What Was Liberalism in the 1950s?

Abstract

Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection has given a new relevance to previous assessments of 1950s liberalism. Democratic strategists who now contemplate the ruins of their first successive presidential debacles in thirty years must ponder how best to revitalize their party at the national level -much like their earlier counterparts did after Dwight D. Eisenhower's second triumph in 1956. Specifically, today's Democrats must decide how much to change in the future: whether to stand by traditional principles and allies until the political winds shift or to heed the call for new ideas and tactics more in tune with changing circumstances and voter preferences. Unfortunately, what historians and political scientists have said about 1950s liberalism does not offer a straightforward answer to the present Democratic dilemma. Earlier scholarship disagrees on how liberal Democrats found their way back to power and on whether or not 1950s progressives paid too high a price for electoral victory. The orthodox theory portrays 1950s liberalism as a cleverly updated version of the New Deal and insists that classical liberal-conservative battlelines endured past midcentury. According to this theory, liberal activists eventually achieved a political revival by mixing revamped proposals and different spokesmen with old values. In contrast, other authors dismiss the notion of a continuing ideology rooted in the Great Depression. Instead they locate the essence of 1950s liberalism in a national consensus related to the era of prosperity and global involvement after 1945. Whereas the orthodox school stresses traditional political conflict as a prelude to renewed reform in the 1960s, the revisionist persuasion sees liberal cold war militancy as a briefly attractive but otherwise misplaced outgrowth of the 1950s consensus that had disastrous consequences in the following decade.