Galun.com - Liberalism and Its Discontents

Notes: Liberalism and Its Discontents

In the 1950s and 60s, liberalism meant Keynesian economics, the expansion of social welfare programs, and civil rights.
Liberalism was so ascendent in the 50s and 60s that some "consensus" historians argued that liberalism was "the only important political tradition in our national history."
"The attacks on liberalism in these postliberal years have focused generally on two supposed failings, failings that are in some ways mutually exclusive but that many critics cite interchangeably. One complaint, popular among leaders of the traditional right, is the claim that liberalism is a paternalistic, statist creed that has concentrated authority in the hands of government and a few elites at the expense of individual liberty. Liberalism is, in short, a threat to freedom and prosperity. Another complaint, which has found a substantial following among conservative intellectuals and has even generated significant support among some liberals (or erstwhile liberals), is the argument that liberalism is too wedded to liberty; that its excessive, indeed nearly exclusive, emphasis on rights and freedoms makes no room for a definition of the public good; that liberalism leaves society without a moral core and hence vulnerable to the destabilizing whims of fractious minorities and transitory passions. Liberalism is, in other words, a threat to community."
After FDR's father suffered his first heart attack, FDR "He tried to spare his father anxiety by masking his own emotions and projecting a calm, cheerful demeanor. He would continue hiding his feelings behind a bright, charming surface for the rest of his life."
As assistant secretary of the navy, FDR "became involved, perhaps inadvertently, in a controversy that would haunt him for years. In 1918 the navy began an atttempt to 'clean up' the area around the large naval base at Newport, Rhode Island, after receiving complaints about prostitution and homosexuality there. In the process, enlisted men were dispatched to entrap sailors and others (including a prominent Protestant clergyman) in homosexual acts. How much Roosevelt himself knew of these controversial tactics was long a matter of dispute, but he signed at least one authorization for the investigation."
"Roosevelt found himself particularly attracted at first to the 'brains trust' vision of a harmonious economy, a vision inspired in large part by the American experience of mobilization for World War I... a 'cooperative commonwealth' in which business, labor, and government would work together to stabilize the economy...But proponents of 'harmony' were not the only people who had his ear. Roosevelt listened to a broad and eclectic group of advisors and exhorters from throughout the Democratic party: the inveterate antimonopolists of the SOuth and the West...advocates of public works and state investment in infrastructure... agrarian reformers...social workers and welfare strategists."
Walter Lippmann said about FDR before the election that he was "a pleasant man who, without and important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president."
"Roosevelt, Hopkins, and most of the other critical figures who shaped the New Deal welfare state also feared the debilitating effects of what was still widely known as 'the dole.' Harry Hopkins, looking at the effects of the FERA in 1933, said, 'I don't think anybody can go on year after year, month after month accepting relief without affecting his character in some way unfavorably. It is probably going to undermine the independence of hundreds of thousands of families...I look upon this as a great national disaster.' The president himself proclaimed in 1934, 'I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any American to remain permanently on the relief rolls.' Instead, the New Deal turned to an approach with which it felt much more comfortable: work relief, providing the unemployed with jobs. 'Give a man a dole, and you save his body and destroy his spirit,' Hopkins said. 'Give him a job...and you save both the body and the spirit. It saves his skill. It gives him a chance to do something socially useful.'"
Some New Dealers aimed for government regulation of concentrated power, and were inspired by Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom. They feared bigness and wanted to restore a more decentralized economy. Other looked for national planning, rooted in the progressive era's faith in system, process, and expertise, and were inspired by TR. They accepted that economies of scale requird concentrations, but believed that the government needed to sometimes intervene to guide these concentrations - by setting monopoly prices, for example.
"The War Industry Board of 1918, many liberals fervently...believed, had successfully rationalized and coordinated industrial activity...Surely, influential New Dealers argued...something similar could work comparable miracles now."
One Blue Eagle parade (to support the NRA) in NYC "was the largest parade in the city's history - larger than the great celebration that had greeted Charles Lindbergh on his return home from Paris nearly a decade before)...The owner of the Philadelphia professional football team renamed it the 'Eagles' in honor of the agency."
"The New Deal did not...produce any significant redistribution of wealth. There was a significant downward distribution of wealth and income between 1929 and 1945 - the first in more than a century and, as of the 1990s at least, also the last. But virtually all of that shift occurred during (and as a result of) World War II."
For decades before the New Deal, and through 1937, reformers had dreamed of a solution that would create a "harmonious industrial economy, a system that could flourish without extensive state interference and produce enough wealth to solve the nation's most serious social problems." What that solution was was a source of disagreement, but "the larger dream - the dream of somehow 'solving' the problems of modern capitalism - had been one of the most evocative of all reform hopes..."
