Martin Peretz is worried that liberalism has no future in America. Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic, Peretz writes of his concern in a major article published in the 90th anniversary issue of his magazine. "Not Much Left," is a cry from the heart, offered by Peretz to what remains of a liberal movement in America.
Peretz begins by arguing that, in the 1960s, it was conservatism that was devoid of ideas and facing a dismal political future. In the words of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatism was "bookless" and intellectually bankrupt. Now, Peretz argues it is liberalism "that is now bookless and dying." Peretz has good reason for alarm. He--and the magazine for which he writes--represent a form of liberalism that is now largely without constituency in the Democratic Party and the political left. Peretz longs for the day when the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and the liberalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt ruled the left and served as a fertile greenhouse for the incubation of potent political ideas.
The liberalism of the Roosevelts bears little resemblance to the ideological radicalism of today's political left. Peretz's hero is the Protestant theologian Reinhold R. Niebuhr, whose frank recognition of the structural realities of human sinfulness shaped liberalism's view of both human nature and the political prospect. Now, Peretz laments that Niebuhr "is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened." Peretz wonders if Niebuhr's understanding of sin is the essential problem. "However gripping his illuminations, however much they may have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism," Peretz explains.
As he sees it, this dismissal of Niebuhr and the classical liberal legacy would be bad enough. Nevertheless, no one has come along to fill the vacuum left by Niebuhr's absence. "Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalog of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country."
The Democratic Party, once unified behind FDR and his liberal tradition, is now a collection of special interest groups. Liberalism finds itself in a defensive posture in the wider political culture, and the liberals fail because "they have not yet conducted an honest internal conversation that assumes from the start that the very nature of the country has changed since the great New Deal reckoning."
This is an important argument, and liberals and conservatives alike should take Peretz seriously. Here is a liberal in the classic tradition who wonders what has happened to the movement he has loved and served so long. Looking back over the 20th century, he recognizes that liberalism once ruled the day and that the movement made significant gains, largely through the leadership of political leaders like FDR and Lyndon Baines Johnson. The think tanks of liberalism were once the fountains from which the dominant political ideas flowed.
In those days, liberalism was defined as a movement that intended to protect the powerless from the powerful. In this context, the liberal instinct favored the individual worker and consumer who, they reasoned, was in danger of being crushed by massive corporate enterprises. To many Americans, the New Deal made sense because government interventionism appeared to be the only root to recovery in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution.
As Peretz recognizes, the world has changed since FDR and LBJ. In one sense, liberalism fell victim to its own success. The concept of government interventionism won the day throughout most of the 20th century, leading to the development of the regulatory state and its twin, the welfare state. Liberals argued that government involvement in the economy--through regulation and control--would limit the oppressive growth of corporate structures at the expense of common Americans.
