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The Ardors and Tribulations of the Journey of Liberalism
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17421 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
8,019 Words |
| Author
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Max Lerner
Max Lerner is a historian and political theorist. He is author
of America as a Civilization (new edition 1987, Holt). His
latest book is Later than You Think: The Need for a
Militant Democracy (1988), a new edition with an introduction
by James MacGregor Burns and a foreword by the author
(Transaction Press 1989). |
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
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