The Liberal State on Trial

Jonathan Bell. The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years.
Columbia University Press, 2004.

Bell argues that the existence of an ideological threat from the far left during the early Cold War not only determined the course and development of foreign policy--or even of domestic politics (as Mary Dudziak has argued), it also limited the potential for left-wing social democratic politics. Bell agrees with historical accounts which stress the emphasis that Cold War liberalism placed on individual civil rights; his contention is that while other scholars have stressed the institutional limitations of New Deal liberalism or the ideological value of addressing state-level segregation and other violations of civil rights through legislative and judicial means, it was in fact the rise of anti-statism in American political discourse during the Truman era which ultimately restricted the ability of liberals to embrace or even flirt with left-of-center politics at any level. The Cold War created a domestic political climate in which the specter of being anywhere on the left was toxic. Liberalism survived by embracing the language of anti-statism; which in turn limited the degree to which liberals could defend the previous Popular Front accomplishments of the New Deal state and CIO unionism.

This is also, in some ways, a partial history of the rise of the new Right, as conservatives slowly learned over the course of the several election years studied here, how effective the language of anti-statism was. By attacking their opponents as either left-wing sympathizers themselves or as merely dupes of world Communism, Republicans and conservatives were able to put liberal defenders of the New Deal and the Fair Deal on the defensive, while also pushing the latter to embrace rhetoric which might have made tactical sense but which undermined the legitimacy of the liberalism they were tied to. Ultimately, only be embracing anti-statism as vigorously as their opposition could liberals hope to survive by 1952, which was the peak of this strand of new political culture.