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Loving Liberals
‘The Cause,’ by Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson
By JEFF SHESOL
Published: May 18, 2012
The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained
in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure,
finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In
the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have
acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone
to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance,
much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their
antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the
prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that
dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.
Illustration by Oliver Munday
THE CAUSE
The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to
Barack Obama
By Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson
561 pp. Viking.
$32.95.
Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008,
this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re
Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters,
Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism,
socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,”
written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a
companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the
present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments,
Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”)
Much of this unfolds, in “The Cause,” by inference, or
as interstitial material between character sketches. This is less a book about
liberalism than it is a book about liberals — stretch limousines full of them,
fleet after fleet. Liberalism, Alterman suggests, is a movement of “many
different faces,” and his book, at times, appears intent on showing them all:
faces of intellectuals, faces of politicians, faces of protesters and
filmmakers, philosophers and diplomats.
There is an indiscriminate quality to Alterman’s
attentions, which too often seem to reflect his personal passions rather than a
careful weighing of a figure’s historical significance. Thus Oliver Stone gets
just as much ink as Walter Reuther, a towering figure in the history of
organized labor; Bruce Springsteen, about whom Alterman has written a previous
book, receives more airtime than Hubert Humphrey and Thurgood Marshall combined.
(Bob Dylan, meanwhile, merits only passing mentions.) Alterman’s choices can be
interesting and even brave; one has to admire his willingness to include
intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and Richard Rorty in a work of popular
history. But in such a crowded field, their relative influence — and anyone
else’s — becomes impossible to assess.
The net effect is that of a Pointillist painting,
though when you step back from the canvas and squint a little, the dots fail to
cohere into a discernible image. As “The Cause” smash-cuts from Henry Wallace to
Richard Hofstadter and from Gloria Steinem to Gary Hart, Alterman pauses all too
infrequently to reflect on the “cause” — or causes, or ideals — that connects
them. This, to be fair, is a challenge, one compounded by liberal schisms and by
the nebulousness of much liberal thought; Trilling, as Alterman notes, described
liberalism as “a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine.”
Liberals, quite unlike leftist radicals or conservative ideologues, tend to
reject dogma and theory in favor of “bold, persistent experimentation,” as
Roosevelt called it, or, put another way, pragmatism grounded in enduring, yet
evolving, values. It is hard to dissect a gestalt.
Still, that is the historian’s role, and other books —
most notably, in recent years, by Alan Brinkley and Paul Starr — have brought
sharpness to the picture that “The Cause” renders blurry. Despite its author’s
best intentions, “The Cause” makes it harder, not easier, to understand how
liberals ever mustered the intellectual clarity or collective resolve not only
to govern but to achieve what they manifestly did during their long reign at the
vital center of our national life — or even, in a more qualified way, during the
two decades since Bill Clinton promised to “put people first.”
As “The Cause” proceeds toward the present day,
Alterman reveals a revanchist streak. Urging liberals to “recapture” Roosevelt’s
“militant and optimistic spirit,” he casts a cold eye on virtually every effort,
over the past 30 years, to do just that. The intimation of “The Cause” — of both
its title and its tone — is that there really is a true faith against which
subsequent vintages of liberalism must be judged (and found wanting).
“Neoliberals” like Gary Hart are dismissed as callow and cold; “New Democrats”
of the late 1980s are overly in thrall to their corporate donors; and Michael
Dukakis, poor Michael Dukakis, is not merely a loser but “no liberal at all —
just a sign of the desperate times into which American liberalism had fallen in
its apparently endless quest for solid political ground.” As for Clinton, Jimmy
Carter and Barack Obama, the Democrats who have been elected president since
Johnson, “The Cause” flays all three for yielding to “political pressures” and
becoming “far more conservative” as president than as presidential candidates.
Each of these points is arguable in its own right. But
taken together, they reflect a contempt for compromise. Without proposing an
alternative path, Alterman leaves liberals in a familiar dead end. This,
regrettably, is the sort of peremptory judgment that holds liberalism back (just
as the conservative equivalent, with its fixation on Reagan-era doctrines and
its incantation of old pieties, binds the Republican Party in a kind of
intellectual aspic).
“The work goes on, the cause endures,” said Robert
Kennedy’s brother Edward — one of the heroes of this book — in his stirring
speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. But if it really is to
endure, then the means of advancing it will surely have to evolve, taking full
account of unpleasant realities: the scale of the debt; the depth of public
suspicion not just of government but of most institutions; courts that have
grown hostile to claims of civil rights and assertions of governmental power;
and the tenuousness of our commitment to the common good. The work, indeed, goes
on.
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