Liberalism in the United States
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Liberalism in the United States |
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Liberalism in the United States is based on concepts of
Since the 1930s, liberalism is usually used without a qualifier in the United States to refer to social liberalism, a variety of liberalism that endorses a regulated market economy and the expansion of civil and political rights, with the common good considered as compatible with or superior to the freedom of the individual.[4] This political philosophy was exemplified by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and later Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Other accomplishments include the Works Progress Administration and the Social Security Act in 1935, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This variety of liberalism is also known as modern liberalism to distinguish it from classical liberalism, from which it sprang out along with modern American conservatism.[5]
Modern American liberalism now includes issues such as
History
18th and 19th century
The origins of American liberalism are in the political ideals of the
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the United States extended liberty to ever broader classes of people. The states abolished many restrictions on voting for white males during the early 19th century. The Constitution was amended in 1865 to abolish slavery and in 1870 to extend the vote to black men.[12]
Progressive Era
As the
According to James Reichley, the term liberalism took on its current meaning in the United States during the 1920s. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the term had usually described
20th century
New Deal
In the 1930s, liberalism came to describe a pragmatic ideology that called for a moderate amount of government
President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to office in 1933, amid the economic calamity of the
Religious and ethnic minorities had been hard hit and were helped by the relief programs and the patronage policy. Catholics and Jews gave strong support to the New Deal coalition.[21][22][23]
Blacks were included in New Deal programs, especially in the North, with a lesser role in the South.
The New Deal consisted of three types of programs designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform".
Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent market instability and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor.
World War II
Roosevelt was president through most of World War II and, anticipating the post-war period, strongly supported proposals to create a United Nations organization as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation to solve problems on the international stage. His commitment to internationalist ideals was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, architect of the failed League of Nations.[34] Roosevelt took the lead in the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, with the proviso that the United States would have a veto power.[35][36]
Liberal consensus
By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition, [...] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation".[37]
For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in American politics, peaking with the landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and the passage of Great Society legislation.[38] The postwar liberal consensus included acceptance of a modest welfare state and anti-communism domestic and foreign policies.[39] Some of its elements were shared with embedded liberalism,[40] that aimed to combine benefits of free markets with some interventionist domestic policies.
Cold War
This section needs additional citations for verification. (January 2019) |
American liberalism in the Cold War-era was the immediate heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the progressives of the early 20th century.[41] Sol Stern wrote that "Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War".[42]
The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941). Of these, freedom of speech and of religion were classic liberal freedoms as was freedom from fear (freedom from tyrannical government), but freedom from want was another matter. Roosevelt proposed a notion of freedom that allowed for government responsibility for the individual.[43] Freedom from want could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, an idea more associated with the concepts of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party, Henry Clay's Whig Party and Alexander Hamilton's economic principles of government intervention and subsidy than the more radical socialism and social democracy of European thinkers, or with prior versions of classical liberalism as represented by Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party.[citation needed]
In the 1950s and 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had on one hand Northern and Western liberals and on the other
Opposing both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier liberalisms in its views on many social issues and personal liberty, but its economic views were not those of free-market Jeffersonian liberalism nor those of European social democrats. They never endorsed state socialism, but they did call for spending on education, science and infrastructure, notably the expansion of NASA and the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Their progressive ideas continued the legacy of Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War liberalism included the following:[citation needed]
- Support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power between labor (in the form of organized unions) and management (with a tendency to be more interested in large corporations than in small business).
- A foreign policy focused on containing Communism based in the Soviet Union and China. Liberals opposed isolationism, détente and rollback.
- The continuation of New Deal social welfare programs, especially Social Security).
- An embrace of Keynesian economics with deficit spending in times of recession. They supported high spending on the military, a policy known as military Keynesianism.
At first, liberals generally did not see Franklin D. Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at home and abroad, sometimes at the sacrifice of civil liberties.[44] For example, Hubert Humphrey put before the Senate in 1950 a bill to establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the President could be held without trial, but it did not pass.
