individuals by autocratic regimes like Germany, Italy, Japan and the USSR. Now
elements of American liberalism in the 1950s were increasingly concerned that these
dynamics could well be replicated within the confines of liberal democracy. This
concern over the prospect of unstable structures of mass opinion was reflected in
the work of such contemporary intellectual figures as Richard Hofstadter, Walter
Lippmann, Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald and
Reinhold Niebuhr. The destruction, cruelty and slaughter of the Second World
War gave pause for sceptical thought. As Alan Brinkley notes, liberal triumph
coincided conspicuously with liberal dismay:
Like the fear of the state, with which it was closely associated, it reinforced a
sense of caution and restraint in liberal thinking; a suspicion of ideology,
a commitment to pragmatism, a wariness about moving too quickly to
encourage or embrace spontaneous popular movements; indeed, a conviction
that one of the purposes of politics was to defend the state against popular
movements and their potentially dangerous effects.^25The concurrence of confidence and critique generated an ambiguous mix that could
see liberals both disavowing the grand pretensions of a global prospectus whilst
supporting a moral imperative to confront communism as an illegitimate world
power – at the same time as they supported the notion of the United States as an
international model and reference point of modernity while critiquing its social and
economic structures as worthy candidates for progressive reform.
In terms of foreign policy and its domestic significance, American liberals were
continually under strain from the need to respond to two primary sources of tension.
First, was the need to defend themselves against the charge of being ‘soft on
communism’ mainly because of their various associations with left-wing causes and
organizations before and during the war. Their agenda of social and economic
reform was strongly grounded in systemic critiques that required a response of
governmental activism in the advance of a positive state, whilst retaining a sensitivity
towards civil liberties at the same time. The second source of tension was derived
from liberals’ long-term discomfort over the energies and purposes of American
populism. The insurgent properties of populist politics could induce volatile
movements of opinion that could attach themselves in unpredictable and damaging
ways to an eclectic range of public issues. Because these accelerated surges of mass
protest were fuelled by notions of exclusion and cultural disinheritance, they tended
to operate outside the normal channels of political mediation.^26 To that extent, they
could be seen as raw, unrefined and confrontational – with a disposition towards
sentiments of anti-politics, to simplistic analyses and agendas, and usually to negative
and often intolerant positions. In the 1950s, liberals often felt compelled to meet the
moral energy and objections of populists by an uneasy set of accommodations.
Both sources of tension, for example, were dramatically combined in the phe-
nomenon of McCarthyism. The febrile atmosphere had led many liberals to switch
into a markedly more hostile attitude towards the communist threat and into a more
44 Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment