Love Me, I'm a Liberal

America Transformed represents an ambitious attempt at synthesis, a sweeping interpretation of the history of the United States since the outbreak of the Second World War. During that period, Richard Abrams argues, America experienced a series of "revolutionary" transformations in social, political, and economic life. "Revolution" is in this sense used loosely, to signify cumulative and "progressive" change over time. Unprecedented affluence set the stage for dramatic alterations in racial relations, gender roles, and sexual behavior, and for the progressive initiatives of a liberal welfare state. The revolutions of the 1960s, though, provoked a powerful backlash. Spearheaded by an alliance of business elites seeking to dismantle business regulation, conservative anti-communists, and right-wing evangelical Christians, the third quarter of the century saw a wave of counter-revolution that produced "Right-Wing Ascendancy." The result was the collapse of the liberal consensus and the Democratic coalition that had emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and WWII. The period since has been characterized by "a major breakdown of any consensus on standards or even on a definition of virtue" (p. xvi). Government itself suffers from a crisis of legitimacy.

Abrams has organized the book as a series of essays, arranged thematically, with an overlapping chronology. It is written with the verve and confidence that comes from long consideration of the issues, rather than from an attempt to marshal all the literature on the many topics he engages. That approach has both strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, it contributes to clearly articulated interpretive judgments based on the evidence he deploys. On the other hand, he fails to address new arguments at intersections of gender, race, culture, and politics that might have enriched or challenged his interpretations.

The story he tells is a declension narrative, a fall from the promise, beginning to be realized, of an idealized form of cold war liberalism. A number of assumptions ground this narrative. In his vision, progressive change is fundamentally reformist and ameliorative, with the regulatory state functioning to restrain predatory capitalism but ensuring economic growth in a capitalist framework. The problem of poverty is gradually soluble through generally increasing prosperity and through redistributionist welfare programs. Racial justice and the promise of full inclusion and integration is achievable through Supreme Court jurisprudence and the non-violent, integrationist civil rights movement of the sort that culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Progress in racial relations, however, requires a period of social adjustment to the new realities; a form of gradualism, it would seem. A progressive and moral foreign policy is realized through "liberal internationalism," the necessity of the United States to meet its "responsibilities" by the defeat of fascism, the containment of communism, and resistance to other oppressive regimes. (In practice this responsibility seems to mean Wilsonian interventionism of the "right" kind, in cooperation with an international coalition as in Korea, Kuwait, or Kosovo, rather than the wrong kind as in Vietnam, which resulted in a bloody disaster that discredited liberal interventionism.)

Perhaps most central to his thesis is the proposition that progress comes not from "grassroots pressure upon the political system, . . . but from the efforts of a liberal elite fortuitously entrenched in key social, political, and especially judicial positions" (p. 125). These elites "did their work from within some of the least democratic institutions in the country: its universities, its research centers, its corporate boards, its independent regulatory agencies, and its Supreme Court." These heroic (but narratively ill-defined) figures swam against the popular tide, arousing the "opposition of the nation's democratic or majoritarian forces" (p. ix).

The perversity of popular "majoritarian" sentiment in the United States is a dominant theme throughout the book. Abrams argues that the brief triumph of liberal reform came through the agency of establishment elites, with a little assistance from a civil rights movement inspired by Brown v. Board of Education and other such court decisions. But as...