Liberal ascendancy as cohesion and settlement
The 1950s was a period that witnessed a marked rise in the United States’ perception
of itself as a quintessentially settled social order which had experienced the
transformational epochs of the 1930s and the 1940s to emerge as the paramount
embodiment of progress and modernity. This sense of a resolved state of advanced
development found its rationale in what was widely regarded as a dominant
American paradigm of liberal supremacy. In the Cold War intensity of ideational
mobilization and social integration, the United States’ traditional attachments to
liberal principles were fused with the notion of a contemporary liberal settlement
on the contours of post-Second World War politics. The aggregate result was widely
described as tantamount to an ‘end of ideology’. This theme received various
expressions. To some, it represented the contemporary dominance of centre-ground
politics in which the liberal reforms of the 1930s and 1940s were assimilated into a
national framework. For many, this was taken to represent an affirmation that the
United States had acquired the position of an assured centrist alternative to the
extremes of both the left and the right in the international realm. Others saw the
emergence of American supremacy as a social model and a global superpower more
as a continuation of a deeper set of historical and social processes.^2
Irrespective of the interpretive nuances, the dominant narrative of the American
condition during this era was almost invariably conceived in terms of a transcendent
liberalism. Within this construct, the problems of industrialization and modern-
ization had been effectively resolved. The only disputes that remained were those
that could be negotiated to a satisfactory solution through the use of technical
adjustments. In 1951, Lionel Trilling had reached the conclusion that liberalism was
so dominant that it had become essentially ‘the sole intellectual tradition’^3 within
the United States. Ten years later, J.K. Galbraith was equally confident that the
mainstream had remained firmly in the liberal sector: ‘These, without doubt, are
the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself’.^4 Conservatism
was widely seen to be a reactive impulse confined to the margins of American
political debate.
The deeper significance of the assertion that liberalism possessed a ubiquitous
presence in the United States was largely defined by the exponents of consensus
history. They claimed that the circumstances of American development had
bestowed upon the country a unified experience which was characterized by the
indigenous presence of a particular value structure. The avowed unity and continuity
of American history meant that values in the United States were accepted as being
in ‘some way or other automatically defined: given by certain facts of geography or
history peculiar to us’.^5 Byfar the most influential of these consensus historians was
Louis Hartz. The Liberal Tradition in America^6 not only became one of the most cited
books on US political culture but was seen in its own right as a reflection of Cold
War precepts about the challenges confronting the US and in particular the need
for the country to comprehend its own past and its current identity.
In what John P. Diggins described as a ‘brilliant analysis of the relationship
between social structure and ideology’,^7 Hartz rationalized American history and its
36 Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment