Liberalism and Its Discontents.

PETERSON, BARBARA BENNETT

ALAN BRINKLEY, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 372 pp., $27.95 cloth (ISBN 0-674-53017-9).

Liberalism and Its Discontents asks the basic questions, "What is liberalism?" and "What has happened to it?" and offers an excellent political and historiographical analysis of the liberal tradition in America. Alan Brinkley challenges the theme of consensus historians who stress that liberalism is America's only significant political tradition. Brinkley suggests as his book's thesis that other important ideological challenges to liberalism have always been present in Americans' thinking as evidenced by the conservatism, fundamentalism, or the radical left. Brinkley develops the liberal traditions and policies from the 1930s and the New Deal, which expanded through the postwar eras of the big federal and state governments through the late 1990s with the advent of a serious conservative challenge to liberalism. He clearly delineates the arguments of consensus historians and shows how some may be flawed as economic, cultural, and political changes in America through time have questioned the basic premises of liberalism, and he shows how its tenets are contested by various social power groups both from the right and the left.

The theme of the consensus of historians that liberalism represented the only common consensus of the majority of American opinion makers and holders is questioned by Brinkley, who finds liberalism today in disarray. Liberalism is in disarray, he postulated, because of two main complaints: one that liberalism is "paternalistic" and a "statist creed" that has concentrated power in the hands of a few "elites at the expense of individual liberty" and therefore threatens "freedom and prosperity." Two, that on the other hand, liberalism is "too wedded to liberty" and allows for excesses or the tryrany of the majority, thus posing a threat to a stable moral code of ethics and contributing to the "destabilizing whims of fractious minorities and transitory passions" (p. x). Hence, critics, Brinkley states, believe ironically that there is either too little or too much freedom in liberalism. Brinkley then begins his book after this definition and statement of thesis with the history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt and the New Deal embodied the tradition of liberalism and represented the postwar idea of the consensus school in historiography--"he was both a friend of the common people ... and a creature of the American aristocracy. He was both a great statesman and a consummate defender of his own political self interest" (p. 1). Brinkley shows that the New Deal policies encouraged the acceptance of the big state but that in the postwar period, the war "helped reduce enthusiasm for a powerful regulatory state and helped legitimize the idea of a primarily compensatory government" (p. 53).

Brinkley points to the multitude of forces that began with the changes in belief gradually moving from liberalism to growing conservatism of the Eisenhower administration. "Many factors contributed to this wartime evolution of opinion," wrote Brinkley.

 The political climate was changing rapidly. The Republicans had rebounded
 in the 1938 and 1940 elections; conservatives had gained strength in
 Congress; the public was displaying a growing antipathy toward the more
 aggressive features of the New Deal and less animus against big business.
 Liberals responded by lowering their sights and modifying their goals. (p.
 53)

Other ideas mattered too--labor became less militant, and liberals no longer admired the big state of the wartime totalitarian governments in Europe. There was growing confidence too in the natural forces of the economic market, again resulting in a moving away from paternalistic programs. The Democratic Party itself became more conservative as evidenced by the emergence of the Democratic solid South and the policies of segregation, which were seen as unliberal.

Brinkley also illustrates the challenges to liberalism from the Left such as the Students for Democratic Society, the hippie movement in general, the New Left historians, Tom Hayden, and Al Harber. He also develops the themes of the Radical Right and examines the growth of religious fundamentalism with the story of people like Oral Roberts and other evangelists. The evolution of a strong conservative tradition in the postwar period evolved from Barry Goldwater, Friedrich Hayek, and William F. Buckley, as Brinkley expounds in detail on their policies and viewpoints.

Brinkley concluded that the evolution of liberalism as a philosophy has undergone profound changes and challenges from the 1930s to the 1990s and that a history of the philosophies questioning and challenging the basic tenets of liberalism are worth examining, if only to preserve an accurate and multivisioned picture of history. He suggested that most scholars themselves are liberals and therefore tend to write a narrower history than reality calls for. He insists that the "popular memory be balanced," a worthy goal for this book in itself and certainly reason for reading his well-argued volume.

In contributing to the knowledge of the presidency, this book contributes in two significant ways: it balances our views of the presidents themselves relating details about the successes regardless of party, and it offers detailed insight into historiographical issues between the progressive, consensus, and New Left historians' views on the presidents and their presidencies. The book suggests, too, that fundamental changes in American opinion such as the change from liberal to conservative periods are often accompanied or tied to similar social, economic, and cultural factors such as poverty or prosperity.

BARBARA BENNETT PETERSON

Emeritus Professor University of Hawaii3