Liberalism Is Dead

Liberalism Is Dead
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. from the February 2011 issue

IN THE TUMULTUOUS HISTORY of postwar American Liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which the Liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. This pose has called for admirable discipline, for the evidence was all around them. Yet Liberals, who began as the rightful heirs to the New Deal, carried on as a kind of aristocracy, gifted but doomed. They dominated the culture and the politics of the country unchallenged from the beginnings of the Cold War to the first Nixon administration. With the general populace, however, they increasingly faltered. Now they are down to around 20 percent of the electorate. They have the nation's librarians, most of the professoriate, students so long as they remain relatively untaxed, labor leaders, and career Democrats. After that it gets tricky. Conservatives accounted for 42 percent of the vote in the recent election, maintaining roughly a 2-1 margin over liberals, which has been true for decades. In the last election, the independents, the second most numerous group, voted with conservatives. They were alarmed about the economy, and will probably remain alarmed for a long time.

Liberals are going the way of the American Prohibition Party. It is time for someone to tell them: "Rigor mortis has set in, comrades." They could be oblivious during the Nixon Crisis or while Ronald Reagan sleepwalked through history, as many Liberals still say; but today their obliviousness amounts to a kind of madness. The house is afire, but there is a whole string ensemble madly playing their fiddles.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the decline might appear to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy when historians noted the first sightings of what was to become Liberalism's distinctive trait, overreach. At times Liberals promise too much. At times they attempt too much. Occasionally, they actually achieved too much, and many Americans fear for their wallets and their liberties. As a consequence larger numbers of the electorate have been voting for conservatism, a movement that began in the 1950s when anti-communists combined with proponents of limited government and advocates of American traditionalism. For years it was a small, struggling movement, challenging Liberalism intellectually until Richard Nixon availed himself to parts of it. Then in the 1970s it became an intellectual and electoral force, and with the presidency of Ronald Reagan it became the dominant force in American politics. The Liberals remained oblivious.

Kennedy's soaring oratory frequently attained the sublime meaninglessness of romantic poesy. It was lovely, but it roused the Soviets, led to the Vietnam quagmire, and put America in the role of Doctor Democracy to the world, not leaving us with much room to maneuver. It was, in truth, an extension of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Even further back it echoed President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. It was infectious and admirable and it even impressed later generations of conservatives, but it was susceptible to overreach and of course it was a bit dishonest. For instance, there never was a missile gap, as Kennedy claimed, or any other cause for his histrionics. Moreover, on the domestic side the oratory set in motion what was to be catastrophic overreach, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

In a way JFK's stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War behind us. He wanted to return to "normalcy." Yet JFK departed from Ike's more prudent course when he said in his first Inaugural, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." He kept up the rhetorical barrage. Then on April 12, 1961, the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin into space. A week later Kennedy betrayed ambivalence at the Bay of Pigs and immaturity at his June summit with the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev, who told his aides that by comparison Ike "was a man of intelligence and vision." Kennedy was inert as the East Germans built a wall around Berlin in August, and only reacted vigorously when he had the Cuban missile crisis on his hands in fall of 1962. Then the Great Blah began, as Richard Rovere wrote in the New Yorker that the showman in the White House had achieved "perhaps the greatest personal diplomatic victory of any president in our history." Perhaps! Now, however, the Russians were roused, and America was on a path much more perilous than that which Ike had envisioned. It led to a red-hot Cold War in Kennedy's day and to Vietnam. It fixed America's stance in the world as defender of democracy. It led to the inevitability of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically it set us on the path to a behemoth Big Government.

STILL, IN LOOKING FOR Liberalism's decline the historian's eye falls on an earlier event as a precursor to Liberalism's present entombment: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II between what we might call the radical Liberals led by Henry Wallace and the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book "The Vital Center," more practical Liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh, and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata for their constituents were reasonable by comparison with the radicals' wild ideas.

Yet, even here in 1947 they introduced the excesses that were to grow much worse. They instilled their Liberalism with a disturbing moralism and even worse, the first Big Lie of modern American politics. Others would come, for instance the allegation that anyone who questions their most recent panacea for racial relations is a racist or for alleviating poverty hates the poor, and that Bill Clinton was virginal. When he, as president, dissembled about Monica Lewinsky under oath it was a minor offense. The Big Lie was that Alger Hiss, Dexter White, and the other security risks were not Communists. We now know with the opening of the Venona files that they were. We further know from a careful reading of history that in the late 1940s such figures as Dean Acheson and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes knew that they were. Yet these Democrats thought the truth did not matter. Hiss was an eccentric or an idealist. What mattered was keeping the Republicans out of government. Maybe they were right that Hiss's communism was a harmless thing, but they did not have to lie about it. The Hiss debate envenomed our politics right up to the present and brought discredit to Liberalism.

The practical Liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won with the Democratic nomination of Senator George McGovern for president. The radicals had changed the rules of the Democratic Party, thus ensuring their victories in subsequent conventions. Simultaneously with this radical takeover of the Democratic Party, radicals took over the universities, bringing in nonsense studies and idiot enthusiasms. In the meantime, LBJ's Great Society was an egregious instance of overreach, causing even some Liberals to warn against the "unintended consequences" of government programs. These straying Liberals were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism, which was now growing fast. The radicals' conquests of the Democratic Party and of the universities hastened the straying Liberals' journey to conservatism. Such Liberals as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan were in Kristol's words Liberals "who were mugged by reality."

