American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time (review)

"Democracy ain't worth a damn if it's not liberal" (1)—thus opens John McGowan's new book on the dwindling fortunes of the liberal tradition in Bush's America. Concerned that his fellow citizens have forgotten the virtues of pluralism, the evils of unbridled capitalism, and the value of ideological flexibility over dogmatic partisanship, he makes the case for a revived Madisonian cum New Deal cum Great Society politics. He seeks, in other words, to contest the dominant red state temperament of our times. McGowan naturally distinguishes the "far" right and to a lesser extent the "radical" left as the liberal persuasion's most resourceful nemeses, and his dead-on observation that both poles are at heart dividers rather than uniters (the more rigid multi-culturalists practice "identity politics," the ur conservatives demand "privatization") opens space for this author to argue in favor of a new federalism. McGowan offers a remedy list that includes limiting the government's ability to pile-up huge debts (in the process increasing its reach and thus power) while concurrently sticking states with massive bills for roads, health care, mass transit, and other infrastructural upkeep. Obviously he rejects the two-party cliché that tax-and-spend Democrats face-off in mortal combat against small government Republicans. After more than a quarter-century observing Reaganism and its heirs use the might of the central state to minimize Roosevelt era social safety nets while cozying up to the country's corporate elite, he's had enough. One catches the faint whiff of Thomas Paine—and a little Thomas Frank—in these pages.

Put into context, American Liberalism piggy-backs on a distinguished lineage of mid-century books. Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition (1948), Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center (1949), and Louis Hartz's classic The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) come readily to mind. These works made the case for a postwar liberalism tested by the Great Depression and the Second World War—and argued against a return to the old property-rights capitalism that prefaced the market crash of 1929. McGowan writes in the fading afterglow of their and postwar liberalism's heyday.

More contemporaneously, American Liberalism comes across a scholarly version of the many "political" books that appear in election years. And like these books, it sometimes sacrifices nuance for sloganeering. Too casually does McGowan praise "liberalism [as] the sine non qua of political decency in our time" (139). Liberalism's legacy is complex. It encompasses not merely efforts to create fair and sustaining social welfare legislation grounded in a philosophy of "equal rights," but also a host of less salutary outcomes including complicity in pre-1970s southern segregation, the dramatic expansion of corporate power, and the undeclared wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are reasons—largely unexamined in this book—for pluralism's demise. In so many respects, McGowan is right. Despite its dyspeptic recent past, liberalism has much to offer our political culture; certainly it stands as a useful break to the ultra politics on the left and the right. And yet this book's unwillingness to assess the weaknesses as well as the strengths of American liberalism may make readers wonder just why so many Americans jumped off the liberal bus in the first place.