But, "[b]y the end of the 1930s, faith in such broad solutions was in retreat...The state could not, liberals were coming to believe, in any fundamental way 'solve' the problems of the economy. The industrial economy was too large, too complex, too diverse; no single economy plan could encompass it all. Americans would have to accept the inevitability of conflict and instability in their economic lives. And they would have to learn to rely on the state to regulate that conflict and instability."
So reformers moved from trying to find a solution, to believing that there was no solution, the government would just have to be the constant referee ("traffic manager") of the economy, resolve conflicts, removing bottlenecks, etc.
But then, there was another group, who basically said that rather than getting involved in refereeing the economy, the government could just use its power to tax and spend to promote growth and redistribute wealth. Then, government could "manage the economy without managing the institutions of the economy." All you'd have to do was increase taxes on the rich, increasing programs for the poor, and consumption would go up, production rise, and inequality fall. Essentially, these were the proto-Keynesians.
"These two broad approaches to the problems of the economy - increased state regulation and increased use of fiscal policy - coexisted relatively easily in the late 1930s. Indeed, many New Dealers considered them two halves of a single strategy...."
In the late 1930s, many feared that the US economy would never be vibrant again, that it was simply a mature economy destined for sluggish growth - all the land had been settled, population wasn't going to grow much, resources exploited, etc. "The mature-economy idea provided powerful support to arguments for increasing the regulatory functions of the state. An economy in which dynamic growth was no longer possible placed nearly unbearable pressures on players in teh marketplace to ... collude to raise...prices. Only a strong administrative state could combat this dangerous trend. But the same concept also added strength to arguments for greater government spending. In the absence of large-scale private investment, only the government had the resources...necessary to keep even modest economic growth alive."
WWII shifted strength to the advocates of the fiscal approach. Mobilizing wartime production proved more complex and difficult than expected, which cast doubt on the ability of government to successfully referee the economy. On the other hand, WWII hugely boosted the economy and decreased inequality, a very strong argument for the fiscal approach.
And, of course, the fiscal approach was much more in keeping with the traditional American fear of the state, since it just required the state to use a few "levers" (like taxes), rather than creating a huge bureaucracy to regulate the economy.
The Keynesian approach also helped to justify - and make more important - social wefare programs, because these defined "social security mechanisms as a way to distribute income and enhance purchasing power."
Although FDR was afraid to challenge the South on racial issues during his presidency, his popularity set the stage for the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Because "For nearly a century the South's position within the Democratic party had been the region's most effective tool for maintaining its power and autonomy within the larger American society." The Dems needed the South's votes to win the presidency, so the South used that to get the Dem Party to vote against any civil rights bills. But FDR created a new Democratic coalition that includes the Northeast and urban areas. As a result, "Roosevelt could have won all four of his national elections even had he received not a single electoral vote from the eleven ex-Confederate states...[also] the traditional two-thirds rule at national Democratic conventions, whereby Southern delegates could block any presidential prospect not to their liking, was abolished in 1936." etc. Also, black voters in the north shifted to the Democrats, which meant Democrats could no longer ignore black votes.
"World War I was, in the American imagination, essentially a war against German culture, which... seemed savage, and barbaric, and innately belligerent...World War II evoked a different image: less of a barbaric people than of a tyrannical regime, less of a flawed culture than of a flawed political system and a menacing state."
Because WWI "pushed a fear of totalitarianism...to the center of American political thought," this weakened the reformers arguing for state direction/control of the economy, since that seemed like it could lead to totalitarianism. "'The rise of totalitarianism,' Reinhold Niebuhr noted somberly in 1945, 'has prompted the democratic world to view all collectivist answers to our social problems with increased apprehension.'" It is no accident that The Road to Serfdom was written in 1944.
Until the Great Depression, the chief economic issue was always seen as scarcity. So reformers looked at the experience of WWI in the context of trying to figure out how goverment could increase production (through planning). But the Great Depression suddenly made people think that the new problem was that there was too much production, and not enough consumption. So the experience in WWII was studied less as a way to see how government could increase production, and more as a way that government could increase consumption.
There is, of course, an argument by revisionist historians that Herbert Hoover was far from a reactionary, and was in fact a "'forgotten progressive,' one of the most active and innovative figures in government and the leading advocate of a more forceful federal role in the management of the economy."
"Hoover was the champion of the trade association movement in the 1920s and made extensive use of his powers as secretary of commerce...to promote economic rationalization and limit 'destructive competition.' As president, Hoover constructed a program of unprecedented federal activism to deal with the Great Depression - price supports for farmers, federal assistance to public works and relief efforts, direct government loans to banks, railroads, and other troubled businesses - and laid the groundwork for many of the achievements of the New Deal."
