Roundtable on Averbeck’s *Liberalism Is Not Enough* – Final Entry: The Author Responds

To see the forest for the trees: “To discern an overall pattern from a mass of detail; to see the big picture, or the broader, more general situation.” [1]

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I’d like to start by thanking S-USIH, and especially Tim Lacy, who did the grunt work, for putting together this roundtable. It’s been delightful to receive a wide range of responses and build new connections with scholars interested in similar work.

As Raz and Lassabe Sheperd pointed out in their reviews, I wrote this book with a larger body of scholarship in mind. Mical Raz’s own work, in fact, closely paralleled my own in its focus on the intersection between postwar social science and public policy. Karen Ferguson focused on this intersection in the most unlikely of places, the politics of black power, and Naomi Murakawa wrote a brilliant book on Great Society liberalism and the emergence of mass incarceration. These are, of course, just to name a few. But this is one reason the book was, as Lacy noted, so short – rather than aiming for a synthesis work with a hefty side of my own research, I opted for focusing on what I, in particular, could offer. Still, Lacy has a point — fleshing out several aspects of the history would have made it a longer, and in some respects, better book. But I am at heart an essayist, and I wanted to write the kind of book I would want to read, so decided to go ahead and seize that opportunity lest it never return to me in an academic and publishing landscape that is daunting at best.

However, the cornucopia of recent work on postwar liberalism that is critical of that tradition is very encouraging, and also offers a starting point to respond to Geary’s primary concern with the book – that I generalize about a diverse body of thought, especially at the expense of the left-liberals from the same period. I certainly do not dispute that such left-liberals existed, nor that they were, in many regards, at their peak in the late 60s and early 70s. But note, however, how brief their moment was – barely even a decade. Similarly, the other benchmark moment of progressive social legislation, the New Deal, really only had a few years to cohere before the momentum behind it evaporated, as both Jefferson Cowie and Alan Brinkley have so convincingly demonstrated. [2]

Moreover, what both of these brief periods also shared was a huge uptick in political activity and pressure applied by the left, which capitalized (in the New Deal era) on an economic crisis, and in the 60s and 70s, a cultural crisis and a foreign policy crisis. As Michael Kazin has argued, the left has always played a key role in pushing liberals into progressive policy corners – in this sense, pointing out that Geary highlights left liberals is more than merely semantics. [3] But Geary elides the political context in which, as he puts it, liberals “eventually came around” to supporting civil rights. This happened not on liberals’ own initiative, but because the black freedom movement, in conjunction with a Cold War context that made American hypocrisy a serious liability, forced them to.

Nonetheless, Geary is right to include left-liberalism within the broader category of liberalism. Liberalism was and is diverse, covering a variety of perspectives that represent significant differences etched by responses to changing historical contexts. But then again, doesn’t this describe every ideology? Rare indeed is any tradition of thought, political or religious, that doesn’t have many branches and splinter groups. How then, should the historian respond to this diversity? Should we cast our definitional nets so broadly that there is little we can say, holistically, about a body of thought? Or, should we look at the pattern of results over the long-durée and conclude that while variation is always abundant, the predominant data should be considered more historically relevant?

My approach is the latter. In this sense, I happily plead guilty to generalizing about postwar liberalism. Furthermore, I argue that such generalization – in this case and many others – is a necessary exercise for creating meaningful historical understanding. In her review, Lassabe Shepherd highlighted my reason for this – results, results, results. If we are going to apply the past to contemporary problems of political strategy or commitment, we have to consider the fate that those with likeminded goals met in their time. And when it comes to progressive tendencies within American liberalism, the story isn’t a pretty one.

I hardly need to review how the moment of left-liberalism was followed by a political environment that, over the course of the next half-century, the conservative movement pushed ever further to the right. But what I do want to highlight is how complicit liberals and the Democratic Party were in this process. While Geary interprets this emphasis as arguing that “there was hardly any difference between liberalism and conservatism,” I would edit that assessment to say that I am arguing that the differences that exist are not sufficient to get us to where we — both the left and left-liberals — want to get. Liberalism is diverse, but what we can say is that it is committed to capitalism in one form or another. Because of this commitment, essential myths that will repeatedly clash with socialist goals and values will remain at its core. Lacy aptly pointed out one: meritocracy, and I agree with him that a healthy unpacking of the concept’s relevance would have greatly strengthened the book.

But if the underlying ideological assumptions of liberalism do not convince us that it has reached its limits as a tool of social justice, then the rejection of progressives by liberals from within the power circles of the Democratic Party certainly should. I hardly want to review that depressing history, particularly since we lived through one of its most painful iterations in 2016 and 2020. But sometimes I do feel like the spectator of a horror movie, watching left- liberals frantically try to identify the murderer while wanting to cry out, “the call is coming from inside the house!” Considering how many times I’ve seen this movie, it seems clear to me that this dynamic is not a historical accident — which is why, when it comes to distinguishing between the forest from the trees, I would rather error on the side of generalizing to emphatically insist that the forest is real.

Moreover, there appears to be a concern that this ideological preference keeps the left from effective political activism by poisoning the potential for collaborating with sympathetic liberals. While I can only speak for myself, I do not believe that arguing for a wholehearted embrace of the left excludes organizing around common goals. My approach to activism is inspired by Francis Fox Piven, who advises us, to paraphrase, to demand everything and take what we get. That does involve making some hard choices, but when it comes to getting policy passed, something is almost always better than nothing, and we ought not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. To that end, I’m happy to join Geary in using the real accomplishments of the New Deal and the Great Society to demand more — the glass is both half empty, and half full. But the possibility of getting “the perfect” can only be sustained if we are never satisfied, and never let up the pressure for a truly just arrangement of power and resources. In this sense, there is a distinction between coalition building on the ground, and the ideological and rhetorical work of pushing the Overton window further to the left.

As for Lacy’s concern that this will alienate potential allies, I can only say that to me this holds no more water than similar critiques that by speaking too loudly or angrily about racism or sexism, we will breed a generation of reactionaries (as if this would somehow be our fault or responsibility). Such critiques forget that political discourse creates lasting change not so much by converting the already committed, but by permanently altering the ideological landscape in a way that will shape future generations well before they have a political identity to be defensive about. This is why I found Kazin’s comment about the “hardened self-righteousness” of some leftist activists so misguided — the idea that political and social movements are the result of a slow accumulation of conversions resulting from calm, civil debate is one of the key liberal pieties which I not only find little historical evidence for but, moreover, keep witnessing getting in the way of more effective political action. It is a great example of the type of liberal assumptions we simply cannot afford to continue to indulge.

Which brings me to the cloud that hangs over all of these points of debate: the potential that fascism might have an actual chance of seizing serious political power in the near future. While this isn’t the place to get into the particulars of how to best prevent this (lest this post never end), I understand this concern but simply disagree that the Democratic Party is going to be of much help. Indeed, their embrace of neoliberalism and “third way” politics is a huge part of how we ended up here in the first place. It would probably be shocking to most liberals to hear me say that I think we have a better shot at defeating fascism by forging a mostly new path forward rather than repackaging liberalism again, but I do — especially if we’re talking about defeating fascism in the long term, in a way that transforms the political landscape in a manner similar to how the New Right did by similarly focusing on the long-durée for more than half a century by now. After all, we’ve given liberalism 230 years; let’s give a mass movement of the left at least as long.