Authors: Ira Katznelson
Much as Riesman projected, deep uncertainty about the character and prospects of liberal democracy lingered after World War II had been won. The eminent philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen closed his 1946 collection of essays expressing “the faith of a liberal” by underscoring the doctrine’s vulnerability in an inhospitable world: “We are now entering into the world arena, and the question is no longer that of the special type of liberal civilization which once existed in the United States, but whether any type of liberal civilization can exist in America.”
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John F. Kennedy responded to a Harvard University class questionnaire that year by noting, “I am pessimistic about the future of the country.” Half of the fifteen thousand business executives polled by
Fortune
projected an “extended major depression with large-scale unemployment in the next ten years.”
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Reflecting on the West’s cultural and political crisis, the economic sociologist Paul Meadows cautioned that “the close of the recent war can hardly change the fact that the ideological revolutions in Europe during the ’twenties and ’thirties bludgeoned liberals into a reeling retreat,” and that unless the liberal political tradition learned to live in a world of power, it would continue to surrender to this retreat.
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This moment of despondency soon was followed by the Maoist victory in China, the fright of nuclear proliferation, intensified conflicts about race and civil liberty, and a bloody war in Korea, claiming some three million lives, overwhelmingly civilian, that was marked by gross miscalculations of Chinese intentions and fighting ability, a disastrous retreat, a counterattack restoring the thirty-eight parallel as the dividing line between the North and South, and a showdown between Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Truman, in which the president repulsed a stark challenge to the civilian control of the military.
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During the era’s last phase—marked by the Cold War, Stalinist and anti-Communist fanaticism, atomic fear, and a new hot war in Asia—many learned observers worried whether liberal democracy could maintain its balance and élan. With Roosevelt gone, Richard Hofstadter was quite unsure. He concluded a 1948 assessment by writing:
[FDR] is bound to be the dominant figure in the mythology of any resurgent American liberalism. There are ample texts in his writing for men of good will to feed upon; but it would be fatal to rest content with his belief in personal benevolence, personal arrangements, the self-sufficiency of good intentions, and month-to-month improvisation, without trying to achieve a more inclusive and systematic conception of what is happening in the world.
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Permanent violence and permanent insecurity loomed. “Our own outlook, as well as the world’s outlook,” Columbia University’s Asia specialist Nathaniel Peffer asserted in 1948, “is darker than before 1914 or even 1939. . . . We have not even the assurance of a transient peace, to say nothing of a long truce, as after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. On all the evidence before us, we are now in the state of prelude to war.” At a moment marked by ever “sharper fears,” the “pendant issue” is that of “absolutism versus democracy, or, better put, representative government,” with “democracy losing by default,” judging that its “lease on life is precarious again, perhaps more so than before the war. Again it appears to be in danger of being ground between Right and Left.”
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Looking inward in this situation, the poet Archibald MacLeish cautioned a Pomona College graduating class in 1950 that the country found itself in a “trap of fear and hate.”
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Surrounded by wild and intense insecurity, American political institutions and processes could not look to fixed points or a guiding status quo. As the novelist Robert Musil once described turn-of-the-century Austria, no one “could quite distinguish what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and backward.”
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Decision making had to proceed under conditions that made it uncommonly difficult to assign probabilities to what might lie ahead based on past experience.
Intense uncertainty, the kind that makes the usual sense of the term
status quo
virtually irrelevant, became a source of fear. No one quite knew whether the era’s constellation of crises indicated “a state of greater or lesser permanence, as in a longer or shorter transition towards something better or worse or towards something altogether different.”
