Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

When Progressives Were on the March

January/February 2020 171

Union. The schisms waxed and waned

over the next several decades but were

always present in some form. The coming

of the Cold War intensified these con-

flicts, and in the United States, McCar-

thyism took them to new heights—but

they were not simply the invention of

party bosses, or the result of the fbi’s

quest to root out communists, or a

response to the cia’s machinations abroad.

THE FUTURE OF PROGRESSIVISM

For Woloch, the advance of progressive

forces before and during the postwar

moment was mainly a response to the

crises of the Depression and the war, and

the petering out of progressivism once

those crises had passed was predictable.

What is remarkable is that the legacy

of the postwar moment survived the

shifting political winds that followed. It

gave the world a reformed capitalism

that was capable of generating sustained

growth and increased welfare for over

three decades; in so doing, it under-

pinned the political stability of the entire

Cold War era. Even today, when the

growth formula of the postwar era has

been replaced by something vastly

different and when political stability and

the advance of democracy are no longer

assured, the major achievements of that

period remain firmly embedded.

Many readers of Woloch’s book will

wonder whether the story he tells has

any bearing on today’s debates over the

future of progressivism. The first thing

they will notice is that the interests and

conditions that boosted the left in the

postwar era appear lacking today. The

global economy is not in depression, and

decades of economic growth have raised

standards of living so that the extreme

poverty of the 1930s is rare, at least in

thorough. The Labour Party and the

trade unions were stronger there than

left-wing parties and unions elsewhere,

and they enjoyed more time to prepare

for taking power. In France, leaders

and parties associated with the defeat at

the hands of Nazi Germany and with

the Vichy government’s collaboration

with the Nazis were also seriously

discredited—indeed, some paid with

their lives. But the left could overcome its

political fragmentation for only so long.

In the United States, the rejection of

the old guard was less total than in the

other two countries. Business elites and

their Republican allies were reasonably

held responsible for the Depression, but

they paid the price for this failure in the

1930s, earlier than did their British and

French counterparts. Big business re-

mained powerful, however, and regained

confidence as the Depression receded

and as corporations were seen to perform

well in the war. Republicans, for their

part, could rely on various local sources

of political strength in rural areas and

among whites. In Congress, their alliance

with conservative southern Democrats

placed strict limits on what progressives

could achieve. Put simply, race mattered

profoundly in the United States.

There is yet another possible cause

for the weakening of progressive forces:

the onset of the Cold War and the rise of

anticommunism, which divided the far

left and the center-left. This is a common

explanation for the derailing of progres-

sivism, but Woloch does not attribute

quite as much importance to it as have

other historians. Instead, his narrative

shows that conflict between sections of the

left stretched back to the 1920s, when

communist and noncommunist parties

first split over support for the Soviet

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