The current crisis of liberalism reflects a loss of faith in, and sharp reaction against, liberal institutions, policies, and ethics. Increasingly influential on both the Left and Right, this reaction reflects not only the perceived failure of liberal policies to deliver on their promises of prosperity and security, but an “absence of leadership of the liberal international order”—a deficit of conviction, clarity, or agility among elites committed to liberalism. Even leading defenders of liberalism acknowledge that something has gone wrong. The political theorist Steven B. Smith starkly declares that “The world is on fire,” because the “liberal order” is “now in a state of advanced decay, if not decrepitude.” His fellow political theorist William Galston finds “the current ills of liberal democracy” “deep and pervasive,” while the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has gone from foretelling liberalism’s triumph at “the end of history” to acknowledging that “liberalism has been in retreat in recent years.”
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This crisis of self-confidence has prompted reconsiderations of liberalism’s merits—and a return to episodes in its past, either to identify the roots of liberalism’s current travails, or to furnish a model of how to respond to our crisis through the example of how past liberals responded to theirs. Within this debate, the Cold War liberals in particular bear a legacy that should interest liberals of every persuasion today.
For some, Cold War liberalism invokes a political grouping, mostly in the United States, including Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Governor Adlai Stevenson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, diplomat George Kennan—and various policy experts and activists working for and advising them. Others see Cold War liberalism as an intellectual position, represented by such figures as the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and literary critic Lionel Trilling. While the thinkers, policymakers, and elected officials sometimes interacted and aligned, they were also separated by their concerns, orientations, and contexts; they also sometimes significantly disagreed with one another. Cold War liberal policymakers may offer models of political wisdom—or presumption and folly. But it is Cold War liberal intellectuals who bequeath ways of conceiving, defending, and embodying liberal ideals that constitute a possible inheritance to be drawn on—or disavowed—today. Accordingly, some of the most direct polemics over Cold War liberalism focus on the ideas of thinkers rather than the decisions of officials.
These intellectuals constituted a climate of opinion and a distinct segment of the ideological map. Their position may be defined in contrast to other political and intellectual stances of their time. But what was distinctive in their thought also emerges in comparison to other forms of liberalism—particularly the idealist, perfectionist, and progressive liberalisms that came before them, and the liberal egalitarianism and neoliberalism that came after.
Cold War liberalism was shaped by the scarring, sobering experiences of totalitarianism and total war, which disabused many liberals of the psychological and historical optimism of their predecessors. Cold War liberals recognized that progress was not inevitable, and regression to barbarity always possible. This outlook may be best characterized not as pessimism, but (in Berlin’s phrase) “historical skepticism,” which rejected all simple historical narratives—and the idea that the future was preordained. Berlin and other Cold War liberals criticized Marxism not only for “utopianism,” but for viewing history as driven by “vast impersonal forces.” This view served as an “alibi” for enforced famines, purges, massacres, and indeed extermination committed in the name of “History.” Cold War liberals defended not only political freedom, but historical free agency, in order to empower individual action, affirm human dignity, and assert responsibility, which became their ethical watchword. This meant that they also emphasized politics against economic or sociological determinism, and political judgment against philosophical abstraction.
Not just totalitarianism, but the mindset that American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called totalism, was Cold War liberals’ nemesis. Totalism embraced a Manichean division of the world into pure good and evil; a demand for total moral transformation to achieve personal and collective purity; erasure of the separation between individual and group, and total subordination of the former to the latter; and the elevation of official doctrine over personal conscience, judgment, and experience. Against this, many Cold War liberals embraced ethical pluralism. This held that there were multiple genuine values and legitimate perspectives, which did not cohere into an orderly system. Values—liberty, equality, order; personal integrity and the well-being of the community; individual uniqueness and social cohesion—made ineluctable claims, and yet they pointed in opposed directions, creating moral dilemmas. Combined with awareness of human fallibility and malevolence, this fostered a tragic outlook. These considerations inspired an affirmation of conflict as both a precondition for, and an inescapable consequence of, freedom, which was a paramount value for Cold War liberalism.