Meanwhile, the radical Liberals became more self-indulgent. They were of two types, the aging students who had in the late 1960s been called Coat-and-Tie Radicals and the more serious ideologues. The first became Delusional Leftists. The second either were or became socialists, though they dare not use the word -- even social democrat was out. Only a crisis in the leadership of President Nixon allowed the electorate to ignore these transformations.

How grave Nixon's misbehavior was in Watergate, I leave to history. I shall only say this. There is a formal and informal politics. In the formal politics we play by the rules. In the informal we break the lesser rules from time to time. Everyone in Washington suspected, when informed of Watergate, that Nixon had suggested sotto voce to his lieutenants, "Rid me of this problem." LBJ had done it with such rogues as Bobby Baker. Truman had done it with numerous scoundrels, and FDR did it with a wide array from Maurice Parmelee, a practicing nudist, to Jesse Jones, his secretary of commerce. Most modern Big Government presidents say, "I don't want to hear about it," and the thing is dealt with by others. Perhaps it was the moralism of modern Liberalism that would not allow it in Nixon's case.

At any rate, "Worse than the lie is the cover-up" became the new Washington truism, and in the subsequent cleansing much of Southeast Asia went Communist. It became dangerous to be numbered among America's friends. By now Liberalism was becoming lost in its fantasies. Conservatives became evil while each Liberal became a moral colossus, a truth seeker, a poet. Possibly the first attempts at windsurfing were undertaken. More on this later. The Liberals began to confer with only the like-minded. They lost touch with America. They almost never establish communication with the American conservatives. When they were beaten by conservatives they really never knew what hit them.

CONSERVATIVES HAVE HAD Edmund Burke, the Earl of Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli), and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided conservatives with discipline and direction. Sometimes the conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for Liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabians and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s and the recognition of the Soviet Union's costs in liberty (and at times lives) and social democracy's costs to GDP, people like John Kenneth Galbraith became coy about their intellectual heroes. Some pointed to John Stuart Mill, but so did some conservatives. John Maynard Keynes was useful but too narrow. So the Liberals really have no formidable ancestor to claim -- certainly no Burkes, not even a couple of the Founding Fathers. Maybe Jean-Jacques Rousseau or more recently Saul Alinsky, but the first is lost in dithyrambs and the second stole hubcaps or maybe whole cars.

Actually around the 1970s I can hear some clarions of the dead Liberalism claiming the Beatles as Liberal philosophes. After all since the 1960s rock 'n' roll had a special place in the Liberals' Weltanschauung. Sean Wilentz, the modern-day heir to Schlesinger, has even written a scholarly study of Bob Dylan. Did Schlesinger ever write a book about Frank Sinatra or earlier Glenn Miller? As I say, Liberalism is dead.

By the 1980s the leadership of the Liberal cause could be divided into two types, the Delusional Left and a smaller camp, the socialists. The Delusional Left talked of global warming, some sort of government health care, and increasingly one world under one law -- that sort of thing. They did not talk of socialism, but doubtless if the wind came up and filled out socialism's sails, they would gladly be swept along. The true socialists lay low until very recently and even now they are not very candid, adopting a pose of "Read my deeds" rather than "Read my lips." The Delusional Left have provided me with a lot of laughs: Al Gore's historic kiss at the 2000 Democratic Convention, Jean-François Kerry the Vietnam war protester claiming to be the war hero. By contrast President Barack Obama is not so funny, though occasionally he comes up with such lines as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

FROM THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION on the numbers have not been good for Liberals. In 1972 one state went for George McGovern, and that was not even his home state. He even lost the youth vote, though one would never know it from reading the press accounts. In 1976 Liberalism did better, but Jimmy Carter ran as a moderate and God gave him Watergate. Then came 1980. Reagan benefited from the ongoing electoral accretions that modern conservatism had attracted: the neocons, the evangelicals (aka the Christian Right), the Reagan Democrats. The Liberals could only claim feminists, gays, blacks, and Latinos. In other words, nothing new -- just perpetrators of what we call Masked Politics. When the Mask slipped one could see all had been Liberals all along. During the eight years of Reagan, he changed the political center for years to come. His policies worked. As the Old Cowboy headed back to California, the political center was center-right: vigilance about big government; balanced budgets, low taxes, and peace through strength.

In 1992, after 12 years of conservatives in the White House, Bill Clinton beat a peculiarly weak George Herbert Walker Bush. Yet Clinton, like Carter, ran as a moderate. Once in office he tried to push a Liberal Big Government agenda with an infrastructure buildup and health care reform. He was trounced in the midterm election, losing both houses, and the House of Representatives by the biggest shift since 1946. The rest of Clinton's presidency was as he himself proclaimed, "The era of big government is over." The Reagan Revolution was secured. In 2000 Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost to the governor of Texas despite prosperity and peace. Bush won the midterms in 2002, increasing his margins in both houses, and in 2004 he won again. Then came the Republicans' Wilderness Years in 2006 and 2008 -- but not conservatism's. Its adherents were still well ahead of Liberals. Conservatism has steadily spread throughout the Republic since its larval days in the 1950s, and Liberalism has declined to its present need of a proper burial.