Liberals were united in their opposition to McCarthyism.[45][vague]
Decline of Southern liberals
Southern liberals were an essential part of the New Deal coalition as without them Roosevelt lacked majorities in Congress. Notable leaders were Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas, Jim Folsom and John Sparkman in Alabama, Claude Pepper in Florida, Earl Long in Louisiana, Luther H. Hodges in North Carolina and Estes Kefauver in Tennessee. They promoted subsidies for small farmers and supported the nascent labor union movement. An essential condition for this North–South coalition was for Northern liberals to ignore Southern racism. After 1945, Northern liberals, led especially by young Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, increasingly made civil rights a central issue. They convinced Truman to join them in 1948. The conservative Southern Democrats, best known as the Dixiecrats, took control of the state parties there and ran Strom Thurmond for president in 1948. Thurmond carried only the Deep South, but that threat was enough to guarantee the national Democratic Party in 1952 and 1956 would not make civil rights a major issue. In 1956, 101 of the 128 Southern Representatives and Senators signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing forced desegregation.[46] The labor movement in the South was divided and lost its political influence. Southern liberals were in a quandary as most of them kept quiet or moderated their liberalism whilst others switched sides and the minority remnant continued on the liberal path. One by one, the last group was defeated. According to historian Numan V. Bartley, "the very word 'liberal' gradually disappeared from the southern political lexicon, except as a term of opprobrium".[47]
Civil rights laws
Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most
During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became increasingly strained as civil-rights leaders accused liberal politicians of temporizing and procrastinating, although they realized they needed the support of liberal Northern Democrats and Republicans for the votes to pass any legislation over Southern obstructionism. Many white liberals believed the grassroots movement for civil rights would only anger many Southern whites and make it even more difficult to pass civil rights laws through Congress. In response to that concern, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to tone down the March on Washington in 1963. President John F. Kennedy finally endorsed the March on Washington and proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he could not get it passed during his lifetime. Lyndon B. Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as well as economic liberalism.[49] Johnson rode the enormous wave of sympathy for the assassinated predecessor. With help from conservative Republicans led by Everett Dirksen, the Southern filibuster was broken. Johnson enacted a mass of Great Society legislation, headed by the powerful Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which reversed state efforts to stop blacks from voting and facilitated their mobilization as millions of new liberal Democratic voters.[50] The result was an immediate end to segregation in most public places (except schools) and an end to restrictions on black voting.[51] Unexpectedly, passage was quickly followed by a wave of black riots in the inner cities which made for the "long hot summers" in every major city from 1964 through 1970. The riots alienated much of the white working-class that had been the base of the labor-union element in the civil-rights coalition.[52]
The civil-rights movement itself was becoming fractured. On March 8, 1964,
Socially liberal political movements
In the 1960s and 1970s, mass movements for
Clashes with the New Left on Vietnam
While the civil rights movement isolated liberals from the white working class and
A large portion of the growing opposition to the war came from younger activists, with a strong base on elite university campuses. They had become alienated from the establishment and formed the
Liberals vehemently disliked Nixon and he reciprocated in kind with an enemies list. Yet as president, Nixon took many policy positions that can only be described as liberal. Before Nixon was elected, the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians such as Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. In 1968 Nixon won the nomination by an appeal to a "silent majority" of conservatives, disgusted and frightened by soaring crime rates and widespread race riots.[71] Using executive orders, he single-handedly created the main environmental agency (the Environmental Protection Agency), something that was achieved without a vote in Congress. He expanded funding for liberal favorites like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.[72] One of his top advisers was liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said that "Nixon mostly opted for liberal policies, merely clothing them [...] in conservative rhetoric".[73] In addition to support for such liberal causes as the arts and the environment, he supported liberalization of laws against recreational drugs. To the astonishment of conservatives, he imposed wage and price controls to counteract inflation. Noam Chomsky, who often attacks liberalism from the left, has called Nixon "in many respects the last liberal president".[74] Historians increasingly emphasize the liberalism of his administration's policies while not attributing them to Nixon personally.[75]
