"Cold War Liberalism": Thoughts on a Major Misnomer

At a glance there may seem nothing to take issue with in the term "Cold War liberalism," conventionally used to indicate a version of American "liberalism" characteristic of the Cold War period--a political commitment to the reform of capitalism even as they fought Communism, in contrast with their reform-opposing counterparts of the "conservative" right. Yet the use of the term "liberal" here has been misleading. A support for reform of the welfare state variety, for example, does not by itself a liberal make--the belief that it is so a particularly American misconception reflective of an American conservative tradition that, in contrast with its European counterparts, has been especially uncompromising in its defense of economic privilege, and almost as a badge of honor, contemptuous of political philosophy and historical fact. Thus does it miss the reality that modern reformism actually began with conservatives anxious to ward off more threatening challenges from the left (as seen in the Germany of Otto von Bismarck), a tradition that the "Cold War liberal" certainly carried forward--as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the foremost of the Cold War liberals, was well aware, looking to New Dealerism as part of the Cold War itself in the most significant single statement of the ideology, The Vital Center (1949), with the Cold War liberal's squeamishness about "Big Government" and infringements on the prerogatives of businessmen, and its inclination of them to a minimalism in the area of reform, underlining the essentially anti-leftist thrust of their support for change.

That centrality of Anti-Communism to the Cold War liberal's thinking points to a more fundamental problem with the characterization of the "Cold War liberal" as a "liberal" than the nature and limits of their reformism. This is the fact that in opposing themselves to socialism, in its "actually existing" or any other variety, the Cold War liberal did not do so on the basis of the liberal principles of the Enlightenment--respect for reason as a basis for understanding and acting in the world, and with it also the rationality of individual human beings, humans' equal possession of inalienable rights, and the possibility and necessity of progress. Rather the Cold War liberal did so on the basis of the conservative principles of the Counter-Enlightenment, insisting on defining humans through the darkest reading of their capacity for irrationality; the limits of reason's efficacy in understanding and arranging the world; the incompatibility of equality with freedom in ways explicitly connected with a defense of a system of property, classes and privilege; and a pessimistic view of the chances for ameliorating "the human condition" as they demanded instead that old euphemism for preservation of the existing structure of privilege at any cost, "order." Indeed, Schlesinger, who seems to me describable as, in that phrase Upton Sinclair once used, a "cruel-souled zealot of pessimism," takes a mean-spirited delight in taunting the straw men of which he made progressives ("Let us not sentimentalize the millennium by believing we can attain it through . . . revision of our economic system. We must grow up now and forsake the millennial dream") in a book which opens with his case for aristocratic "leadership," gloomily preaches about the "chastening truths of Christianity" regarding Evil and Original Sin, sneers at what he characterizes as the simple-minded eighteenth century view that man could "live by logic alone," harps on the indispensability of property and private business to a free society and impossibility of replacing organic development with design, and bashes not just "socialists" or even "progressives" but the "liberals" he despises as soft-headed dupes of Communist conspirators (yes, the so-called leader of Cold War liberalism despised liberals and said so over and over again in so many words!), in a case he made citing intellectual pillars of the right from the Sith Lord Joseph de Maistre (hailing his cynicism regarding the utility of constitutions in making a better world) to Joseph Schumpeter (whom he relied on so heavily in, among much else, his argument for aristocratic political leadership). Indeed, though it is hardly necessary to make the point that this is a fundamentally conservative case, a close reading shows that Schlesinger's argument was entirely in line with what his important conservative contemporary Russell Kirk delineated as the six canons of conservative philosophy; while Schlesinger's specifically political-economic views, if not perfectly libertarian in the manner of the members of the Mont Pelerin Society (if only up to a point, he was a reformist), contains nothing that would have kept him from signing that society's Statement of Aims. And lest one wonder, Schlesinger is not some anomaly among the "Cold War liberals," his ideas consistently borne by the lot, with Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, if anything, a more refined statement of the essentials, as for his part Richard Hofstadter explicitly recognized what I refer to here as Cold War liberals as the true conservatives of the age.