The reason is the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in his book The Battle offers a figure that roughly approximates other studies, 70 percent to 30 percent. The Republicans just took the House of Representatives by more than 60 seats and gained 6 seats in the Senate, abetted by conservatism's latest newcomers, the Tea Party movement. The social democrat in the White House has been denied his majority by a rout. Fully 42 percent of the electorate is conservative. Of the 29 percent that is independent, 56 percent went with the Republicans in this election over the economy and jobs. Liberals account for 20 percent of the vote. This spread -- 42 percent conservative, 20 percent Liberal -- has pretty much endured for 30 years! Think of that when you recall all those obituarists writing about the death of conservatism but two years ago.

Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they actually rang up additional trillion-dollar deficits. We now face the entitlement crisis and a budget crisis, and the Liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio, and the Internet. Even the Europeans are facing up to the cost of the welfare state, but the Liberals can only spend and tax, though their taxes appear futile against our towering debt.

As a political movement Liberalism is dead. Its acolytes do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans' 10) and Republican control of still more state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the House of Representatives in the future. Liberalism, R.I.P. Even Liberals do not call themselves Liberal today. They identify themselves as Progressives. It is fooling no one. 
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The Decline of Liberalism
By Conrad Black from the February 2011 issue

AMERICAN LIBERALISM, synonymous today with big government, the exact opposite of the liberalism of Edmund Burke and other British champions of individual liberty, arose essentially from the use of the state to alleviate the most severe economic inequalities in society. In Great Britain this began in the competition between the Liberal and Conservative leaders, William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, between 1865 and 1880, and among major European powers with the quest for an unthreatening working class with the founder and first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. Britain had a great battle over pensions under the chancellor of the exchequer just before the First World War, David Lloyd George.

The assassination in 1914 of the distinguished French socialist leader Jean Jaures, for advising against a headlong plunge into general war, was a grim harbinger of what was to come: ineffectual socialist pacifism that facilitated the advance of totalitarian regimes of hitherto undreamed of evil. Between the wars, in the aftermath of the hecatomb of World War I and through the Great Depression, there was a general drift to higher taxes, a more extensive social safety net, and the rise in Britain and France of democratic socialist parties to principal opposition status and a few turns at government (Ramsay MacDonald and Leon Blum).

In Germany, where the picture was much complicated by the bitterness of defeat in war and rampant inflation in its aftermath, the democratic socialists were outflanked and outmatched by the Communists, the National Socialists, and the principal upholders of Germany's fragile democratic heritage, the mainly Catholic Christian democratic parties that were revolted by the authoritarian paganism of the Nazis and the totalitarian and atheist materialism of the Communists. The triumph of the Nazis and the dithering and waffling of France and Britain between conservative appeasers and pacifistic socialists, when crowned by the most cynical alliance in world history between Hitler and Stalin, infamously catapulted Europe into the Second World War.

From 1865, while the more advanced European countries were slowly conceding a larger share of public policy concern and fiscal largesse to improving working conditions, tighter restrictions on commercial fraud and exploitation of consumers, wider franchises and education, and some concessions to organized labor, and financing these reforms with increased taxation on higher incomes, the United States was in the full flower of economic growth, fueled by a colossal 60-year wave of immigration: economic growth rates generally exceeded 10 percent annually for most of that time. In such a climate, nearly 28 million immigrants arrived in America between the Civil and First World Wars, helping almost to triple the country's population from 33 million to 98 million.

In this heady atmosphere, while there was labor unrest, individualism and pure capitalism reigned, and American exceptionalism had little time for what was generally considered proletarian, foreign-originated sniveling on behalf of the self-pitying indolent. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made a few gestures to restrain monopoly, assure a stable money supply, and discourage fraud in vital industries such as food processing and packaging. Several of these attitudes showed twitches of meliorism in respect of the working class, but it didn't go much further. Immigration was rolled back in the 1920s. Federal taxation of incomes was only made constitutional in 1913.

WHAT IS CALLED LIBERALISM in America today had scarcely seen the light of day in the United States until Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated president on March 4, 1933, to face an unemployment rate generally reckoned at somewhere between 25 and 33 percent, with the banking and stock and commodity exchange systems collapsed and shut down, no direct federal relief for the unemployed, farm prices beneath subsistence levels for 75 percent of farmers, nearly half of residential accommodation in the country threatened by mortgage foreclosure, and no guarantee of any savings deposits. FDR led the country out of the Depression, saved 95 percent of the existing institutions and social framework with emergency relief and by bolting a safety net onto them, and channeled economic envy and anger against nonexistent groups (economic royalists, war profiteers, monopolists, munitions makers, malefactors of great wealth, etc.), and ultimately against the nation's real enemies: the Nazis and Japanese imperialists. If he had once named any plutocratic wrongdoers, mobs would have burned down their houses, but he preserved the moral integrality of the country.

His New Deal unfolded in five phases. The first New Deal (1933-1934) consisted of gigantic workfare projects to absorb the unemployed in conservation programs and what would today be called infrastructure construction; a comprehensive banking reorganization with guarantees of deposits; agreed rollbacks of agricultural production, voted by sector, to assure viable pricing; encouragement of cartels and collective bargaining to raise wages and prices; evaluation of the dollar and a departure from the gold standard apart from international transactions; and legislated improvements in working conditions.

