Liberalism and its challengers: FDR to Reagan

National Review, July 26, 1985 by Forrest McDonald

AT FIRST GLANCE a book about liberalism since Franklin Roosevelt, written by a liberal, would seem unlikely to be appetizing fare for readers of NR. On closer inspection, it appears even less so. The work is largely derivative, a synthesis of secondary accounts organized around a succession of presidential Administrations, with a chapter of Martin Luther King Jr. thrown in for color. Such a format is as inherently soporific as a textbook.

As one wades through it, however, one gradually realizes that this is an important book--not for the light it sheds upon the political history of the United States during the past five decades, but as a comment upon the status of present-day liberalism. Alonzo Hamby is a scholar of considerable standing, his specialty being Harry Truman. He admires Truman, virtually idolizes Roosevelt, thinks Jack and Bobby Kennedy were just wonderful, and regards Martin Luther King as a veritable saint. His list of bad guys--Taft, McCarthy, Nixon, and so on--is entirely predictable. And yet what we have here is a book that, from a different perspective, confirms and reinforces the message of Bob Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up. What this suggests is that the demise of liberalism has become so obvious that even liberal academics have noticed it.

The causes and nature of the phenomenon appear different from the liberal perspective, however, and it is instructive to consider Hamby's analysis of how it came about. Most striking is the absence of a number of elements that conservatives would regard as central. There is no hint, for example, that a berserk Supreme Court had anything to do with it: no mention of Roe v. Wade, Engel v. Vitale, Griswold, Miranda, Escobedo, Bakke, Weber. There is scarcely a mention of the metastasization of a federal bureaucracy that eludes control by Congress, Court, and Constitution, or of the proliferation of such utterly monstrous agencies as the Legal Services Corporation. There is no consideration of the decay of public and private morality (save in regard to Richard Nixon); or of the emergence of self-styled oppressed minorities demanding and getting preferential treatment; or of the institutionalization of victimhood in the constitution of the Democratic National Convention. There is no admission that the liberal enterprise may have been inherently flawed, and only a passing, grudging suggestion that there may be some problems that are there may be some problems that are not susceptible to solution by government. Finally, and most surprisingly in a book about liberalism and its challengers, there are virtually no conseratives. Three neoconservatives--Bell, Kristol, and Moynihan--do draw brief mention, but there is nobody here named Hayek or Voegelin or Weaver or Kirk or Buckley.

What was it, then, that did liberalism in? Hamby finds the answer in the twisted psyche of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson, temperamentally "a man of excess and overcompensation," was "determined to outdo all his predecessors" and pushed "the tradition of his old hero FDR to a breaking point." Desperately "wanting love for his benevolence, he overloaded the social-welfare system and raised utopian hopes. . . . Craving respect for his strength and will, he committed the nation to a war it could not win," and the effort left "the nation's economy on the road to ruin."

There is something to the thesis, and I confess that I find it personally appealing. I was voting to end Johnson's political career as early as 1948, and I adhere to the school of thought which holds that Ronnie Dugger and Robert Caro are Soft on Lyndon. I therefore readily concur in the judgment that Johnson's Administration was an unmitigated disaster for the nation. But to attribute the demise of liberalism to it is to oversimplify an extremely complex process. As for the Vietnam War, we in truth won it. What was unwinnable was the peace, and that only because a large and influential segment of the civilian population of the United States behaved in a manner that every previous generation of Americans would have regarded as treasonable. For all of Johnson's failings, it is unfair to fault him for not having foreseen that.

Irrespective of the shortcomings of his analysis, however, Hamby reaches the right conclusions. He preceives that by the 1970s "the once firm distinction between liberalism and socialism had all but evaporated," and that the product of four decades of liberalism had been "sentimentalism, big-brotherism, excessive bureaucracy, waste, out-of-control budgets, endemic inflation, an economically debilitating tax structure, and the persistence--indeed, the seeming aggravation--of many social problems the Great Society liberals had promised to ameliorate." He is willing to concede that Ronald Reagan may be able to work a turnaround and end up as a "Roosevelt of the Right." If, in these views, he is representative of most old liberals, there may yet be hope for the Republic.