How is it that all this went over so many people's heads? I suppose that it wasn't just yesterday that we in America got stuck with a pack of illiterates for the un-intellegentsia of the mainstream. Even then fewer people actually examined the Cold War liberals' writings for themselves, let alone had the background to understand them, than is generally appreciated, all as the Cold War they so helped to promote itself had a generally deadening effect on the intellect. And it only got worse afterward, with that deadening effect increasingly taken for granted. (At the time Irwin Ross wondered at, and called out, the ostensibly pox-on-both-your-houses, horseshoe theory-minded "anti-extremist" Schlesinger's combination of vehement opposition to leftist extremism and complete unconcern for the extremism of the right; later readers wouldn't even do that.)

However, it is only fair to admit that other factors were also operative, not least the extent to which Cold War liberals so often dressed up the more blatantly Counter-Enlightenment content in modern language--rather than thundering about Original Sin and Evil speaking of Freudian psychology, as few registered that they amounted to the same thing, a weaponization of despair about the human condition against the champions of hope for a better world. There was the way some of Schlesinger's colleagues blunted the edges of what he had to say, like his view of the implications of his politics--that what the more critical recognize as Big Business-dominated oligarchy, tempered by a little reform now and then, was the least-worst option for modern societies from the standpoint of freedom, with the political scientist Robert Dahl making a career of passing off such oligarchy as democracy and "consensus" in works like Who Governs? and Polyarchy. At the same time, just as figures like Dahl went further than Schlesinger in delegitimizing discontents with a very unequal order of things, the Cold War liberal "big tent" of the day did see people of exactly the "liberal" and "progressive" types Schlesinger despised rally to the center for lack of a more leftward option, and in the hope that the center provided, as it claimed to do, a basis for pragmatic redress of societal problems, with some of the center's intellectuals honorably representing it. Thus just as there was a Robert Dahl there was a John Kenneth Galbraith, who would ultimately make a case for "American socialism." Still, one does well to recall that the more progressive of those figures in the end never had much influence over Cold War liberalism's course, that if being "liberal" was part of fighting the "Cold War" being "liberal" was subordinated to the Cold War. One side of this was that the Cold War liberal ever hastened to say the job of reform was already done and no more necessary, claiming poverty had been made a thing of the past until someone shoved in their face the fact that it wasn't (as Michael Harrington did in The Other America). Then even when they couldn't pretend poverty had been whipped they were ever ready to sacrifice reform at home to fighting enemies abroad--New Dealerism to World War II and the Cold War that began long before the fall of Berlin, the Fair Deal to Korea, the Great Society and its War on Poverty to that war the center so much more wanted to fight, the War in Vietnam that was to leave America so much poorer.

Of course, having established that the term "Cold War liberalism" obscures rather than illuminates the reality of the phenomenon to which it refers what might be a better alternative as a descriptor for the phenomenon? It seems to me that the often synonymously used term "corporate liberalism" was suggestive of the truth, bespeaking the accommodation of reformism to the prevailing system. And for all its own potential for confusion "centrism" seems to me a still more useful descriptor than that, taking "liberalism" altogether out of the matter, especially when we remember that the centrist's reason to stand "in the center" is not the "objective," "non-ideological," above-the-fray thinking of centrist pretensions, but rather a matter of their conservatism, safely in line with the American tradition prevailing from the country's beginnings "conservative liberalism." Within that framework one may speak of the center as embodying the less rigid, more pragmatically adaptive side of this conservative liberalism than the more tradition-bound avowed right. However, in the 2020s it can seem that we haven't seen much of that adaptive side at the level of practical politics for a half century--and certainly since the Neo-Liberals (and neoliberals) got the upper hand in the Democratic Party in that way absolutely consolidated by Bill Clinton's ascent to the party's and the country's leadership. Turning the older centrist's admission that "Yes, capitalist society has its problems, but we can and will make them right" to "It is what it is, whatever, get over it," and in so doing make a Schlesinger, who supported such reforms as Tennessee Valley Authority-style projects and national health insurance, look like a raging leftist by comparison.

One may take that as having meant that there just wasn't much practical pressure to adapt, certainly not in comparison with the Cold War era when in the face of Communist ideological challenge the Cold War itself was a reason for the "Cold War liberal" to be "liberal" (on occasion, at least). Yet looking at the country's economic decay and social crises, and the way in which they have nurtured extremism (if mainly the rightist extremism Schlesinger and his alte kameraden so little feared), one may very easily draw a much more critical conclusion about whether centrism fulfilled the mission it set out for itself--at least, in public.