The second New Deal, 1934-1938, included Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, some remodeling of the pyramidal corporate structure of the hydroelectric industry, and higher taxes as a sop to the demagogic political movements chipping at the two-party system. In the latter half of this phase, the workfare and conservation programs were rolled back, and the federal deficit was reduced. Depressive conditions began to reappear and Roosevelt reapplied workfare pump-priming on a massive scale in 1938-1939 (third New Deal), and shifted to the greatest peacetime arms buildup in history, including America's first peacetime conscription, the fourth New Deal phase, which carried into the war, 1939-1945. Counting the workfare program participants as employed (which is as logical as including European military draftees and defense workers as employed), unemployment was severely reduced by 1935; counting them as unemployed, the unemployment numbers came down to the low teens by 1936, descended below 10 percent in 1940, and unemployment was completely eliminated before the Japanese attack plunged America into war in December 1941.

The final phase of the New Deal came posthumously to Roosevelt, 1945-1949, but was his GI Bill of Rights, which gave university tuition and a stake to start a business or buy a farm to 13 million returning American servicemen (almost 10 percent of the entire population), and effectively turned the working class into a middle class, having saved them from joblessness, trained and led them to victory in war, and staked them to new careers. The Roosevelt program kept extremists from making any headway in American elections. The Socialist Party vote declined by 85 percent from 1932 to 1936, and when asked if Roosevelt wasn't carrying out the Socialist program, perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas replied: "Yes, carrying it out in a coffin."

THERE HAS BEEN A good deal of revisionist comment recently that Roosevelt's policies did not end the Depression, but as U.S. GDP doubled in his 12 years in office and unemployment declined from roughly 30 percent to 0.5 percent, that case is difficult to sustain (and is in fact, nonsense). From this point on, the tussle between American liberals and conservatives has been over what emphasis to give unrestricted economic activity, which promises relatively high growth, but with sharp cyclicality of booms and busts; and alleviation of substandard social conditions through anti-poverty and health care programs. Most of Western Europe, as it rebuilt from the devastation of war, fearful for notorious historic reasons of the anger of the urban working class and of small farmers, has been lumbered by a system of social benefit and subsidized living that paid Danegeld to traditional disturbers of social peace at the price of minimal economic growth, though they are relatively high-income societies.

In the United States, conservative and liberal issues became tangled in foreign policy as well, as liberals tended to believe that stability in the world could be had with minimal recourse to force and with reliance on international organizations, while retaining a military adequate to deter direct national attack on the United States and defend its principal allies, and conservatives have been generally more proactive in seeking an improved strategic balance, by a combination of diplomatic innovation and assured peace through enhanced military strength.

In foreign affairs, President Truman devised the great instruments of anti-Communist containment -- NATO, the Marshall Plan, etc. -- and defied Stalin with the Berlin Airlift and resisted the Communist takeover of South Korea. President Eisenhower, the first Republican in 20 years, maintained virtually everything FDR and Truman had done, but did not expand the state socially (though he did build the interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway), and in foreign affairs, he ended the Korean War along the compromise lines sought by Truman, contrary to the wishes of more conservative Republican hawks, including Douglas MacArthur, Richard Nixon, and John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower refused to touch Vietnam as the French were pushed out of it, and cut the defense budget while relying on "more bang for the buck": massive retaliation to deter aggression. He threatened a nuclear response to everything, even over the trivial Formosa Strait islands of Quemoy and Matsu. It was brinkmanship, but it worked. Eisenhower also began the de-escalation of the Cold War, with the first summit meeting in 10 years, at Geneva in 1955, where he proposed his "Open Skies" program for reciprocal aerial military reconnaissance.

Roosevelt's social programs were left essentially unaltered for 20 years after he died, until President Lyndon Johnson cut taxes while expanding the social ambitions of the federal government with his Great Society War on Poverty, and massive job retraining efforts, coupled to great and long-delayed advances in civil rights. Kennedy and Johnson favored civil rights more actively than had their predecessors, and backed conservatives into pious humbug about the Constitution not allowing for federal imposition of voting rights and official social equality for African Americans. Johnson overcame that opposition and it was one of liberalism's finest hours. But the long Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower consensus frayed badly when Johnson, who had been a congressman during the New Deal years, determined to take it a long step further and proposed a policy extravaganza that promised to buy the end of poverty through social investment. As all the world knows, it was a disaster that destroyed the African American family and severely aggravated the welfare and entitlements crises.

And in foreign and security policy, Kennedy abandoned massive retaliation, promised limited war by limited means for limited objectives, in unlimited locations, and the Communists took him up on it. Having claimed a nonexistent missile gap, he then squandered the U.S. missile advantage in favor of Mutual Assured Destruction; i.e., no advantage. Worse, he drank his own bathwater over Cuba. Before that crisis (1962), there were NATO missiles in Greece and Turkey, no Russian missiles in Cuba, and no assurance against U.S. invasion of Cuba. After the crisis, there were no NATO missiles in Greece or Turkey, nor Russian missiles in Cuba, and a guarantee of no U.S. invasion of Cuba. U.S. intelligence had not realized that there were already 40,000 Soviet troops in Cuba in the autumn of 1962, and that the nuclear warheads were already there and could be attached in 24 hours. The famous and photogenic sea blockade was closing the gate after the Trojan horse had entered. It was a triumph for Kennedy, in that he didn't commit to an invasion that would have been a very rough business in a nuclear-capable theater and that would presumably have precipitated countermeasures in Berlin. (Khrushchev could not have sat inert while the U.S. overpowered two Soviet divisions in Cuba.) But it was no strategic victory, and discerning judges, especially de Gaulle and Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon (who lost the race for governor of California as a result of the perceived Kennedy tour de force in Cuba), saw that.

