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Title: The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H. W. Brands ISBN: 0-300-09824-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An Interesting if Sketchy Argument
Comment: H.W. Brands has developed an interesting thesis in his recent book "The Strange Death of American Liberalism" that neither liberals nor conservatives will much like.
Liberalism, Brands argues, is a centralized political arrangement that can only thrive in the U.S. during wartime. Because of the depth of Americans' distrust of the central government, the natural political fallback position of Americans is conservatism. Only during war do Americans drop this instinctual distrust of the federal government and allow it to take over new responsibilities.
So why do some Baby Boomers think that liberalism is a natural and permanent condition in U.S. politics, simply in need of resuscitation? Brands says the duration of the Cold War fooled them. Whereas wars involving the U.S. had been relatively short in the past, the length of the Cold War allowed for a more sustained intrusion of the central government into Americans' lives than ever before.
As Brands' book is only 170 pages long, he merely breezes through U.S. history (surprising for a historian), but nevertheless gives an interesting historical sketch as a preliminary test of his hypothesis. He argues, for example, that the basic nature of both progressivism in the early 20th century and the New Deal in the 1930s were both fairly conservative. On the other hand, he also buttresses his thesis by showing the solid advances in power made by the federal government during WW1 and WW2.
One of the more surprising bits of data that Brands gives is a poll in 1939 that asked Americans whether the U.S. federal government was spending too much money, not enough, or just the right amount. 61% answered that the government was spending too much. Only 10% said too little. And throughout the 30s, even with unemployment rates never dipping below 10%, and once going as high as 25%, most Americans thought it should be a priority for the government to balance its budget and reduce its debt. On the eve of FDR's second administration, 50% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans said they hoped it would be more conservative than his first administration.
Conservatives are probably gleeful to read this. Is there any more palatable thesis to conservatives than that their political philosophy is the natural state for Americans? But while Brands' interpretation of U.S. history is likely to provide some succor for conservatives, his reading of the importance of Reagan will probably turn their stomachs. Reagan, according to Brands, could not overcome the public's distrust of the federal government to enlist its support for new foreign adventures beyond Grenada, or for a more general support of the Cold War beyond increased defence spending.
It's here that Brands' argument becomes strained. Aren't huge increases in defence spending still a sign of American trust in the central government in at least one regard? Brands' book is so short that he never gets around to properly answering these kinds of questions. He says that others must take up his hypothesis to test its explanatory power. Brands should have spent the time to answer these questions himself.
"The Strange Death of American Liberalism" was published just prior to 9-11, but if its hypothesis is correct, such an event might prove to be the resurrection of liberalism as Americans turn once again to the federal government for solutions to problems that only it can provide. But whatever its relevance to current events, this book gives an interesting twist to the traditional conservative/liberal divide.
Rating: 2
Summary: Pretty Vacant
Comment: What do you think of when you hear the word "liberalism"? The civil rights movements, the bill of rights, feminism, the separation of church of state? Well that's not what H.W. Brands is thinking about. Brands is referring to the belief in big government. Americans were consistently hostile to big government until military necessity forced them to create one. Liberalism existed as long as the cold war lasted to give it life and in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and detente people naturally lost their interest in it. So naturally they turned to Reagan who then restarted the cold war and was politically successful even though most Americans were not particularly enthused about his program.
As we can see, clarity is not one of Brands' virtues. (He also is not very good in defining what "conservatism" means.) In fact this is a short, superficial (yet padded) work that adds nothing to our knowledge. Indeed it is little more than a regurgitation of the conventional wisdom, which is done with more wit and panache in The New Republic. In such writing one must be continually interesting yet never actually challenge the bromides of the time. So what we have is a cheap form of paradox: the success of liberalism was the result of the cold war, Nixon was really a liberal, that sort of thing.
We have to define liberalism more closely. If liberalism is dead, it does not mean that "big government" is dead, since the size of the government has not changed very much over time. If liberalism is dead, it does not mean that the American government does not have considerable power, since it has a military regime second to none. That it uses its considerable offices to ensure free trade rather than cut infant mortality or stop AIDS leads us to political questions, and political choices, that Brands does not really discuss.
Let us look at those parts of the liberal agenda which are particularly unpopular or unlikely to pass; abolition of the death penalty, revival of trade unions, systematic economic reforms to counter deindustrialization, national health insurance, national daycare, a civil rights agenda that moves beyond the laws of the sixties. Not all of these are unpopular, not all of these require "big government." They are currently in limbo for complex reasons which Brands does not touch on and does not provide much help in discussing. There is nothing on unions, nothing on feminism. There is nothing on the structures of the political parties or federalism or the congressional and electoral system. But allo these encourage certain vested elites over others, which ensure delay and resistance at every turn. There is no mention of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis which shows that even before the Voting Rights Act, let alone black power, that Detroit whites and other Northerners were not willing to pay the price needed for integration. (For no very good reason, Brands argues Americans lost their faith in government a decade later, as a result of revelations of CIA skullduggery.)
