Losing the Center: The Decline of American Liberalism, 1968–1992

7. "America Ain't What's Wrong with the World”: Ben Wattenberg, the Vital Center, and Neoconservatism’s Liberal Roots

7 “America Ain’t What’s Wrong with the World” Ben Wattenberg, the Vital Center, and Neoconservatism’s Liberal Roots the “Little Flower” understood schisms. Acknowledging, “the trouble with us liberals and progressives is that we’re not united,” Fiorello Laguardia confessed: “Let’s not fool ourselves—we have more than fiftyseven varieties.”1 if anyone realized liberalism’s voluminous categories, it was Laguardia. indeed, the son of italian and Jewish immigrants inhabited an extraordinary number of these varieties all by himself. Born in bohemian greenwich Village, he grew up in the Arizona territory, worshiped as an episcopalian, worked in italy, and joined the goP— all before serving three terms as mayor of the multiethnic stew that was new York City. taking full advantage of the Left’s divides, in 1947 the “Little Flower” and henry Wallace launched the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). through organizing liberalism’s dissidents into the PCA, they hoped to unseat harry truman. to buttress the president, Arthur schlesinger and eleanor roosevelt formed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). in the time before the 1948 election, these two entities vied to attract Laguardia’s fiftyseven varieties to their cause. Days prior to the PCA-ADA split, these very progressives and liberals met to mend political fences. Before the afternoon had expired, their gettogether turned into a political brawl. entering their summit, each side proffered contending interpretations of the nascent Cold War. Laguardia and Wallace believed that stalin merely desired secure borders, while schlesinger and roosevelt regarded Kremlin intransigence as evidence of its revolutionary nature.2 When a Wallaceite accused schlesinger of being “obsessed 134 Losing the Center with the Communist problem to the neglect of all the great fascist and warmaking forces,” reconciliation talks broke down.3 the fisticuffs revealed the profound divisions separating postwar liberals . With schlesinger and the ADA pushing for containment and Wallace and the PCA wanting to share global leadership, a showdown appeared inevitable . the 1948 election produced just such a confrontation, an altercation that decided postwar liberalism’s trajectory. More than a triumph for containment, truman’s victory also bequeathed a liberalism that united many of Laguardia’s fifty-seven varieties under a common banner: Vital Center liberalism. Vital Center Liberalism Born from international events, Vital Center liberalism was much more than a foreign policy impulse. While the soviet Union represented an international challenge, communism also posed a domestic problem that all Western leftists faced: cooperate with or oppose the stalinists in their midst. Vital Center liberals opted for battle. their resulting transatlantic alliance of liberal capitalists, deradicalized socialists, and moderate rightists moved all those creeds to the center. Far from a mushy middle way, the Vital Center represented a profoundly cosmopolitan and sophisticated reply to the challenges of midcentury political extremism. Vital Center liberals saw the stakes as nothing less than the survival of democracy. rocked by the democratic Left’s prewar failures, the nazis’ wartime atrocities, and the soviets’ postwar aggression, they searched for a viable path between stalinism and rightist reaction. Arthur schlesinger found that course in the person of Leon Blum. the French socialist who lanBen J. Wattenberg (second from right) (courtesy hobart and William smith Colleges Archives and special Collections) “America Ain’t What’s Wrong with the World” 135 guished in a nazi prison during the war had sensed the very same issues that so hounded schlesinger: the survival of democracy in an age of extremes.4 Blum and schlesinger worried with good reason. hamstrung by the Depression , Western democracies had watched helplessly as the fascists engulfed europe in war. During the early postwar era, it appeared that history might repeat itself. Unhindered by democratic procedures, Communists offered easy remedies to economic calamity and disorder. rightists, in turn, proposed their own radical agenda. Fearing a reprise of prewar europe’s political vertigo, Blum called for a fundamental reformulation of the modern political order. As he saw it, the nazis and soviets had rendered the French revolution’s Left-right continuum obsolete. As a result, he called for a “third force.”5 Dispensing with a “united Left,” Blum and schlesinger cast their lot with a centrist alliance of democratic socialists, liberal capitalists, and moderate rightists. to schlesinger’s mind, this coalition promised consistent political action to counter the big issues of the day. in so doing, the Vital Center would imbue liberal democracies with the “fighting faith” they lacked a generation prior.6 By...