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The Ardors and Tribulations of the Journey of Liberalism
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17421 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1990 |
8,019 Words |
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Max Lerner
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I offer a political and intellectual conundrum: How did it happen that the creed of liberalism, which sat so high on the wall for two-thirds of the century, through the 1960s, should have suffered so great a fall since then? Will all the royal horses and men that form the support system of liberalism ever put this Humpty-Dumpty together again?
I use liberalism in its broadest sense, as an angle of vision from which to view the world, politically, socially, and culturally. It is this vision that made it at once appealing and vulnerable at crunch-points in its history.
Yet there is no way to grasp liberalism as pure idea, isolated from its embodiment in partisan politics, institutions, leaders, and electoral triumphs and defeats. Retrospectively, while other terms were used at the time, its American linkage goes back to the philosophy and vision of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, just as the conservative philosophy and vision go back to Madison (again), Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. Twentieth-century American liberalism has been linked with social reform on a wide front with the Democrats as a party, and with specific presidents and presidential candidates, starting with Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt and ending with the failed candidacies of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis.
Most recently, many had the sense of a watershed even when, in the 1988 campaign, George Bush escalated his attacks on "the L-word." Even more notable than the attack on liberalism was the fact that few stalwarts in public life rallied to its defense. It was not a glory point in the history of liberalism as a standard to raise and a drum-beat to march to.
If we ask when the liberal idea and vision were at their apex the answer would have to be the years of FDR's New Deal and the postwar decades that followed. As it happens I had a chance recently to go back to a polemical book on liberalism in the 1930s that I published a half-century ago, and rethink it from today's perspective. Taking a hard second look at this phase of liberalism's history I felt a shock of recognition.
Playing Aristotle's "political animal" we must all make an intellectual and moral journey and give some account of it. I came of age politically in the middle and late 1920s. All the writers I had read at college and graduate school, from Shelley and Byron through Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, Louis D. Brandeis, Randolph Bourne, John Reed, and Thorstein Veblen, were liberals and radicals. The winds of doctrine that swept through American politics, history, law, and sociology from the turn of the century were liberal winds, and they swept with the gusto of a second American intellectual renaissance. They infused both major parties with a "Progressivism" that turned the politics of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson into variations on a common theme. In domestic policy both presidents were reformers. In foreign policy both saw an America that had to play a leadership role on a stage larger than America itself.
The climate of the twenties was bleak for liberals, who recoiled from the crass nationalism of the Republican boom years, wondering whether they would ever recover the vision of internationalist hope that had foundered with the folly of Versailles and Wilson's last years. It was not until the panic of 1929 and the Great
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