What we have is a book in which "popular opinion" is treated as an autonomous force and the not the result of past political struggles. (And the polling evidence he cites is a crude simplification of a complex reality.) There is also an unhelpful tendency to link the passage of every successful reform in the fifties and sixties to national security. This is clearly misleading; as Patricia Sullivan noted, civil rights reform was making progress in the thirties and the forties before the cold war intervened. I doubt very few minds were changed because some people suggested that the South made the United States look bad in the eyes of the world. The portrait of the liberal Nixon is likewise flawed: Nixon did have to face a democratic Congress, who after all were responsible for passing much of the legislation that Brands gives sole credit to Nixon for. His praise of Nixon's "generous" welfare program ignores the work of Jill Quadagno and Rickie Solinger (who points out the demagogic campaigns against welfare fraud at this time). As for Nixon's foreign policy, Brands ignores the fact that Nixon extended the Vietnam war for four years without gaining anything that could have been achieved in 1969, and at the price of dragging Cambodia into the war. On questions of disarmament, the Israel-Arab conflict, Angola, Apartheid, the Pakistan-Indian war, and Latin America, Nixon's foreign policy was as anti-Soviet and belligerent as any conservative could ask for. It is true that conservatives did not always recognize this, but so what? Stalwarts of the right such as William F. Buckley and John Wayne could all agree that Ronald Reagan did not know what he was talking about in opposing the Panama Canal treaty. Brands ignores continuities: notwithstanding the rhetoric of the war on poverty, LBJ and Clinton both thought that poverty was largely the result of the behavioral problems of the poor and underplayed the economic forces that encouraged it. Brands is a noticeably prolific historian. This volume is a good argument for writer's block.
Rating: 3
Summary: The End of Total War = End of Liberalism
Comment: Brands argues a simple idea here that makes good sense: that the lberal agenda was activated and supported by the cold war, not the New Deal, and that it's practitioners included both Democrats and Republicans: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. According to Brands, the communist threat was used initially by the democrats as a reason for expansion of the federal government and the welfare state as a means to demonstrate to the world that Operation Democracy was superior to Operation Communisum. And that as Operation Communism began to falter and the Soviet threat disintegrated, the liberal agenda disintegrated, too. This gave rise eventually to the "end of welfare as we know it."
Brand argues that the American people have always been skeptical about the federal government being given too much power. He cites chapter and verse from the Federalist Papers, the history of the Revolutionary War, the U.S. Constution. He notes that during the cold war this skepticism was held in check because Americans, historically, have always recognized that there must be a federal government to wage war and make treaties. Given their long suspicion of big government, it took the cold war the longest war in American history to draw more power to itself both internationally and domestically.
Reagan, the great schizophrenic, wanted it both ways. For those who lived through that crazy house time, Brands analysis makes good sense. Reagan told Americans that big government was evil and incompetent, un-American and communisitic and that business was competent and would fix everything that was broken. But at the same time, from the other side of his mouth, he asked Americans to believe that when it came to prosecuting war, the government was competent and knew what it was doing. I always wondered why we couldn't let business run foreign policy, since they seemed to be running everything else under Reagan's tenure. Culturally, Reagan was a Democrat, (having been an FDR liberal), but politically he was a weird mixture of Calvin Coolidge, and George Wallace. He reached way back to the days of the Robber Baron for his rhetoric about business, spent billions on the military industrial complex so his friends could profit from the war, and cut average Americans out of the big Keynesian spending spree.
America after WWII at last recognized it was a world leader and that isolationism was impossible. Everything done in the name of the American people during those years -- improved benefits, the recognition of labor unions, the expansion of various Social Security and Great Society Programs met with little opposition from Republicans for it was all done as a necessary part of fighting the cold war. It was Reagan's great genius to stop the gravy train the average American was riding on, and clear the right of way for the gravy train's headed for corporations and wealthy Americans. I'll always be grateful to him for showing me how undeserving poor people are, and how deserving the rich are. After all, they are rich and they got that way through hard, hard work!
We are now, since September 11, for the moment anyway, reassuming some of the rhetoric of the cold war. We hear comparisons of al Queda to facism, we hear of massive military spending, billions in gifts to various industries, billions earmarked for security. And so, once again we are launched back into the well-known waters of total war, though like the Gulf War, we know it will only be temporary. Thus the lobbyists know they must take good advantage of the circumstances. A boondoggle that could not get funding before September is now necessary for national defense. New corporate welfare proposals are vital to our domestic economy. I'm so relieved. It's the language we all understand. The schooling of half a century is always at the ready, ready for activation by whatever new threat appears, and fortunately now, we don't have to spend any of it on undserving Americans because we don't have to prove that Operation Democracy is better than Operation Communism anymore. Nobody wants to live in a cave, after all!
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