The 1965–1974 period was a major liberal activist era in congress, with the Democratic-led congress during the
The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the Nixon years can best be seen in policies by, for example, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and also in Nixon's failed proposal to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way of a
An opposing view was offered by
1970s–1990s
During the Nixon years and through the 1970s, the liberal consensus began to come apart. The alliance with
Meanwhile, in the Republican ranks, a new wing of the party emerged. The anti-establishment conservatives who had been aroused by Barry Goldwater in 1964 challenged the more liberal leadership in 1976 and took control of the party under Ronald Reagan in 1980. Liberal Republicans faded away even in their Northeastern strongholds.[80] Reagan successfully lowered marginal tax rates, most notably for those at the top of the income distribution while his Social Security reforms raised taxes on the middle and bottom of the income distribution, leaving their total tax burden unchanged.[81][82]
More centrist groups, like the
21st century
On January 1, 2013, President Barack Obama succeeded in raising taxes on the rich while keeping them steady on the middle class. On January 21, 2013, Obama delivered his second inaugural address that championed numerous liberal causes.[86] His signature achievement was the expansion of health benefits to millions under the Affordable Care Act, which became known as ObamaCare, that expanded the role of government in healthcare. In 2016,
Varieties
Early liberalism
The United States was the first nation to be founded on the liberal ideas of
However, both before and after the country was founded legal questions concerning the scope of these rights and freedoms arose. In the Dred Scott decision of 1856–1857, the Supreme Court ruled that these rights only applied to white men and that blacks had no rights whatsoever that any white man was obliged to respect. Several constitutional amendments after the Dred Scott decision extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to larger classes of citizens, to all citizens in 1868, then specifically to blacks in 1870, to women in 1919 and to people unable to afford a poll tax in 1964.[90]
Classical liberalism
In the United States, classical liberalism, also called laissez-faire liberalism,[91] is the belief that a free-market economy is the most productive and government interference favors a few and hurts the many[original research?]—or as Henry David Thoreau stated, "that government is best which governs least". Classical liberalism is a philosophy of individualism and self-responsibility with little concern for groups or sub-communities.
Classical liberals in the United States believe that if the economy is left to the natural forces of supply and demand, free of government intervention, the result is the most abundant satisfaction of human wants. Modern classical liberals oppose the concepts of social democracy and the welfare state.[92] The Bourbon Democrats were a faction of the Democratic Party in the 19th century that aligned with classical liberalism,[93] as does the modern-day Blue Dog Coalition.[94]
Modern liberalism
In 1883, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) published Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences and laid out the basic tenets of modern American liberalism while at the same time attacking the laissez-faire policies advocated by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.[95] Ward was a passionate advocate for a sociology that would intelligently and scientifically direct the development of society.[96]
Another influential thinker in the Progressive Era was Herbert Croly (1869–1930). He effectively combined classical liberal theory with progressive philosophy and founded the periodical The New Republic to present his ideas. Croly presented the case for a mixed economy, increased spending on education and the creation of a society based on the "brotherhood of mankind". In 1909, Croly published The Promise of American Life in which he proposed raising the general standard of living by means of economic planning, though he opposed aggressive unionization.[97] In The Techniques of Democracy (1915), Croly argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic socialism. As editor of The New Republic, he had the forum to reach the intellectual community.[98]
According to Paul Starr, sociologist at Princeton University:
Liberalism wagers that a state [...] can be strong but constrained—strong because constrained. [...] Rights to education and other requirements for human development and security aim to advance the opportunity and personal dignity of minorities and to promote a creative and productive society. To guarantee those rights, liberals have supported a wider social and economic role for the state, counterbalanced by more robust guarantees of civil liberties and a wider social system of checks and balances anchored in an independent press and pluralistic society.