Henry Stimson, secretary of war during WWII, "presided magisterially over the vast bureaucracy. He involved himself directly in broad strategic decisions and a few particularly critical issues. But he never really ran the army. That was partly because Franklin Roosevelt was himself so directly involved in policy decisions, partly because Stimson's chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, moved outside the chain of command and established direct communications with the president (something Stimson seems not to have opposed). But it was also because Stimson himself chose to leave most daily operations in the hands of trusted subordinates. In fact, Stimson spent relatively little time actually in his office. He returned home by 4:00 PM every day to ride or play golf. He spent long weekends on his Long Island estate and took extended vacations every summer. He combined his official travels with long, leisurely visits to exclusive resorts."
The baby boomers "grew up in the midst of unprecedented prosperity. The dramatic economic growth of the postwar era, and the expectations it produced, had much to do with the explosions of 1968. In the age of abundance and cold war liberalism, according to the dominant messages of both official and popular culture, those who lived in the capitalist world would be blessed with both prosperity and personal freedom. That was what distinguished the WEst from its communist adversaries: the opportunity of individuals to live their lives as they wished with reasonable comfort and security; the opportunity to pursue not just material success but personal fulfillment. NEver before in history had so many people come of age expecting so much of their world..."
"The upheavals among young people in the 1960s...reflected, at least in part, the gap between these bright expectations and reality. For as members of the postwar generation moved toward adulthood, they discovered that conservative values and institutions still stood in their way...American society, like most other industrial socieities, was considerably less rigid and hierarchical in the 1960s than it had been a generation before; but neither was it fluid or tolerant enough to match the expansive expectations of its youth. And so a generation came of age unusually impatient with what to older men and women seemed ordinary restraints and conventions, and unusually outratged by evidence of injustices and inequalities that earlier generations had tolerated or endured."
"The most promising group within the Old Left in the lean years after 1956 [Kruschev's secret speech] were the Shachtmanites, a small band of Trotskyist socialists led since the 1930s by the talented activist Max Shachtman....[whose] anti-Stalinism eventually pushed him so far to the right that he supported the war in Vietnam and proclaimed George Meany the principal hope for progressive change."
The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) "emerged out of the rubble of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the obscure student wing of the equally obscure League for Industrial Democracy, an old socialist labor organization." But ties were strained because the SDS did not share LID's anti-communism and admiration for the working class, and SDS severed ties in 1965.
There was a "serious, perhaps fatal weakness at the heart of the New Left from the very beginning. Revolutionary movements are, almost by definition, self-denying phenomena, dependent on the willingness of their members to subordinate individual goals to a larger cause. But from the start the self-denying impulses within SDS were competing with (and as often as not losing to) another impulse: a yearning for personal fulfillment."
"the quest for self-fulfillment was at the core of the New Left's most original and appealing commitment: 'participatory democracy' itself.
To the Stalinists, political democracy had been a word without meaning - subordinated always to what they considered the much larger goal of social and economic equality; to the socialists, it was an essential means to greater ends. To the early New Left, democracy was an end in itself, a vehicle through which individuals could feel empowered and enrich their lives. SDS's external efforts may have focused in part on social justice and concentrations of wealth and power. Internally, however, the organization was an almost entirely shapeless experiment in democratic self-fulfillment. Members fervently resisted anything resembling internal leadership."
"A similar preoccupation with personal liberation and fulfillment as opposed to larger visions of social change, was visible on the college campuses that erupted periodically during the heyday of the New Left. With the notable lexception of the broad campus protests of May 1970...most of the major university protests had little to do with the war or the racial crisis. They expressed grievances that emerged more out of the personal experiences and frustrations of the demonstrators than out of large public commitments."
"by the early 1970s, student radicalism had become almost hopelessly confused with narcissistic cultural impulses that were essentially apolitical."
"Like many other liberals of his generation [he was born in 1929]...[Allard Lowenstein] assumed that when freed from oppression and discrimination, once-marginalized Americans would freely choose the values of the liberal mainstream; that they would join the middle-class world, accept its values, and play by its rules. He believed that it was possible to generate radical change - an end to racism; a breaking down of social and cultural barriers decades, even centuries in the making; a liberation of individuals from the repressive Victorian values of the past - without producing any genuinely radical results. Neither then, nor later, was he willing to make the leap that so many other activists of the 1960s made - from a repudiation of the evils liberalism had long tolerated to a repudiation of liberalism itself."
"[Lowestein] believed, in short, in what Martin Luther King had called the 'beloved community.' And it is hard to imagine him flourishing amid the fragmented cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s, in which liberalism self-consciously shed the crusading idealism that, to Lowenstein, was its most important and redeeming quality."
"The 1968 Democratic convention is best remembered...for the violent clashes between antiwar demonstrators and the Chicago police in Grand Park. But there as also extraordinary rancor and bitterness inside the convention hall...itself...Everyone knew that Hubert Humphrey...would be nominated. Virtually no one was happy about it...After watching a film honoring Robert Kennedy, delegates began singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic - again and again and again, for more than twenty minutes, turning a teary tribute into an angry demonstration."