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The federal government proceeded in circumstances of recurring and escalating emergency without the benefit of an established starting point and without a fixed repertoire of public policies that were effective and legitimate. As Presidents Roosevelt and Truman sought to reduce such deep uncertainty to a more tolerable level of risk, they lacked fixed or sure preferences about public policy. As a result, the field of policy invention was uncommonly open but also largely uncharted. Unusually unconstrained by existing public policy, the New Deal possessed a wider array of policy possibilities than any prior set of government initiatives in American history. It could learn from a store of initiatives tested both by liberal democracies and by illiberal dictatorships in Europe. It could emulate experiments the various states had initiated, and adapt policies developed under different conditions by progressives in both major parties, by democratic socialists, by the labor movement, and even by mainstream Republicans in the Hoover administration. It could draw on a wide array of options developed by policy intellectuals who worked in university social science departments, law schools, and recently established think tanks, and who sought to invent alternatives in the space that lay between an insufficient status quo and the designs offered by the era’s dictatorships. But could it succeed despite the self-seeking partisanship of politicians and the polarization inherent in the legislative process?
V.
N
OT SURPRISINGLY,
America’s émigré intellectuals who had come close to the abyss acutely comprehended the stakes. Imbued with concerns about “the evil of politics and the ethics of evil,”
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they were particularly attuned to liberal democracy’s difficult, intransigent, and unresolved dilemmas.
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They possessed a discriminating sense of the insufficiency of older models of liberal democracy, combined with a keen alertness about the present. Like Henry James in Venice, they often thought of themselves as brooding tourists, brooding because they understood that the time was marked by many unimaginably bad choices.
During the academic year 1935–1936, the small but remarkable group of refugee scholars who constituted the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York assembled in regular sessions of what they called their “General Seminar” to assess the prospects for political economic democracy on the understanding, as the institution’s president, Alvin Johnson, put the point, that “democracy is the central problem of all present day serious political thinking.”
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This was a regular gathering of members of the primarily German and Jewish cohort of social scientists who had escaped Fascism. Their lives had ruptured. Their commitment to democracy was marked less by an ameliorative instinct—though they did have strong views about how to make liberal democracy and modern capitalism work better—than by resistance to all forms of dictatorship. From the perspective of these newcomers, the faith of American liberals—the very idea that fear had been supplanted by hope—seemed too simple, rather credulous, even provincial.
The issues they took up in their General Seminar concerned the roots of Fascism, the vulnerability and excesses of democracy, the era’s sources of mass irrationality, and deformations in public opinion. In doing so, they compelled attention to what, arguably, were the most vital challenges of their time, defending liberal democracy in an open, rich, and cosmopolitan way. Reports of their meetings record how they grappled with the strengths and weaknesses of parliamentary representation, the role of political parties, and the rule of law in circumstances where “everyone today pictures democracy and parliamentary institutions on the defensive or already definitely in retreat. . . . Thus it is a crucial question for the future,” Hans Simons wrote, “whether democracy and parliamentarism can gain in strength and influence not only in comparison with dictatorship, but in their intrinsic value and in their capacity for expansion.”
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Also striking is how these intellectuals linked those broad and fundamental concerns about democracy to specific policy discussions about economic planning, trade unions and the regulation of labor conflicts, taxation and the distribution of wealth, and foreign policy, on the understanding that whether liberal democracy could thrive depended considerably on what kind of liberal democracy might be fashioned in hard times.
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All this was occurring at the very moment when fear was said to have been vanquished.
Two years after these intellectuals met, Thomas Mann crossed the United States from February to May 1938 to lecture to audiences totaling some sixty thousand in order to help marshal “the coming victory of democracy.” Mann spoke of a “lust for human degradation which it would be too much honour to call devilish.” Worried that “democracy as a whole is still far from acquiring a clear conception of this fascist concentration, of the fanaticism and absolutism of the totalitarian state,” he stressed that “democracy and fascism live, so to speak, on different planets.” He reminded his listeners that, as a degenerated regime, a travesty of democracy, “it is in physical and mental oppression that fascism believes. . . . Oppression is not only the ultimate goal, but the first principle of fascism.” Such dictatorships, “hostile to freedom,” mobilize nationalism as “a thoroughly aggressive impulse, directed against the outer world; its concern is not with conscience, but with power; not with human achievement, but with war.” With the Final Solution still some years off, he also brought to light “the treatment of the Jews in Germany, the concentration camps and the things which took place and are still taking place in them,” including the “ignominious distinctions such as the cutting of the hair and the yellow spot.”