— Paul Starr, The New Republic, March 2007
See also
- Conservatism in the United States
- Libertarianism in the United States
- Modern liberalism in the United States
- Progressivism in the United States
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Bourbon Democrats were a combination of several constituencies including southerners, political and fiscal conservatives, and classical liberals.
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In contrast to the halting mobilization of Insurgent Republicans and southern Democrats, the Blue Dogs' adoption of ... ideological bonafides, the Coalition worked to establish a Blue Dog brand and associate it with support for centrist policies.
- ^ Henry Steele Commager, ed., Lester Ward and the Welfare State (1967)
- ^ On Ward and Sumner see Charlotte G. O'Kelley, and John W. Petras, "Images of Man in Early American Sociology. Part 2: The Changing Concept of Social Reform," Journal of the History of ohe Behavioral Sciences 1970 6(4): 317–34
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- ^ David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive (1985)
Further reading
- Adams, Ian (2001). Political Ideology Today (reprinted, revised ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719060205.
- Alterman, Eric. The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama (2012) excerpt
- Atkins, Curtis Gene. "Forging a New Democratic Party: The Politics of the Third Way From Clinton to Obama." (PhD dissertation York U. 2015) online.
- Baer, Kenneth. Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (2000).
- Bell, J. and T. Stanley, eds. Making Sense of American Liberalism (2012)
- Bloodworth, Jeffrey. Losing the Center: The Decline of American Liberalism, 1968—1992 (U Press of Kentucky, 2013). excerpt
- Brinkley, Alan. The end of reform: New Deal liberalism in recession and war (1996), covers 1937–1945. online
- Buenker, John D. ed. Urban liberalism and progressive reform (1973) covers early 20c.
- Chafe, William H., ed. The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies. (2002).
- Clark, Barry Stewart (1998). Political Economy: A Comparative Approach. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-275-95869-8.
- Ericson, David F. et al. eds., The liberal tradition in American politics: reassessing the legacy of American liberalism. (Routledge, 1999) ISBN 0-415-92256-9
- Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The rise and fall of the New Deal order, 1930–1980 (1989).
- Freeden, Michael (1978). The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Geismer, Lily. "Kennedy and the Liberal Consensus." in Marc J. Selverstone, ed., A Companion to John F. Kennedy (2014): 497–518.
- Geismer, Lily. Don't blame us: suburban liberals and the transformation of the Democratic party (Princeton UP, 2017).
- Gerstle, Gary. "The protean character of American liberalism." American Historical Review 99.4 (1994): 1043–1073. online
- Gerstle, Gary. "The Rise and Fall (?) of America's Neoliberal Order." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018): 241–264. online
- Gillon, Steven. Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (1987).
- Hamby, Alonzo L. Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush (1992) online
- Hamby, Alonzo L. Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (1973).
- Hayward, Steven F. The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964–1980 (2009) excerpt v 1; The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980–1989 (2009) excerpt and text search v2
- Huthmacher, J. Joseph. "Urban liberalism and the age of reform." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49.2 (1962): 231–241. early 20th century online
- Jeffries, John W. "The 'New' New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism, 1937–1945." Political Science Quarterly 105.3 (1990): 397–418. online
- Johnston, Robert D. "Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1.1 (2002): 68–92.
- Lepore, Jill (2018) These truths: A history of the United States (Norton) ISBN 9780393357424
- Matusow, Allen, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984) online
- Milkis, Sidney M., and Jerome M. Mileur, eds. The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (2002).
- Pederson, William D. ed. Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt (2011) 711pp; comprehensive coverage
- Pestritto, Ronald. Woodrow Wilson and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (2005), excerpt
- Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the high tide of American liberalism (1997).
- Smith, Jason Scott. Building New Deal Liberalism: The political economy of public works, 1933–1956 (2009)
- Stevens, John Paul. "Keynote Address: The Bill of Rights: A Century of Progress." University of Chicago Law Review 59 (1992): 13+ online.