The American Diptych

On calls for a second Cold War liberalism

A few weeks ago, Adam Gurri, the Editor-in-Chief of Liberal Currents, caught some heat for a piece he wrote entitled, “The Next Democratic Candidate for President Should Run as a China Hawk.” In the piece, Gurri envisions the next Democratic President as recentering the country on a frontal confrontation with China. To do this, Gurri tells us, the United States will have to build a new international order that is compatible with the global thriving of liberalism.

Online, Gurri’s piece was met with loads of criticism. Over the last few weeks, scholars have weighed in. Craig Johnson provided a historical corrective. He wrote

[Gurri’s] perspective misses what actually happened in the Cold War. It presents the successes of worker organizing and racial liberation in the US as responses to international great power competition. It frames economic development as the innocent consequence of imperialism. And it centers the potential massacre of Americans rather than the actual deaths of millions of people of color in the Global South.

The history of the Cold War, as it turns out, was not America’s shining moment.

As much as I liked the broad-based rejection of calls for a new Cold War, none of the responses captured the scope of the problem.

This was not a one off. Gurri’s work is just the latest in a long line of Liberal Currents pieces that have pined for the glories of great-power competition. Here, I’m thinking of the work of Peter Juul and Samantha Hancox-Li. These authors have all written nostalgia pieces that have framed the path out of America’s polycrisis through the lens of Cold War mythmaking.

Given the immediate and broad-based pushback, it’s worth unpacking what’s going on here.

Cold War Liberalism Redux

Gurri, Juul, and Hancox-Li are all working towards a redo of Cold War liberalism.

Cold War liberalism is often reduced to a simple formula: domestic welfare provision combined with anti-communism abroad. But this shorthand obscures its deeper constraints.

After World War II, demands of geopolitical competition narrowed the horizon of liberal ambition. Redistribution, socialist planning, and class politics were treated with suspicion. The period saw not only the consolidation of the administrative state but also some of the most illiberal episodes in American history—the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and the catastrophe of Vietnam.

As Johnson indicated, the calls for a new Cold War liberalism depend on a historically narrow conception of what actually took place in the twentieth century. Gurri wrote that “[t]he pressure of the first Cold War was successfully channeled into long-needed reforms at home, helping to make America truly a liberal democracy for the first time—one that finally, through the Voting Rights Act, would begin to live up to the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise to enfranchise everyone regardless of their race.” This is, according to Johnson, a selective accounting of the legacy of Cold War liberalism. The illiberal forces generated by the Cold War led the US government to crack down on “the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and dozens of other domestic movements.” Johnson continues,

The US government was in the business of stability, both at home and abroad, and not only accepted but actively endorsed discrimination, violence, and death if it served that purpose. The pressures of the Cold War did not help these efforts. In fact, the US government (both Democrats and Republicans) repeatedly cited the rivalry with the Soviets to push against calls for integration. Crackdowns on union organizing, on student activism, and on those fighting for racial justice were justified on the premise that these agitators were in the pocket of the Communists, either knowingly or ignorantly.

Gurri and his interlocutors at Liberal Currents are, it seems to me, making a gamble. Liberal Currents has staked out a position, not unlike my own, on the need for domestic reconstruction to save American democracy. The gamble I see on the face of Gurri’s work is that the project of reconstruction cannot be sold to the American public without some unifying project dripping in nostalgia for the American century.

This instinct is, I think, tied up with Liberal Currents’ project.

Recovering the American Liberal Tradition

From my perspective, there is much to detest in the new China hawks’ vision. Gurri’s apparent willingness to court World War III in defense of Taiwan leaves me wondering how any Democratic nominee could sell this conflict on the level of American foreign policy interests. Separately, Gurri imagines America as the generator of a new international order when we have neither the capacity nor the moral standing to play that role.

Why, it should be asked, would the world allow the US to play this role when it has demolished the old-world order unilaterally under Trump, when it has waged war, when it has been implicated in ghastly human rights violations, and when it has turned on all its longstanding allies? There is no way of writing credibly in the way that Gurri has without engaging in an unhealthy degree of American self-importance.

In attempts to cling to superpower status long after it has slipped through our grasps, I see something like the post-colonial crackup in Great Britain. The war with Iran, on this account, is an embarrassing spectacle of self-delusion on par with the Suez Crisis.

But my substantive disagreements are less interesting than how the calls for a second Cold War liberalism relate to Liberal Currents’ mission. Liberal Currents is a publication primarily dedicated to recovering a viable American liberal tradition for the twenty-first century. The publication has always had a backwards glance.

In seeking to find a fighting liberalism, Liberal Currents has gone in contradictory directions. For example, on law, Liberal Currents is split between writers who pay homage to the old ways of the mid-twentieth century legal liberals and a new stable of writers who would break with those traditions.

The search for a viable liberal tradition requires editorial discernment on the part of Liberal Currents’ writers. But the pruning required runs into resistance when Liberal Currents is itself in the business of selling the iconography of twentieth-century liberalism. It’s hard to play the hits while leaving the past behind.

The trouble is amplified by the fact that the American liberal tradition is interwoven with split-screen tales of illiberalism. The US has not produced many great liberal theorists. (Exceptions include John Rawls and John Dewey.) But our history is bound up with moments of liberal emancipation: the Founding, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Right Revolution. Instead of great liberal theorists, the US has produced social movements and courageous leaders who have fought to beat back the country’s myriad hierarchies. In other words, America has a long history of “reconstruction politics.” While we don’t have many Lockes, we have a Lincoln!

But scholars who have worked up a level of insight and discernment know that our tradition of reconstruction politics has always been interwoven with illiberal projects. The Founding is sullied by slavery. More concretely, the original Constitution is a document designed to preserve myriad hierarchies. As historian Manisha Sinha would say, Reconstruction is bound up with the project of American Empire. They are two sides of the same state-building coin. Both the Progressive Era and the New Deal depended on some accommodation with Jim Crow. And the Rights Revolution is embedded in a Cold War struggle that brought death and destruction to countless innocents.

There is no pure liberal tradition to find and rescue. This simple fact is, I think, at the core of Liberal Currents’ recent woes.

Liberal Currents has, at times, seen its project as a restoration of an emancipatory American liberal tradition. That requires that its contributors deal in our own collective memory of our shared past.

But the public today cannot be sold a simplified story of the past. We are all too far along in educating ourselves about our illiberal traditions.

The answer is to more forcefully break with the past. The past can tell us that American progress is rooted in reconstruction politics. But we needn’t pattern ourselves on the American diptych, the selling of reconstruction politics with paired illiberal projects.

On a fundamental level, I worry that we could over learn the lessons of history. On some level, Liberal Currents’ new China hawks make me think that they have bought into the lessons of the American diptych. For my money, a genuine movement to restore American democracy would require us to turn inward and forgo our worst impulses. It is only when we can become a beacon for the world, long far off in the future, that Americans should seek to play the role we once did in the last century.