Cold War liberal
Cold War liberal is a term that was used in the United States during the Cold War, which began after the end of World War II.[1] The term was used to describe liberal politicians and labor union leaders who supported democracy and equality. They supported the growth of labor unions, the civil rights movement, and the war on poverty and simultaneously opposing totalitarianism commonly seen under Communist rule at the time. Cold War liberals supported efforts of containment, such as diplomat George F. Kennan and U.S. president Harry S. Truman during the post-World War II era, towards Soviet Communism.
Background and overview[edit]
Modern American liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the Progressive Era of the early 20th century.[2] Sol Stern wrote that "Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War."[3] The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941); of these, freedom of speech and freedom of religion were classic American 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 went beyond government non-interference in private lives. Freedom from want could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a concept 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 radicalism and classical liberalism as represented by Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had two wings: Northern and Western liberals opposed the generally-conservative Southern whites. Difficult to classify were the northern urban Democratic political machines. They had supported New Deal economic policies but would slowly come apart over racial issues. Some historians have divided the Republican Party into the liberal Wall Street and the conservative Main Street factions; others have said that the party's conservatives came from landlocked states (Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Barry Goldwater of Arizona) and the liberals tended to come from California (Earl Warren and Pete McCloskey), New York (Nelson Rockefeller), and other coastal states.
Opposing both Soviet 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 or those of European social democrats. Although they never endorsed state socialism, they called for spending on education, science, and infrastructure, notably the expansion of NASA and the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Their progressivist 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 were support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power between labor (in the form of organized trade unions) and management (with a tendency to be more interested in large corporations than in small business); a foreign policy focused on containing the Eastern Bloc, which according to some was one factor leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991; the continuation and expansion of New Deal social welfare programs (in the broad sense of welfare, including programs like Social Security); and an embrace of Keynesian economics. By way of compromise with political groupings to their right, this often became in practice military Keynesianism.
At first, liberals generally did not see Franklin D. Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman as one of their own and viewed him as a Democratic Party hack. Other 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 by sacrificing civil liberties.[4] At the same time, the ADA succeeded in pushing Truman leftward on issues like the civil rights movement.[5] Hubert Humphrey was a liberal leader who fought to uphold Truman's veto of the McCarran Act of 1950.[6] Liberals were united in their opposition to McCarthyism.[7] Truman would call Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has" by "torpedo[ing] the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States."[8][9] The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy with the primary goal of containing Soviet expansion during the Cold War.[10]