Liberalism is Not Just Another Word for Disappointment

I recently read The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, which (I think) is the closest thing to a grand history of post-New Deal liberalism to appear in recent years. Authored by journalist Eric Alterman, with an assist from historian Kevin Mattson, it is rich, if also poorly edited. There are nice portraits of Betty Friedan and Jesse Jackson and a valuable shout-out to the largely forgotten historical significance of Moveon.org, although all of the above coexists with clunky clauses, unflagged transitions, and uneven anecdotes. With its wealth of characters and case studies, The Cause is an enjoyable read for those who already know a fair amount about the subject. Missing, however, is a real narrative that demonstrates something other than relative decline vis-à-vis an evolving standard.

Can’t liberalism ever win? Apparently, it can only fall short as the next challenge presents itself. The book’s approach is largely additive; civil rights appears on the liberal agenda, then so do feminism and environmentalism. Following a brief nod to the New Deal glory days, the story follows a conservative arc, to the point where the boatloads of liberal victories in the 1960s are described in terms of their limits, as if many of them have not endured for half a century. What is the most important thing to know about Medicaid? That it was born of compromise? Or that a majority in Congress supported the idea of health care for the very poor?

The book is a declensionist tale, although again the standard for judgment shifts by time period. The ironic thing—or maybe the defining thing—is that liberalism after the New Deal has almost always existed in a mode of trepidation, despite liberals’ purported belief in progress. When one comes across a reference to Reagan’s ability to employee the liberal optimism of yore, one could easily be forgiven for forgetting that such optimism ever existed, so permanently imperiled is the book’s version of liberalism. Alterman, whose book first appeared before the 2012 election, seems skeptical that Obama has created an enduring liberal coalition. Fair enough. But to leave open the question of whether Obama is a liberal in the FDR tradition (the inference that I drew from the book) is rather curious. So is the glib assertion in an earlier chapter that Michael Dukakis was not really a liberal. Liberalism’s weakness on class issues is very real, and obviously Obama has not squared that circle. Still, the tension between class and pluralism was present from the start of FDR’s political coalition. In other words, it is intrinsic to modern American liberalism.

Overall, this book confirms my sense that the left-leaning perspective of most historians is particularly evident in their interpretations of liberalism, which are often exercises in self-criticism. (Not that there’s anything wrong with liberal self-criticism. I engage in liberal self-criticism all the time. I just try not to do so when I am writing history, because usually it leads to ahistorical judgments.)

So, how would I do things differently? Here are two themes I would stress, besides the aforementioned motif of ironic pessimism: 1) liberalism’s ability, in very successful fashion, to assimilate radical ideas, starting with Marxism and extending through civil rights and feminism (This is The Nation side of the story: The cooption of radicalism might have diluted the left, but it also has kept American democracy both vibrant and stable.); and 2) liberalism’s attempts, in more halting fashion, to respond to conservative criticisms (This is The New Republic end of the story, although it is pretty clear that that publication did immense damage to liberal causes in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the areas of foreign policy and health care. Here, I am on the same page as Alterman. The late Michael Kelly, one of the nastiest, least fair columnists I have ever read, provides a reminder of the embarrassingly small-minded nature of political writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is someone who somehow called himself a liberal but who thought Al Gore was a threat to the Republic.). Combined, the above themes represent the recurring dialectic over Obama’s two terms, a blend of transgender rights and sequestration, health care expansion and resistance to raising taxes on the middle class.*

Liberalism is flexible, and liberals are capable of learning lessons. Michael Kelly aside, they are often their own best critics. Just how seriously one takes this dynamic might explain one’s current view of, say, Lawrence Summers—or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. Critics see flexibility as insincerity and lessons learned as rudderlessness. A more generous interpretation is that American liberals tends to be interested in what works, both as policy and as politics. That liberalism is forever falling short is hardly the whole story, and frequently not even the most important one.
- Steven P. Miller

* What the dialectic does not explain are the drone attacks and the hedging on Syria. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, I think this is because there really is no coherent liberal or conservative approach to foreign policy (just inconsistently heeded tendencies). The foreign policy arena is usually more partisan than ideological, although I recognize that both were at work in Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
(Edited and amended slightly on 6/14/16)