Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer

Demoralize

1. b. To deprive (a thing) of its moral influence or effectiveness.

2. To lower or destroy the power of bearing up against dangers, fatigue, or difficulties ...: applied esp. to an army or a people under arms; also transf. to take from anything its firmness, staying power, etc.

Oxford English Dictionary

I

It remains a commonplace of contemporary American politics that Democratic Party candidates for the presidency should be wary of identifying themselves as liberals. The confident 1941 tones of Franklin Delano Roosevelt are unavailable for 2005 Democrats: 'The liberal party is a party which believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them. The liberal party insists that the government has the definite duty to use its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls to insure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' ('What Is a Liberal – Who Is a Conservative?' 47). That the 2004 presidential election did nothing to restore liberalism's fortunes goes without saying (Page and Lawrence).

The sources of liberalism's fall are many. For example, the intractable stagflation of the 1970s combined with oil and bond market shocks helped undermine Keynesian liberalism's claim to effective management of the American economy. Nor did it help that liberals could be found both directing and protesting the Viet Nam War, or that the busing conflicts of the 1970s, or the thirty years of abortion debate, or debates over gun control, or the association of liberalism with some of the favourite issues of secularism (homosexual marriage, opposition to prayer in the schools, etc) made large areas of liberalism's great recruiting ground in the American working class hostile territory, often leaving liberals puzzled at the refusal of many American workers to share in that basic assumption of liberalism's inherently materialist metaphysics that economics always trumps culture.¹

All such sources granted, I want to hark back to a slightly earlier period and to focus on a small topic. More than a few of those above-cited sources of its descent into limbo were marked by liberalism's debate with a rejuvenated conservatism and, later, with a super-charged neo-conservatism, both able to give as much as once they had taken from liberalism. What I want to look at is something that, coming from within liberalism, helped, in a modest literary way, to begin the process of demoralization that would make it an outlook that, on all but the boldest politician's lips, dare not speak its name.

My hypothesis is that the demoralization of liberalism may have begun just before and after the Second World War, in the work of men and women associated with Partisan Review and New York literary culture. In particular, I want to suggest how the work of three of them – Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer – may have contributed despite themselves and from within liberalism to the crisis of liberalism.

For many New York intellectuals, raised on various forms of Marxism and fellow-travelling, the move to the liberal centre began under the pressure of the Moscow Trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact, events that would lead many to break whatever ties they once had with the Party itself or with Trotskyism or Marxism generally. Those 'breaks,' prefigurative of breaks that some of them would later experience with liberalism itself, would eventually lead another generation of critics to speak of them, luridly, as having inaugurated a 'discourse' of 'anti-Stalinism' in which they succumbed to strange 'imaginaries' or projected dangerous and hallucinatory 'Others.'

However, those 1930s ruptures rarely took New York intellectuals from left-liberal ranks, and many remained, for years, socialists.² At least two of them...