However, the liberal leadership thought they had a new and foolproof technique of crisis management, the critical path of graduated escalation, and that led us straight into Vietnam, with no notion of how to fight such a war; while LBJ's application of overreach to domestic affairs drove America into the mire of the Great Society.

RICHARD NIXON ENDED Mutual Assured Destruction by starting anti-missile deployment; pursuing what he called "nuclear sufficiency," which in practice was a restoration of U.S. nuclear superiority, based on technological advantages, especially Multiple, Independently Targeted warheads (MIRVs) on the same missiles; and using this strength to "build down" through the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks process, thus impressing hawks with his enhancement of American military strength and doves with the greatest arms limitations agreement in history, in 1972.

Vietnam by 1966 was killing 200 to 400 American draftees every week, with no prospect of victory. The greatest military blunder in U.S. history was failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, when public opinion would have supported it. President Johnson effectively gave up in Vietnam in October 1966 when he offered a joint withdrawal of all non-South Vietnamese forces from the South. Ho Chi Minh declined this, because he wished to defeat the U.S. directly, signaling a decisive victory in the Cold War of the Communists over the West. He could have won his declared objectives by accepting the joint withdrawal and then returning six months later. He knew the U.S. would not commit ground forces again to the war. That he did not accept Johnson's offer demonstrates the fervor of his ambition to defeat the United States itself.

Richard Nixon handed the Vietnam War over to the South Vietnamese, bought them time to ramp up their war effort by wiping out the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia as he drew down U.S forces, and resumed heavy bombing of North Vietnam when that country overtly invaded the South in 1972. Nixon opened relations with China, which helped propel a reduction in tensions with the USSR, and he detached both the Chinese and the Russians from support of Hanoi's effort to defeat the U.S., as opposed to just unifying Vietnam. Nixon enabled the South to hold its own on the ground with heavy U.S. air support. He ended the Vietnam War with a non-Communist government in place in Saigon and believed it could have been preserved if the U.S. had retained its readiness to respond with heavy air reprisals to a renewed North Vietnamese invasion of the South. For that reason, he sent the peace accord to the Senate for ratification, although he was not obliged to do so, to gain Senate support for the enforcement of the treaty if necessary.

The great watershed of modern American politics was the tawdry Watergate affair. Historians will long debate whether Nixon actually committed crimes or whether, as he claimed, he committed "mistakes unworthy of a president" but not crimes. Certainly, the impeachment counts presented to the House Judiciary Committee were outrages of partisan hysteria, and liberals in the Congress and the national media grossly exaggerated the significance of what was uncovered. Assisted by Nixon's inexplicable mismanagement of the affair, they hounded Nixon from office, diminished the presidency as an institution, and then, for good measure, cut off all aid to South Vietnam, ensuring that that country would fall to the Communists, that the United States would be completely humiliated, and, although they would not precisely have foreseen this, that millions would die in the killing fields of Cambodia, and drown when forced to flee Vietnam as boat people. And for Watergate and the debacle in Vietnam, the liberal political and media establishment took a decades-long bow and claimed the status of redeemers of American democracy and integrity in government.

Nixon had saved America from the liberal debacle in Vietnam and the self-imposed cul-de-sac in the arms race, and Nixon ended school segregation without falling into the catastrophe of compulsory school busing between districts as was being ordered by the courts. He proposed, but did not get to enact, welfare reform, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, which he foresaw would become another faddish leftist hobby horse if conservatives were not sensible, abolished the draft, and reduced the crime rate. He had taken a great deal of the liberals' clothes, while holding the conservative majority in place, and his reelection by the greatest plurality in American history in 1972 (18 million votes and 49 states) showed the extent to which liberalism's failures under Kennedy and Johnson had been recognized and corrected.

THOUGH MANY LIBERALS were doubtless sincere in believing that Nixon was a menace to constitutional government, and he did have some completely unacceptable notions of executive privilege in national security matters (such as the claimed right to ransack the Brookings Institution and break into the office of a dissident Vietnam consultant's psychotherapist), Nixon was a patriotic American, a very capable president, and he did much more to stabilize constitutional government than to undermine it. The effect of the Watergate and Vietnam disasters was to criminalize policy differences and help turn the United States into a prosecutocracy terrorized by overzealous U.S. attorneys; propel the media to depths of investigative cynicism that made the lives of anyone trying to accomplish anything newsworthy unprecedentedly difficult; temporarily reduce the executive branch to less than its constitutionally allotted position of equality with the legislature and judiciary; cause scores of millions of Americans to be disillusioned with government and to abandon the national media for competing and new technology rivals as they became available; and introduce a period of aggressive Soviet expansion in southern Africa, Central America, and Afghanistan.

But Watergate and Vietnam hastened the decline of American liberalism. Jimmy Carter squeaked into office in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate and failed in his quest for a more liberal state and a safer world through accommodation of the USSR. Ronald Reagan led the definitive takeover of the Republican Party by conservatives; he was as much to the right of Nixon as Nixon had been to the right of Eisenhower. He cut taxes and promised a defensive anti-missile system that effectively cracked the Soviet Union completely. Unable to envision a further increase in the percentage of GDP devoted to defense, scarcely able to maintain its hold over Eastern Europe and its own restive ethnic minorities, the Soviet Union quietly imploded and international Communism collapsed, as China, partly under the influence unleashed by Nixon's opening to it, became a hotbed of state capitalism. Reagan led the country to huge productivity increases, the creation of 18 million net new jobs, and the adaptation of the American economy to new techniques and technologies. Conservatism was triumphant.

