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  • The Strange Death of American Liberalism
  • Irene Grau and Fred Antczak
The Strange Death of American Liberalism. By H. W. Brands. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001; pp vii + 200. $22.50 cloth.

When Mark Twain was confronted with reports of his death, he dismissed them as "greatly exaggerated." H. W. Brands gives us a similarly hyperbolic obituary. Brands defines liberalism as "a prevailing confidence in the ability of government—preeminently the federal government—to accomplish substantial good on behalf of the American people" (viii). Liberalism is to be defined neither in terms of the ideals that animated it nor the particular successes that drove its evolution, but in terms of the "big government" means required to accomplish them—means that also have been used by conservative movements. Brands argues that liberalism's impending death began with the failure of the Vietnam War and the public's realization that the government not only kept things from them, but actually lied to them (an offense, one notes, of an equalitarian premise more plausibly attached to the Left). Ultimately Brands thinks it is the loss of confidence in the means of government (rather than ends and ideals) that marks "the death of liberalism."

Brands's main argument is that liberalism has succeeded only under the specter of national security, thus only during times of war, or something like war. He defines liberalism's heyday, therefore, as from 1945 until the 1970s. Brands claims that the American public has trusted and supported the ever-expanding scope of the federal government only when the government has rhetorically draped its efforts in the mantle of national security and world peace. Consequently, he argues, without the Cold War threat, Johnson would not have been able to implement his Great Society programs, "the apogee of American liberalism" (91).

Since colonial times, Brands asserts, Americans have always maintained a skeptical stance toward government. From the Bill of Rights to the Civil War, if any government agency was to be trusted, it was state government. The rising power of the federal government developed after the Civil War, due to the "special circumstances" of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of big business, but Brands sees no corollary increase in trust for specific uses of government—for example, child labor laws—when it delivered the desired goods.

Brands asserts that the Progressive Era was primarily because of special circumstances: Fate, in the form of McKinley's assassination, propelled Teddy Roosevelt into office. In the wake of events like the failure of the assassination attempt on TR, or FDR, or Reagan, one wonders what Fate's scorecard looks like if read equally carefully from the conservative side. Brands points to Wilson's defeat of Roosevelt—in 1912 of course, in a three-way race when TR wasn't an incumbent—as evidence of the public's continued skepticism of big government. Wilson continued to expand governmental power through such [End Page 145] departments as the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Trade Commission. But Brands dismisses these expansions of government as merely protectionist in light of a new era and more special circumstances. He asserts that most of the changes lacked "even a glimmer of what would characterize modern liberalism: a state where government didn't simply prevent evil but actively promoted good" (18). Rhetoricians may find missing here any engagement of Wilson's reasons for entering the war.

While Brands admits that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal did some good, he treats it as a necessary manifestation of the Depression, and claims that Roosevelt merely implemented regulations on financial businesses rather than federalizing them. Brands sees this action as indicative of his initial lack of "liberalism" rather than, as a number of historians have argued, Roosevelt's going as far as the politics of the moment could have sustained. That raises a problem with the next step of his analysis: he claims that even when Roosevelt did implement decidedly liberal programs, such as his farm program and the National Recovery Administration, the public was still not overly enamored of the idea of big government. Brands cites Gallup polls supporting public skepticism, noting that in 1936 even Democrats...

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