There were four notable features of Cold War liberals’ conception of freedom. First, freedom was identified as a core value of democracy, which Cold War liberals identified not only with collective self-rule, but with regulated conflict and individual liberties. For Aron, the difference between democracy and totalitarianism was that the latter sought to eradicate conflict through suppression; the former sought to institutionalize, and thus tame, conflict. The second notable feature was Berlin’s influential identification of freedom with “negative liberty”—the carving-out of a secure area for individuals to choose “as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, un-bullied, not swallowed up in some vast system.” Third, as this suggests, Cold War liberals set freedom in opposition not only to political power, but to intellectual uniformity; they identified freedom with free thinking, individuality, and variety. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Invisible Man: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states.” Freedom was thus linked to not only a political system, but a mindset or ethos, to be defended against anti-liberalism and cultivated within liberalism itself. Cold War liberals sought, in Trilling’s words, to “recall liberalism to its first imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Even as Berlin’s defense of negative liberty sought to separate entitlement to liberty from attainment of moral perfection, so as to make liberty more available to all, Cold War liberals recognized that the defense of liberty is morally and intellectually demanding.
Cold War liberals responded not only to the world wars and totalitarianism, but to the Great Depression. For them, the preeminent liberal economist was not F. A. Hayek, but J. M. Keynes. They identified with “the non-Communist Left” (Berlin) or “the free left,” opposed to “the tyranny of the irresponsible plutocracy” (Schlesinger). Their ethical watchword, besides responsibility, was “decency.” Decent politics ruled out Stalinist ruthlessness; a decent society required welfare provision to prevent misery and dependency.
But Cold War liberals’ thinking about political economy reflected not only ethical scruples, but political realism. Like both contemporaneous social democrats and Ordoliberals, they recognized that the state played a necessary role in structuring the economy. Like Madisonians, they perceived the importance of building in what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing powers.” Bringing these ideas together, they embraced the idea of the state acting to institutionalize countervailing powers against corporations and oligarchs—whether through government agencies or legal protections empowering associations representing workers or consumers. Wary of both government and corporate power, Cold War liberals championed pluralism not only of values, but of interests and associations. They allied with labor unions and civil liberties groups—so long as these were anti-communist.
In world affairs, Cold War liberals sought, not always successfully, to steer between extremes of “realism” and “idealism.” As anti-fascists in the 1930s, they had broken with the pacifism embraced by many people of conscience in the aftermath of World War I. They perceived the appeasement of domestically tyrannical and internationally expansionist nations (whether Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR) as neither morally acceptable nor politically prudent. Yet witnessing how crusading moralism had justified the follies of the first World War—and the atrocities of the second—left them wary of missionary zeal. Some—like Niebuhr, Aron, Kennan—were associated with “realism” in international relations. But, in contrast to harsher forms of realism, they saw a place for morality in world affairs. Some succumbed to confidence in the wisdom of foreign policy experts. But others recognized the limitations of reason, and the powers of prejudice, self-righteous conceit, anger, ambition, and panic as afflicting not just “the crowd” but elites who imagined themselves above such things. Unlike illiberal Cold Warriors, they believed moral considerations should inform means as well as ends: not all measures that served righteous ends were acceptable.
At the same time, witnessing the failures of interwar legalistic idealism, as expressed through such initiatives as the League of Nations and Kellogg–Briand Pact, led Cold War liberals to doubt the adequacy of institutions, procedures, and agreements to constrain and guide world affairs. They recognized that, as Hobbes asserted, “covenants without the sword” were powerless to achieve security. While they promoted the construction of international institutions and law, Cold War liberals also accepted U.S. global power as a fact of life, and potentially the greatest force for relative good in the world. This led them to sometimes support or excuse actions that conflicted with their avowed commitments to prudence and moral integrity.