Americans calling themselves conservative as opposed to liberal were now at a ratio of about three to two. After the chaotic and violent convention of 1968, the Democratic Party took the nomination process away from the party bosses who had chosen and supported Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, as well as the less successful but respected Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, and the elevation of a very improbable sequence of candidates resulted, from George McGovern in 1972 to Michael Dukakis. After Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, succeeded him and mismanaged the economy, broke his pledge of "no new taxes," and ran a very inept reelection campaign after allowing an eccentric Texan billionaire to seize a chunk of Republican support, the Democrats won with a young, Ivy League-educated Southern governor, who ran as a "new Democrat," which in policy terms, meant essentially a Republican. Bill Clinton tried a turn to the left, especially on health care, was beaten badly in the midterm elections in 1994, and then produced budget surpluses, engaged more policemen, and proved too agile for the Republicans to catch. The country was, however, and in the new Watergate tradition, reduced to a demeaning impeachment hearing based largely on the president's rather undiscriminating extramarital sex life. In the midst of it, the Republican leaders in the Congress finally rolled back much of the shambles of the Great Society and rammed through comprehensive welfare reform.

The 2000 election was an uncertain draw between Clinton's vice president and Bush's son. The eight Bush years that followed were clouded by the preoccupation with terrorism after the suicide attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Bush mismanaged the budgetary deficit, and the Clinton-originated practices of immense current account deficits and the encouragement of the issuance of trillions of dollars of worthless real estate-backed debt, supposedly to facilitate home ownership, came home to roost in severe recession while the country's entire conventional armed forces capability was mired for five years in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Barack Obama is the result, after he deftly took the Clintons' party out from underneath them and liberated white America from its guilt complex after 350 years of mistreatment of blacks (and as a bonus, liberated them also from having to listen to charlatans like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Charlie Rangel as African American leaders).

Mr. Obama broke the glass ceiling barring non-whites from the highest office but tried to use the economic crisis to justify a sharp turn to the left, expansion of the state in health care and the environment, tax increases, and outright bribes ("refundable tax credits"), to the indigent. The resulting political and economic debacle gave a no-name, leaderless Republican Party a huge sweep as a reward for unimaginative denigration of the administration in November's elections, and if Obama is to have a chance of reelection, it will be by turning the balance of this term into, as has already begun, a tutorial from Bill Clinton on how to masquerade as a Republican. All polls now indicate that there are twice as many self-designated conservatives as liberals, but also almost twice as many independents as liberals.

AMERICANS ARE WORRIED about debt and tax increases, distrustful of government regulation, concerned at extreme income disparity and the loss of huge chunks of business, including energy supplies, to foreigners, and they associate liberalism with extravagance, the use of the welfare system to buy the votes of the underperforming (whether with a legitimate excuse or not), the belittling of America in the world, and a general erosion of cherished values. And the last liberal leader the people really liked was John F. Kennedy, and in that they were largely buying a public relations confidence trick, amplified by the horrible tragedy of his premature death. If the Republicans have a plausible leader, and the Bushes were no world-beaters, their program will win for them. Leaders of unusual stature or agility, such as Eisenhower, Nixon at his best, and Reagan, win heavy majorities.

Liberalism saved America and led it to its greatest days under Roosevelt and Truman. And it essentially continued under Eisenhower, a nonpartisan war hero who pretended to be above politics. Under Kennedy and Johnson and their inept Democratic successors, liberalism ceased to be perceived as helping the deserving and instead became taking money from those who had earned it and giving it to those who hadn't in exchange for their votes. Nixon saved the country from the Kennedy-Johnson failure to redefine liberalism successfully, but freakishly squandered the political credit for doing so. Reagan won the battle for the conservatives against the liberals, and the Democrats have only won since when they ran an ostensibly moderate candidate against a very weak Republican. (Bob Dole and John McCain, whatever their merits as senators, were hopeless blunderbusses as presidential nominees.)

Liberalism will revive, as conservatism did, when it redefines itself as something that is new, looks likely to succeed, favors economic growth, and is no longer tainted by envy, hypocrisy, and the mere bribery of voting blocs. This will take a leader of the stature of a Roosevelt or Reagan. No such person is now visible, in either party, but neither were they seen in that light before they were elected and became candidates for Mount Rushmore.
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Is Liberalism Dead?
By James Piereson from the February 2011 issue

HAVING WRITTEN AN ARTICLE a year ago on the question "Is Conservatism Dead?" and answering it in the negative, I am now charged with answering the reciprocal question, "Is Liberalism Dead?"

I am afraid that, pace my friend Bob Tyrrell, I must also answer this one in the negative. Liberalism is not dead for some of the same reasons that conservatism is not dead. Liberalism and conservatism are more or less permanent antagonisms within our system of state capitalism such that neither is likely to disappear unless or until the system of which they are parts somehow blows up. The question, therefore, is not whether liberalism is dead but rather whether our highly institutionalized system of political economy shows signs of breaking apart. If either liberalism or conservatism should expire, then it will be through a crisis or cataclysm much in the way that secessionism disappeared with the Civil War and laissez faire capitalism in the Great Depression.

