Louis Hartz and the Liberal Tradition: from consensus to crack-up

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Irving Louis Horowitz

After two major international wars, all fought on liberalist premises of making the world safe for democracy, and ridding it of tyrants, it became not only feasible but also inevitable for a new generation of thinkers such as William Buckley, Peter Viereck, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, and a host of other figures now legion or legend, to open up for serious discussion everything that liberalism took for granted, not least its claims to unchallenged supremacy in the post-1945 world. The conservative counter-attack acknowledged that ours was a world in which fascism and Nazism were defeated, but insisted that communism and other varieties of totalitarianism remained very much alive and well. In such a world, the notion of a liberal ideological consensus or worse, the end of ideology, was viewed as little more than the hubris that was perpetuated by a New England elite fearful of its academic privileges, not the wisdom of the ages. Yes, there was a John Locke, but so too there was an Edmund Burke. The world of conservatism had its own ghostly heroes--from Walter Lippmann and Arthur Krock in journalism to W.H. Mallock and Whittaker Chambers in what might best be described as popular political philosophy.

Under such circumstances, and looking at the world from the present post-ideological conflict stage, it might be best to examine liberalism as a bourgeois democratic ideology that sought to respond to the twin challenges of socialism and conservatism in the nineteenth-century, and to the still more severe challenges of communism and fascism in the twentieth century. And to be fair, this was a highly successful frame of mind, one that under-wrote a wide number of innovative and reform policies. The challenge to liberalism in the twenty-first century is somewhat more complex. It is the need to protect state sovereignty and at the same time preserve individual, or Lockean rights. It is simply too glib any longer to speak of liberalism as a dominant ideology. It makes its believers lazy and its opponents surly. To think otherwise, to suppress the struggles being fought out among contending forces, such as the political parties, the economic pressure groups, the administrative elites, is to weaken the bite of liberalism, to make it hostage to some set of abstract series of remarks in general normative theory. This presumed consensus would not be serviceable at the present.

Indeed, recent survey research confirms the liberal crack-up--at least as a dominant national ideology. In a three panel survey conducted in 2004 by AARP-Roper ASW, covering an even number of the GI Generation (ages 70 and over), the Silent Generation (ages 58-69), and the Baby Boom Generation (ages 40-57), there is a striking lack of identification with liberal economic causes. All three generations call themselves very or moderately liberal at between 16-20 percent. And the baby boomers, often seen as radical, actually describe themselves as conservative at a 51 per cent level--only eight percentages less than those over 70 years of age. And while it is the case that the boomers support abortion rights, government intervention to protect the environment, health services, and educating the young, the range--from 59 percent for the younger cohort to 48 percent for the oldest cohort--speaks more to polarization on the social agenda items, but not anywhere near the sort of consensus that would provide a bonding effect for liberalism as an ideology or a policy. (8)