What Happened to American Liberalism?
I recently read H. W. Brands’ book, “The Strange Death of American Liberalism” (Yale University Press, 2001). I had read a couple of his other books, which covered earlier periods of American history, and found them interesting and insightful. He has written books about the Founders, the second generation (Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson), and one book on Texas history (he is a professor at Texas A&M), and others on later periods.
In this book he does admit to being a liberal, something that does not explicitly show in his other works that I have read. But he does seem to be a classical liberal, not a modern leftist.
Perhaps I should insert some of my own background here. I was born in 1950 in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents had grown up poor during the Depression. They thought the sun rose and set in FDR. And even when I was in high school, most Republicans and Democrats were not that far apart. Barry Goldwater, in 1964, was the first Republican candidate for president who seemed a far-right conservative by today’s standards. And I recall one of his few supporters I knew spouting his campaign slogan “In your heart you know he’s right!” and being answered, “In your guts you know he’s nuts!” by the son of the Republican mayor of the town! Not many people were hard-core conservatives back then. There were more “Rockefeller Republicans” back then than “Goldwater Republicans.”
One thing Brands points out in the book was interesting: throughout our history, most Americans have had little trust in government. During times of war they would rally around the government, but would resume their skepticism once the fighting was over. There was one aberration in this tendency—the period after World War II, as the Cold War took shape. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all profited from that continuing trust in government. But their success fooled Lyndon Johnson, and he managed to lose the people’s trust even during the Vietnam War! The Democrats themselves turned against the war. Republican Richard Nixon managed to negotiate an end to the war. But after the Watergate scandal forced his resignation, the Democrat majority in Congress reduced American aid to South Vietnam, resulting in its fall to the Communist North Vietnam in 1975, complete with helicopters rescuing people from the US Embassy as Saigon fell. Jimmy Carter recovered the White House for the Democrats in 1976, only to show his own ineptness and then lose to Ronald Reagan in 1980. The distance between the parties grew, although it was still possible to debate in Congress and still go out to eat together afterwards. And in that period we began to see the rise of the “neo-conservatives” or “neocons”—formerly liberal, but put off by the rise of the anti-war element in the Democrat party. They were still strongly anti-Communist, unlike the new Democrats. And they were not anti-war.
The single term of George H. W. Bush reinforced Americans’ mistrust of government, and his successor Bill Clinton started out pushing the liberal line, but got hit with the loss of the House with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and faced the music, famously saying “The era of Big Government is over.”
Brands’ book ends with the inauguration of George W. Bush. Here’s a quote from the last chapter:
“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 and liberalism would regain its former ascendancy….But in fact it was the liberalism of the Cold War that was the anomaly. The appropriate image was wasn’t a pendulum but a balloon, one held aloft by the confidence in government the 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.”
So I do not know his thinking about the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the rise of the Tea Party. But while 9/11 caused a surge of support initially for those wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I would have to say that the Neocons blew it badly.
The initial invasions were successful. But the mistake was thinking that continued occupations of those two countries would allow the US to turn them into modern, western-style democracies. Speaking for my self, I disagreed with that decision at the time. I am a lifelong student of history, and I knew that the English-speaking peoples took hundreds of years developing our system of government—you can’t transplant that in a few years’ time to a people with absolutely no history of democratic government. And now the American habit of distrust in government seems to be peaking even during the prospect of possible wars with Russia and China.
Obama tried to reverse Clinton’s “end of Big Government.” Trump interrupted it for a while. But Biden’s attempts to resume it are stirring the distrust again, and I don’t think it is going to work well for him and his party. The current inflation, the obvious incompetence of both Big Government and Big Business to deal with issues like the train derailment in East Palestine, OH, and their championing of unpopular causes like the transgender fad are galvanizing even traditional liberals against the Left. One example—Joel Kotkin, a demographer and writer who has been a lifelong Democrat, has changed his voter registration to Independent. Another—Bari Weiss, formerly an editor at the New York Times, was forced out of her post there, started a Substack, and has been posting articles that may not be conservative, but are definitely anti-Left.
So what happened to American liberalism? I would say that the people who were supposed to be its leaders kept going more and more extreme, to the point where they are no longer true liberals, compared to what the term meant in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and have become hard Leftists—and have left the majority of the American people behind. It is beginning to cost them, and I think it will cost them more in the coming years.