could have been right about anything. That Americans then learned that their leaders hadn’t simply been wrong about Vietnam but had been persistently deceitful—and that the last Vietnam president, Richard Nixon, was the most deceitful of all—simply compounded the popular disillusionment with government.
Vietnam killed the American Cold War consensus, and in killing the Cold War consensus killed liberalism. Détente—the positive half of Nixon’s legacy—represented an admission that the Cold War had become unsustainable on its original terms, and despite Reagan’s anticommunist exhortations of the early 1980s, Americans never re-embraced the old containment gospel. Instead they reverted to their historic distrust of government, which Reagan encouraged at every opportunity—without appreciating that in doing so he was guaranteeing the failure of his simultaneous efforts to summon support for an activist foreign policy.
The election of 2000 underlined the essential conservatism of the American system. George W. Bush unsurprisingly called for massive tax cuts and for private-sector solutions to the problems of Social Security (set up private accounts) and Medicare (let private insurance provide prescription drug coverage). Al Gore occasionally reminded voters that the general prosperity of the 1990s had exacerbated the division between rich and poor, but he took pains to distinguish himself from anything like the liberalism his party had espoused under Lyndon Johnson. “I don’t ever want to see another era of big government,” the vice president declared two weeks before the election. Evidently attempting to outflank Bush on the right, Gore continued, “In this tale of two candidates, I’m the one who believes in limited government, and I have believed in it long before it was fashionable to do so in the Democratic Party. I don’t believe there’s a government solution to every problem. I don’t believe any government program can replace the responsibility of parents, the hard work of families or the innovation of industry.”
With both candidates fleeing liberalism like the political plague it remained, the voters delivered a split decision. Gore got the satisfaction of knowing that a plurality of voters preferred his limited vision of government responsibility for the country’s welfare; Bush (with an even more limited vision, notwithstanding Gore’s protests) had to settle for the White House.
All this was very puzzling to many of those who had come of age with Clinton and Gore and Bush, and come of age thinking liberalism was the default setting of American politics.... To many of the generation that had known only the Cold War, the conservative reaction that produced the presidency of Ronald Reagan seemed anomalous: a temporary swing of the pendulum from left to right. Soon enough, they reasoned, the pendulum would swing back.
But in fact it was the liberalism of the Cold War era that was the anomaly. The appropriate image wasn’t a pendulum but a balloon, one held aloft by the confidence in government that successful prosecution of the Cold War inspired. When Vietnam destroyed that confidence, the balloon deflated, and expectations of government descended to their traditional low level. Pendulums swing back on their own; balloons require refilling.
This was why liberalism was not likely to revive any time soon. If the past was any guide, another serious threat to American security would be required to displace this skepticism. As of the beginning of 2001, such a threat seemed years or decades in the future.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, demonstrated that threats to American security could come from unexpected directions. As might have been predicted, Americans immediately turned to government, with opinion polls registering levels of confidence in government not seen since the 1960s. Many liberals hoped for a revival of liberalism. But the sense of danger gradually diminished, and so, it appeared, did the liberals’ prospects.
H.W. Brands, ’75, is Distinguished Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair of History at Texas A&M University and the author of 15 books.
Excerpt from The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H.W. Brands reprinted by permission of Yale Univeristy Press. © 2001 by Yale University.
