In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews 359 communication about labor conflict, and provides a useful supplement to more theoretical research on this segment of American history. Kevin J. Ayotte University of Pittsburgh Liberalism and Its Discontents. By Alan Brinkley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998; pp. xii + 372. $27.95 By the 1930s, the term "liberal" in American public discourse had come to mean almost the opposite of what it meant a century before—active rather than restrained government, regulation rather than deference to the individual. This change came about not just because Franklin Roosevelt and others wanted to portray radical change as conservative restoration, but because they believed that in a modern economy, Hamiltonian means were required to achieve Jeffersonian ends: in a strong and active government lay the best means to protect the interests of the people. This celebration of 20th-century liberalism reached its zenith in the presidential election campaign of 1936. These events form the starting point, not the subject matter, of Alan Brinkley's Liberalism and Its Discontents. In a series of seventeen essays, most of them revisions of earlier publications, Brinkley assesses shifts in American thinking about liberalism since the 1930s. The book is alternately about liberalism in public disclosure and about historians' orientations toward liberalism. It is well to remember that there was a time when liberal politicians wore that label proudly, believing that active government was the means to improve the quality of life. Their critics, who equated liberalism with socialism or communism, were dismissed as reactionaries of the radical right. Now, however, the term approaches anathema, associated as it is with bureaucratic rigidity, failed social programs, impractical schemes, and threats to freedom. The meaning of "liberal" reached its nadir in the 1988 presidential campaign when George Bush used it as an epithet. After being pummeled by Bush and Ronald Reagan, erstwhile liberals have taken to calling themselves moderates or progressives instead. How did this change come about? Brinkley's essays explore dimensions of the questions, "What is liberalism? What happened to it?" (ix). Although the answers are indirect and incomplete, several of the essays warrant careful reading by those interested in the nexus of rhetoric and politics. Brinkley begins with the second Roosevelt administration, which exposed a tension in New Deal rhetoric. In some cases, government was described as the agent that could bring together big business and big labor in an "associational economy ." In other cases, government was described as a countervailing force to offset big business and big labor. The latter view, championed during the 1936 campaign, came to prevail. To achieve their purposes, liberals relied on the regulatory state and 360 Rhetoric & Public Affairs on the use of fiscal policy not to achieve specific policy goals but to stabilize the economy. Still, even these measures did not end the Depression; it took World War II to do that. This troubled history gave rise to a trenchant critique: Liberalism was bad because it meant "perpetual, intrusive government involvement in the workings of the economy " (46). Even worse, the recession of 1937-38 actually reduced faith in government 's ability to administer a rational economy. The exigence of the war likewise led in opposite directions. It justified centralization and control but it also gave rise to the argument that wartime sacrifices could not be justified if, when peace returned, American society were as centrally directed as were our enemies'. Meanwhile, the massive increases in industrial output for the war reinforced American self-confidence but also gave the lie to earlier statements that the economy had matured and needed careful management rather than continued growth. Even as it inspired national self-sacrifice, then, the war fueled a resurgent conservatism that was evident in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Interestingly, however, doubts about government's ability to mange the domestic economy coexisted with faith in America's ability to mange international relations so as to get its way. Cold War liberalism was the latest strain of American exceptionalism that could be traced back to the founding. The conduct of foreign policy was not responsive to pubhc opinion, though, but was in the hands of such "establishment" figures as John McCloy. They believed that public opinion could...

pdf

Share