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H.W. Brands, The strange death of American liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xiii + 192 pp., $22.50 (cloth).
If American liberalism is dead, what killed it? The question, to be sure, lies at or near the crux of current political debate, particularly in the wake of this year's remarkable midterm election cycle and the identity crisis facing beleaguered Democrats. However, partisan politics may explain only a small part of the story. For H.W. Brands, liberalism's much-bally-hooed demise resulted not from a precise ideological shift among Americans, but from their historical adherence to that "-ism" nearest the heart of our national maturation - pragmatism. In the Brands model, great men such as Roosevelt and Johnson and great programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society did not, as commonly believed, engineer the liberal approach upon which policies (and votes) played out for most of the twentieth century. Instead, the author argues that foreign threats, not domestic comforts, propelled forward postwar liberalism in...