Nevertheless, and despite its tendency to define liberalism against totalitarianism, Cold War liberals resisted a Manichean view of the Cold War, insisting that, as Aron said, “politics is never a conflict between good and evil, but a choice between the preferable and the detestable.” They criticized conformity and dogmatism not only among supporters of communism, but among champions of “the West.” Berlin denied that “the answer to Communism is a counter faith, equally fervent, militant … irrational, despotic, etc.”; and championed “the inestimably precious gifts of skepticism and irony.” Niebuhr detected a “similarity in technique and temper” and “spirit” between Soviet communism and McCarthyism; he warned that “if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the [Soviet] foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle” due to “hatred and vainglory.”
Such nuances are forgotten when, as may sometimes happen today, Cold War liberalism is equated with affirmation of U.S. global power. It is, however, accurate to identify Cold War liberalism with elements of the postwar order that are now under assault: international organizations promoting international law, free trade, and human rights; U.S. support of liberal democracies around the globe; a welfare state and regulated finance and industry; limits on and accountability for power through the rule of law; and an “open society” that welcomes immigrants, multiple cultures, and dissent.
Many of the conditions that allowed for the (limited) success of this vision no longer exist. Cold War liberal policies depended on alliances and institutions, and prosperity and stability, that had been bequeathed by the successful war on fascism. For all their stress on conflict and open-mindedness, Cold War liberals relied on a consensus that affirmed a new social contract, and maintained a taboo on antiliberal ideologies. Over time these conditions eroded, and the reasons for them faded into memory. If for no other reason, this indicates that Cold War liberalism cannot offer a blueprint for liberals today, despite occasional attempts to invoke it as such.
The conditions that shaped Cold War liberalism make it not only impractical, but undesirable, to revive it as a simple template for liberals today. A creature of a bygone political and cultural establishment, Cold War liberalism—for all its avowed suspicion of power and calls for humility—also evinced a confidence in the wisdom and staying power of this establishment, and in the West’s (or America’s) capacity for benevolent world leadership. Too often, this fostered complacency or hubris. For all of their theoretical commitment to pluralism, Cold War liberals frequently came to see the struggle against communism as the “one thing needful,” to which they subordinated other vital causes. Although they supported civil rights and decolonization, they often subordinated these goals to the exigencies of anti-communism—something of which some, such as Niebuhr, came to repent. Despite calls for openness and self-criticism, many Cold War liberals responded with anger, distrust, and condescension to the radical movements that came to prominence in the 1960s; too often they saw only excesses and follies, while ignoring genuine grievances and insights.
Even if we bracket these failings, we should not be too hasty in taking Cold War liberals’ analyses of the dangers they faced as applicable to those confronting us. As Jan-Werner Müller, one of the most astute scholars of Cold War liberalism, has noted, Cold War liberals defined themselves against opponents who were intellectuals and utopians. This hardly describes Donald Trump. Yet, as Laura K. Field has shown, the MAGA Right has been shaped by, and shaped, intellectuals whose embrace of militancy, fanaticism, and ruthlessness against moderation, compromise, self-doubt and self-restraint echo the anti-liberal ideologies against which Cold War liberalism took shape.
Of course, no human being, ideology, or movement achieves perfection. And no past model can be a blueprint for today; we must open our eyes to the present and think for ourselves. Nevertheless, not only the events but the ideas of the past—both errors and insights—do furnish much of our primary material for making sense of the world. And humans do tend to draw, in both our efforts to make sense of the world and our search for guidance, on memory and narratives of the past. Defenders of liberal democracy as well as critics simply will look to the past, and they may legitimately hope to gain insight, inspiration, and fortification from their forebears.
In this regard, Cold War liberalism may be a wiser guide than more optimistic, ambitious alternatives. Certainly, its assumptions are no more tendentious, and its track record no more barbarous, than its predecessors, such as the idealism and ethical paternalism, and the faith in a single trajectory of progress, that underwrote liberal imperialism. Cold War liberalism also stands well above its Marxist-Leninist opponents. Recent events reinforce the twentieth century’s lesson that history follows no coherent or comforting “libretto,” that moral progress is not guaranteed, that change and tragedy inhere in human life.