Such an upheaval, while still unlikely, is not entirely out of the question. The long recession that began in 2007 continues to strain public and private budgets and to undermine the legitimacy of market capitalism. Yet in this accounting there are reasons to conclude that the return of the business cycle will pose the greater threat to liberalism than to conservatism. Thus if we should now be in the midst of an extended period of stagnation, then it is possible that liberalism in the form we know it will not survive as a vigorous political movement. Liberalism is not dead, but it may soon be under siege.

LIBERALISM DEVELOPED INTO A FORCE in U.S. politics only late in the 19th century after extended conflicts over slavery and secession were resolved and industrial capitalism had introduced a new set of issues into the system. Up until this time, parties and interests framed their arguments in terms of the Constitution and the nature of the system it had created. Liberalism, when it emerged late in the century, introduced the element of abstract philosophy into these arguments. More importantly, it set these arguments off into a new direction by asserting that the 18th-century Constitution was inadequate to the challenges of the industrial system. Thus, liberals no longer argued over what the Founders intended but rather over how their creation should be reinterpreted and reformed to meet the challenges of the new century. In this sense, liberalism developed as an aspect of modern capitalism and should be viewed as an enduring element of that system.

Over the past century liberalism has passed through at least four separate stages and is now well into a fifth. It first emerged late in the 19th century under the banner of Progressivism, asserting that new political institutions had to be established to regulate industrial concentrations and to mediate conflicts between business and labor. Progressivism flamed out during World War I and seemed to have disappeared for good during the 1920s. It revived itself during the 1930s as "New Deal liberalism" while preserving a few of the themes of Progressivism. When FDR's brand of liberalism faded out because of World War II and the prosperity of the postwar period, it revived itself in the form of "Cold War liberalism," achieving new peaks of popularity and influence during the Kennedy-Johnson years. The rebels, protesters, and reformers of the 1960s authored still a fourth chapter by introducing into the movement the theme of liberation or "cultural liberalism."

By this last adaptation liberalism strengthened its appeal to the educated classes but at the expense of its broad support among working- and middle-class voters-the "Archie Bunkers" of America. And it was through this revolution that "liberalism" morphed into "leftism." The traditional liberal objective of providing economic security for the working man gave way to a desire to reform and even to overturn the inherited fabric of society, thereby politicizing cultural practices relating to family life, sexual mores, and religion. It was only in this fourth phase, in addition, that liberals (and leftists) managed gradually to gain control over the Democratic Party, which up until the 1970s and 1980s had also provided a home for Southern conservatives, national security "hawks," conservative Catholics, and moderates of various kinds. All of these groups have by now left or been expelled from the Democratic Party, their exodus turning it into a coalition of ideological liberals, public sector unions, and beneficiaries of public programs.

Through these four stages in the history of liberalism one can see a common denominator in the expansion of the power of the national government. Every stage has brought forth an expanding list of demands for government action to address one or another national challenge. This is true even of the cultural liberals of the 1960s like Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sought liberation from just about every institution in American society but the national state. The two themes are obviously connected because as people liberated themselves from religion, family obligations, and community norms, they had nowhere else to turn for protection but to the state. This is why conservatives saw instantly that "liberation" was a challenge to "liberty."

THE "STATIST" AGENDA OF liberalism, though it is usually framed in idealistic terms, serves a hard-nosed political purpose. If there is a single lesson liberals have learned through the decades, it is that the power and resources of the state can be used to build winning political coalitions. After nearly a century of this, liberalism and the groups associated with it have intertwined themselves with the day-to-day operations of government, implementing the programs they have managed to pass into law and organizing new voting groups around them. Liberalism is no longer merely a philosophy of government, as it was in the Progressive era, but rather an integral part of modern government itself, which is why it cannot be killed off despite failures in policy, lost arguments, or even by lost elections.

Liberalism represents America's version of the 20th century's romance with the state. The disasters that befell other countries as a consequence of this infatuation did not happen here because our 18th-century Constitution and the acquired political habits of the American people did not permit it. Here a more gradual and incremental evolution took place that took nearly a century to complete. But make no mistake: the century-long revolution engineered by liberalism has succeeded in overturning the institutional prescriptions of the ancient Constitution. A constitution designed to limit the central government has now been turned into one that empowers it to act in just about every area of life. Liberalism has by stages taken aim at one or another of the institutional pillars of limited government -- federalism, strict construction, separation of powers, public thrift -- until today few are still left standing. Madison's "parchment barriers" have been blurred or obliterated to such an extent that today the only genuine limitation on national power is to be found in public opinion.

Nevertheless, critics like Mr. Tyrrell are correct when they point out that liberalism is no longer the nation's dominant public doctrine, as it was during the middle decades of the last century. Liberalism rode an ascending arc of influence for most of the century before reaching a peak in the 1960s, after which time it has been on a steady downward path. The manifest failure of liberal policies during the 1960s and 1970s, contrasted by the successes of conservatives during the 1980s, was sufficient cause of this reversal of fortune. To make matters worse, these policy failures, as they related to crime, the explosion in welfare rolls, illegitimate births, and the collapse of standards in education, were linked to liberal and leftist attacks on conventional morals that doubly alienated middle-class voters.

