History in the Shadow of Political Theory

On or about April 1938 American politics changed, according to David Ciepley. In that fateful month, the nation’s panicked response to totalitarianism turned Congress against President Roosevelt’s executive reorganization plan, inaugurating a sharp “rightward turn” that has left American public culture impoverished ever since (p. 7). Ciepley argues that, with the “hysteria of 1938,” the American political class abruptly abandoned its centuries-old goal of improving the economic well-being and moral health of the people, disavowing such “public paternalism” as implicitly totalitarian (pp. 18, 12). Since then, he says, elites have hewed to the “neutralist” ideal of a state that studiously ignores the personal character and economic activities of its citizens. Finding this shift in many domains, from legislative battles to social-scientific theorizing to changes in the judicial philosophy of the Supreme Court, Ciepley concludes that the hysteria of 1938 “closed the Progressive era and opened the Liberal era” (p. 26).

Ciepley is a political theorist who endorses “‘virtue progressivism,’ a variant of liberalism that is both economically progressive and virtue-centered” (p. 4). Here, he combines theoretical arguments for virtue progressivism with a sweeping historical account that portrays this theory as a primordial characteristic of American political culture. Describing 1938 as a sharp turning point in American politics, Ciepley contends that “the reputedly genetic antistatism of American liberalism” did not emerge until that year, and then only among a national elite (p. 17). Before then, he says, virtually all Americans endorsed virtue progressivism, and that approach still holds sway outside centers of power. By contrast, the neutralist liberalism of recent decades appears here as a political usurper, lacking popular support.

Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism takes its narrative shape from Ciepley’s ideology critique of neutralism.¹ Up to 1938, Ciepley avers, American political thought was honest and realistic. Faithfully reflecting popular belief, it resulted from “political practitioners responding to practical problems of governance” (p. 29). But the neutralist liberalism that burst onto the scene in 1938 bore little relation to either the commitments of the populace or the nation’s actual needs. Whence the change, then? According to Ciepley, it was “largely the work of academics” undertaking an “ideological effort to distinguish the United States from the totalitarian regimes as much as possible” (p. 29). He argues that the neutralist ideal sprang from the fevered brows of social scientists bedeviled by charges of moral relativism, and was then picked up en masse by the governing class. After 1938, totalitarianism became “the photographic negative that fixed, and in many respects continues to fix, the self-image of the United States”—in short, “our defining Other” (p. 1). The contemporary American political imagination, Ciepley writes, stands in thrall to a “ruling dichotomy” that starkly contrasts “totalitarian restraint” to “individual liberty, understood as the absence of restraint” (p. 2). This “redefinition of the very ‘meaning’ of America” after 1938 “significantly altered the course of U.S. cultural and institutional development, to the point where we can speak of the encounter with totalitarianism as marking a rupture in the American liberal tradition” (p. 1). In a sense, Ciepley brings us full circle to the “consensus histories” of the 1950s—except that he sees two distinct American minds in succession, separated by a “caesura in American public philosophy,” and urges us to trade in the current model for its more genuine predecessor (p. 263).

Historians can learn a great deal from this book, whether or not they share the author’s enthusiasm for the “Protestant-bourgeois virtues” (p. 32). Ciepley brings an impressively wide range of material under his interpretive umbrella and puts a powerful new spin on a host of mid-twentieth-century developments, familiar and unfamiliar. The middle sections of book, which I will barely touch on here, offer much valuable empirical analysis. Yet Ciepley’s desire to lend virtue progressivism the normative weight of historical precedent ultimately renders his narrative overwrought and unpersuasive. He hangs far too much on Michael Sandel...