This sense of tragedy should foster empathy for the defeated, including the victims of globalization, and awareness of the need for fortitude and resilience in facing reverses and defeats. The persistence of deep disagreement, and of beliefs regarded by more optimistic liberals as relics of unenlightened, “primitive” times, affirms the wisdom of Cold War liberals’ preference for defending liberalism by appeal to the evils and miseries of illiberalism, and to the goods liberalism provides—personal liberties and security against material misery and cruel, irresistible power—rather than through invocations of historical progress, or controversial visions of moral flourishing.
Cold War liberalism may also offer a better perspective than its immediate successors, neoliberalism and the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls and his followers. Its recognition of the power of unreason seems more plausible to me than these later liberalisms’ faith in either the economic rationality of the market, or in a “public reason” that can identify shared principles of justice. Cold War liberalism was more politically oriented than either, refusing to take refuge from the hard judgments and murky compromises of politics in either economic or philosophical abstractions. It is also distinguished from neoliberalism in its rejection of determinism. Hayek called for individuals to submit to a significant degree to the “impersonal forces” of the market, since a complex society “is necessarily based on the individual adjusting himself to changes whose cause and nature he cannot understand”; Hayek’s admirer Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative.” For Cold War liberals, there were always alternatives—and hence, a responsibility to choose.
Cold War liberals’ insights into both the importance of countervailing powers, and the need for state action to establish and preserve them, remain important resources for liberalism and have recently been powerfully developed by the political theorist Samuel Bagg. From this perspective, the overarching purpose of political effort, and the good of democracy, is to “maintain a precarious equilibrium,” “constantly threatened and in constant need of repair,” so as to “prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices,” (Berlin), and to work for the “constant mitigation of asymmetries in private power and organizational capacity” through maintaining a “roughly egalitarian balance of social forces” (Bagg). If this is the goal, the means are not always clear. Many Cold War liberals’ confidence in an elite-dominated regulatory and welfare state may have underestimated the fallibility of “expert” administrators and the dangers of state capture. They did not, however, fail to recognize the importance of free markets and free elections to preserve both the dispersion of power and freedom of choice. The Soviet experience showed that a state monopoly over industry—and employment—would not emancipate workers, but fully enslave them.
To contrast Cold War liberalism with both Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism and neoliberalism, and position it between socialism and minimally regulated capitalism, is not to equate it with a reactive centrism. The moderation Cold War liberals advocated was not, as Müller and Aurelian Craiutu have stressed, a matter of strategic “triangulation,” or fixing one’s position by splitting the difference between opposing sides. Rather, it was a rigorous ethical practice of careful judgment and firm commitment to maintaining fair institutions and giving competing claims their due.
Yet Cold War liberals were not always moderate. Müller has noted their oscillation between an embrace of modesty and compromise—and a longing for a morally clear “good fight.” This longing can be dangerous, but also emotionally sustaining, and politically efficacious in galvanizing action when moderation proves too uninspiring, emotionally exhausting, and constraining to fare well in a struggle against fervent foes. Perhaps Schlesinger’s call to make liberalism a “fighting faith” is timelier than Niebuhr’s and Berlin’s warning against militant faiths as such. Yet the effort to strike a balance between principled conviction and openness, resolution and flexibility, remains worthy of emulation.
Indeed, Cold War liberalism may be valuable as a model of the search for balance: between self-criticism and flexibility in the face of change, and resolute commitment to fundamental liberal values; and between clear-eyed recognition of reality and commitment to decency and integrity. Such balance is a matter of character, constant practice, and alert judgment. As such it is more demanding than more doctrinaire or purely procedural liberalisms. But when reality upsets our doctrines and political forces overwhelm our institutions, a return to Cold War liberalism’s politics of judgment, character, and action may be one alternative we cannot responsibly choose to avoid.