The shocking and disquieting events of the 1960s, in particular the assassination of President Kennedy, the urban riots, and the war in Vietnam, produced a psychological change among liberals and leftists toward American society and traditional ideals of reform and progress. From the Progressive era until the 1960s, liberals viewed reform as an instrument of progress through which the ideals of liberty and justice might be more perfectly realized. But in response to these shattering events, liberals began to recast their idea of reform from an instrument of progress to one of punishment. When liberals looked about, they did not see progress but rather blighted cities and ghettoes, a despoiled environment, discrimination against women and minorities, and a national government that coddled dictators in the name of anti-communism. The idea developed in their minds that instead of self-congratulation the nation deserved punishment and chastisement for its manifold failures to live up to its ideals. In this way reform liberalism gave way to "punitive liberalism" and in turn to various policies that sought to punish the middle class for winning success at the expense of higher ideals. From this flowed school busing, race and gender preferences, the coddling of criminals who were "victims of society," and a legal culture based upon the idea that every wrong can be remedied by a lawsuit. For the new liberals, a sense of anger replaced the sunny optimism of former heroes like FDR and JFK. (I have made this case in greater length in my book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism [Encounter Books, 2007].)

In response to these upheavals, the public soon turned against liberalism until today, according to recent polls, only about 20 percent of Americans are willing to call themselves "liberal," while about 40 percent describe themselves as "conservative." In popular circles, where liberalism is associated with high taxes, wild spending, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the tag "liberal" is often thrown about as a term of abuse. But this does not mean that liberalism is "dead," only that it is in the process once more of changing its appearance.

LIBERALISM HAS EVOLVED from a popular philosophy in the middle decades of the century into a "vanguard" movement today with great support among experts, academics, journalists, and government workers but with far less support among voters whom these elites purport to serve and who increasingly must pay for the programs they propose. Liberalism has always relied upon its "vanguard" classes to supply it with new problems to solve and new programs for doing so. The Progressives had their academic experts and muckraking journalists, the New Deal had its "brains trust," and the postwar liberals looked to the federal courts to engineer far-reaching reforms. What is different today is the extent to which the new aims of liberalism -- environmentalism, feminism, homosexual marriage, high taxes, and income redistribution -- are dissociated from the practical aspirations of the middle classes. The liberal vanguard once claimed to speak for the middle classes but most of the time no longer even pretends to do so.

By the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, liberalism exchanged its broad support among the middle classes for the security and political leverage it found in highly institutionalized sectors of American life. While conservatives now command broad support in public opinion, liberals can claim influence over leading colleges and universities, major newspapers and broadcast outlets, public sector spokesmen, and public employee unions which in combination can shape -- or go a long ways toward shaping -- the national political debate in the space between elections. Conservatives, to be sure, have learned to fight on this terrain as well but are still outflanked by liberals who occupy strategic positions in much closer proximity to government. As the "party of government," liberalism by degrees has attached itself to the state such that in many areas (education, welfare, the arts) and place (Sacramento, Albany, Washington, D.C.) it can be difficult to distinguish between them. As the party of "limited government," conservatism has gradually mobilized its forces at some remove from the state.

This describes the fifth and perhaps the final stage in the evolution of American liberalism. Over the course of the 20th century, it succeeded in rewriting the Constitution, building political coalitions around public spending, insinuating itself within the interstices of government, and gaining control of key institutions that manufacture and legitimize political opinion. Today it has retreated into impregnable redoubts encircling the state from which positions it fights a defensive struggle against voter sentiment increasingly skeptical of its programs of high taxes and public spending.

"Public sector liberalism" represents the logical terminus for a movement that began in an effort to redraw the boundaries of government action in order to bring industrial capitalism to heel and grew in tandem with the expansion of government.

This evolution has produced an unprecedented conflict between the two major political parties with one rooted in the public sector and the other in the private sector.

In the past, political parties were coalitions of private interests seeking influence over government so as to facilitate their growth and expansion within the private economy. This was true of early party conflicts that pitted commerce versus agriculture, or later ones pitting free labor against slavery or business against organized labor. The conflict today between Democrats and Republicans increasingly puts public sector unions and beneficiaries of public programs against the middle-class taxpayer and business interests large and small. In states where public spending is high and public sector unions are strong, as in California, New York, and Illinois, Democrats have seized control; where the public sector is weak or not politically organized, as is the case across the South and Southwest, Republicans have greater strength. This configuration, when added up across the nation, has produced electoral standoffs between red and blue states that have been decided by a handful of swing states that do not fit readily into either camp.

How this standoff is resolved between popular conservatism and public sector liberalism is a legitimate subject for debate and speculation. It is obvious, however, that liberalism can only prosper if it can continue to build coalitions through public spending, public borrowing, and publicly guaranteed credit. These are the resources that underwrite their institutional advantages. Should those resources dry up, as they are now doing as a consequence of the long recession, liberalism will unwind as a political force as public programs are cut, public employees are let go, and retirement arrangements with public sector unions are renegotiated. In some public sector states, such outcomes now appear inevitable. Conservatives are in a position to hasten this process along by refusing to approve the spending, borrowing, and federal bailouts that will be required to keep public sector liberalism afloat, though at the price of being blamed for the pain and suffering associated with its collapse. But this is undoubtedly a price worth paying to guide the nation through an adjustment that will otherwise take place later and under circumstances far less to anyone's liking.