The Fifties

by David Halberstam

If nothing else, Mills helped reinvigorate the left, which was in decline after the war. Victory in World War Two, the growing awareness of Stalin’s crimes, and the success of postwar capitalism had brought much of the intelligentsia back to the liberal center because fascist Germany and the Communist Soviet Union were so much worse than the United States. Other intellectuals found that America, in comparison with the rest of the world, now seemed less flawed; but Mills was not interested in a comparison with the rest of the world. He was a home-grown radical, bristling with his own native passions and his own very rugged, very American sense of independence. The enemy, for him and many young leftists who came after him, was the liberalism of the era, so bland and corrupting, so comfortable, that it was essentially endorsed by both major political parties. People did not have to make difficult moral choices anymore. The liberalism of the society of abundance was “without coherent content; that in the process of its banalization, its goals have been so formalized as to provide no clear moral optic. The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism’s success in becoming the official language for all public statement.”