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These brooding immigrants, together with other newcomers, whose numbers included Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss, Franz Neumann, and Hans Morgenthau, had no illusions about the era’s depths of despair, the constitutive features of fear, or the fragility of liberal democracy.
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“Exiled in paradise,” they composed a particularly attentive group that watched and evaluated how the New Deal took up custody for liberal democracy. Perhaps more attentively than other Americans, they painfully observed how, in pursuing liberal guardianship, Washington risked—indeed, had to risk—informal cooperation and formal alliances with illiberal partners, and they acutely noticed when the federal government pushed constitutional processes right to the limit of rights and liberties, sometimes beyond.
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More than most, they also comprehended that the global contest with the dictatorships of the Right and the Left was a struggle about the persistence and competence of representative parliamentary government in a situation of deep uncertainty. With more reason than most to be unsure of the ultimate outcome, they never underestimated either the achievement or its costs. “Something new, a new world began,” Stefan Zweig wrote about transformations to democratic culture and politics in the United States shortly before his suicide in Brazil, in February 1942. “But how many hells, how many purgatories had to be crossed before it could be reached!”
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VI.
T
HE CREDIBILITY
of the claims made both by the dictatorships and by the democracies depended on the degree to which they could innovate to solve the major problems of the day and thus reduce uncertainty to risk.
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These were matters both of reality and of its perception. With the development of film and radio, dictators and democratic leaders alike could address their nations directly in regular talks and addresses. To be persuasive, they had to be seen to be inventing genuine answers to pressing questions. The period’s contest between the dictatorships and the democracies was a competition to find responses to central dilemmas, and to discover whether parliamentary democracies could do as well as the illiberal regimes in this struggle for supremacy.
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The dictatorships projected many alluring answers. With market capitalism performing so poorly, the Italians put forward a corporatist model that coordinated matters of labor and capital under the auspices of the state. The Germans advanced a highly managed capitalism. The Soviets, who had eliminated private property and markets altogether, pushed ahead with an ever-more-ambitious planned economy.
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These economic nostrums had big implications for the character of social class and the role of labor. Italy folded unions into its authoritarian corporatism, making them compliant. Germany eviscerated their independence. The Soviet Union created the form of union representation but without the content, having integrated it into the Communist Party apparatus. Each claimed in its own way to have surmounted class conflict, the bane of market capitalism, while creating a united people, based on solidarities of a singular nation, race, or class, and a commitment to the common welfare of its members. In all, these initiatives seemed to herald the future at a time when the advanced economies of the world seemed to be moving, in one form or another, from competitive to planned economies.
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While the United States was struggling with how it might engage with global affairs, the dictatorships projected a sense of assurance and apparent know-how to enhance their might and maintain national security. They promoted a pervasive militarism. For the Italians, the armed forces, especially Italo Balbo’s air force, were key symbols of national revival and Fascist modernity. For the Soviets, a decision was taken in 1931 and 1932 to accelerate large-scale military investment, moving from 1.8 billion rubles in 1931 to 4 billion the next year, and fully 14.8 billion by 1936, then accelerating to 40.88 billion in 1939, or approximately 4 billion U.S. dollars. Similarly, Nazi Germany’s spending on arms and soldiers spiraled from under 1 billion reichsmarks in 1933 to 10.2 billion in 1936, and 38 billion by 1939, a level approximating 9 billion U.S. dollars.
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By contrast, the United States, in the grip of isolationist sentiment, spent just $0.6 billion on military defense in 1933, 0.9 in 1936, and 1.3 in 1939.
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The high level of spending by the dictatorships was accompanied by a widespread militarization of political and popular life, and the armed forces, following purges in the second half of the 1930s in Germany and the Soviet Union, were tied ever more closely to the ruling parties and to decisions taken directly by Stalin and Hitler. Their regimes, and the Italian, routinely utilized vocabularies charged with violent metaphors that symbolically created united countries ready for war.