It is no apology on behalf of Communism—which in practice immiserated and murdered millions—to observe that the presence of a live alternative form of political economy held Western economic elites’ feet to the fire, making them willing to accommodate demands (and sometimes actively push) for greater economic and social egalitarianism. In the United States, as Thomas Borstellman and Mary Dudziak have argued, perhaps the biggest effect that the Cold War had on domestic life was in pushing the United States to finally grant de jure civil rights to African-Americans. Undoubtedly, it also affected President Lyndon Johnson’s push to deliver on so-called Great Society programs, which aimed to provide a cradle-to-grave welfare system of the sort that socialists and communists were promising. If systems as inefficient and repressive as those could guarantee such benefits for their citizens, Johnson reasoned, then surely a country as rich and dynamic as the United States ought to be able to do so as well.
Although some U.S. conservatives never fully accepted the principle of redistribution, the Cold War context—that is, the threat posed by the alternative of Communism—meant that from the 1930s through the 1970s, even Republican Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon basically accepted the Keynesian, mixed-economy framework and the support of welfare programs. President Nixon even went so far as to promote a Guaranteed Minimum Income—a program very similar to a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the darling idea of today’s Left. Legislation to introduce such a form of income guarantee was passed in the House of Representatives in 1971 only to die in the Senate, before being eventually abandoned by Nixon himself as the economy soured.
As the Communist alternative retreated, however, the choice in favor of building domestic welfare states in the West became less clear for many on the Right. This retreat did not take place all at once, but rather unfolded progressively in the face of the grim realities of the Communist system. Although the global Left’s political disenchantment with the Soviet Union had begun earlier, widespread disillusionment with the economic appeals of socialism began in earnest only in the 1970s, as the Soviet system’s economic stagnation and the immiseration of Mao’s China became increasingly stark. Even if conservatives and liberals never bought into the false economic promises of Communism, the brute fact of the existence of a socialist alternative meant than some effort had to be made to match the siren song of egalitarianism. As the bloom came off the rose of the centralized planning models, it became safer for conservatives to push further to the Right.