Roundtable on Averbeck’s *Liberalism Is Not Enough* – Entry #4 by Daniel Geary

Which Liberalism Isn’t Enough?

In 1965, civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin was looking for an economist to work out the figures for the Freedom Budget: an ambitious ten-year plan to eliminate poverty in the U.S. by guaranteeing employment, healthcare, and housing to every citizen. He turned to Leon Keyserling. A veteran of the New Deal, Keyserling had chaired Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors from 1950 to 1952. Unsurprisingly, Keyserling responded enthusiastically to Rustin’s request. For unlike some of his colleagues in the Americans for Democratic Action who had come to prioritize the problems of an affluent society, Keyserling had steadfastly argued for economic growth and redistribution to improve the living standards of those at the bottom.

There is only one word to describe Keyserling’s politics: he was a liberal. Yet his influential brand of liberalism is nowhere discussed in Robin Marie Averbeck’s book. There is much that I agree with Averbeck about, but I want to highlight my differences here in the interests of addressing some key substantive, methodological, and political issues that her book raised for me which revolve around her wholesale critique of postwar liberalism.

Liberalism is Not Enough is a thought-provoking and valuable contribution to the intellectual and political history of post-World War II liberalism. It argues that postwar liberalism was fundamentally a rationalization for racial capitalism. It was committed to pluralist understandings of American democracy that occluded any recognition of structural racism or even much discussion of racism at all until the civil rights movement forced the issue. While liberals eventually came around on civil rights, they “never attempted a sustained, serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice.” Their “war on poverty” presumed that poor Americans simply required more exposure to “opportunity.” And the “culture of poverty”—an explanation that emphasized the defects of the poor themselves—appealed to liberals because it occluded examination of larger social structures in which they were complicit.

Averbeck offers an admirably concise and persuasive critique of one strand of postwar liberalism: namely that associated with the group that came to be known as “neoconservatives.” Many of her key figures—Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman—can be broadly placed in that category. Averbeck does show that even the ostensibly more radical approach of the Kerner Report—which indicted “white racism” and called for a massive expansion of federal spending—fell back on pluralist and culture of poverty ideas to distract from a reckoning with the fundamental sources of inequality. Yet, as she notes, most of the people on the Kerner Commission were moderates not liberals.

Averbeck largely overlooks left-liberalism, which we might define here as an effort to address systemic inequalities via existing political institutions. Left-liberalism was peaking during the very period she discusses. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s liberals were more open to radical ideas than at any point in history other than the New Deal era. Keyserling’s involvement with the Freedom Budget is a case in point, but he was hardly the only one who embraced such thorough-going reforms. Indeed, the budget was promptly endorsed by the ADA, the AFL-CIO, and dozens of other liberal organizations. By 1972, George McGovern was campaigning on the provision of a generous guaranteed income to all Americans to be paid for in part by re-appropriating funds from the military-industrial complex.

During this period, one can see the presence of left-liberalism from the McGovern campaign to the radical critiques of the Vietnam War published in the New York Review of Books (including Noam Chomsky’s influential “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”); from the challenge to racist policing mounted by the social scientist researchers for the Kerner Commission to the radicalized feminism of Gloria Steinem who contrary to popular stereotypes of second-wave feminism foregrounded the issues of poor and working-class women and women of color as when she published welfare rights leader Jhonnie Tillman’s “Welfare is a Woman’s Issue” in the first issue of Ms. I think one could write a book about the resurgence of left-liberalism during this period…which is why I am at the moment writing that very book.

Even the Lyndon Johnson administration deserves a bit more credit than Averbeck gives it. It is true that the “war on poverty” was overhyped and underfunded and that the Community Action Program was based on flawed assumptions. Yet some of the other programs instituted during this period, while undoubtedly insufficient to tackle the root causes of racism and poverty, did make tangible differences in the lives of many Americans. I am thinking especially of Medicare and Medicaid but also expanded coverage and higher payments in Social Security, the making permanent of Food Stamps, and the introduction of the School Breakfast Program. It is easy to trace the adoption of the “culture of poverty” idea by conservatives and deduce that there was hardly any difference between liberalism and conservativism. But you could not come to the same conclusion by looking at the history of any of the Great Society programs listed above.

There is a methodological component to Averbeck’s wholesale critique of postwar liberalism. Her approach to intellectual history downplays the importance of individual thinkers’ motivations to address instead the consequences of their ideas. There is a lot to recommend this approach. For example, does it really matter if Moynihan thought his 1965 report would lead to programs going beyond the War on Poverty if in fact it added fuel for those who blamed the victim instead? (This is all the more true since Moynihan used his professed reformist intentions to shield him from any criticism from the left). In another telling example, Averbeck shows that while Kenneth Clark did advance a systemic critique of American society, all that liberals took from his work were ideas congruent with a culture of poverty analysis.

There is nothing wrong with this approach to intellectual history which Averbeck often puts to good effect. But it does present a possible pitfall. In directing attention away from individuals and the particular ideas they formulated, it lends itself to overgeneralization. This is exactly what I think Averbeck has done with “liberalism,” which becomes an abstraction that ignores an entire strand of liberalism.

From her analysis of postwar liberalism Averbeck concludes that those of us who support social justice today must begin anew without looking to any previous liberal precedents. I think that as anti-racist socialists Averbeck and I are on basically the same side politically. And I could not agree more with her criticisms of liberal nostalgists such as James Patterson who seem to think that, but for some irrational criticisms of the Moynihan Report, Lyndon Johnson would have eradicated poverty long ago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t seek to extend the best bits of 1960s liberalism. Bernie Sanders couldn’t advocate “Medicare for All” if we didn’t first have Medicare.

The Freedom Budget was far from perfect. It was based on patriarchal assumptions, ignored the Vietnam War (the central issue of the day), and assumed an ecologically unsustainable model of economic growth. But it was nevertheless an appropriately ambitious proposal for eradicating poverty from American society that many liberals supported. We can draw inspiration from it as well as lessons on why it did not succeed. A wholesale rejection of liberalism might offer moral clarity, but it can too easily devolve into fatalism or self-righteousness. There are usable histories we can find in liberalism, but to do so we must first recognize that there was more than one kind of liberalism.