WHEN PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER decided in 1979 to invite a group of intellectuals to the White House to advise him on how to save his floundering presidency, Daniel Bell was one of the first on his list. Bell warned Carter that after a decade of culture war, mass protest, and economic crisis, a “religious revival” might radically alter the country’s politics. He urged the president to communicate a bold new moral vision to reassure the American public, and thereby helped inspire Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech. Carter’s call to confront a “crisis of the American spirit” ultimately fell flat, and was widely mocked by the conservatives who rose to power with Ronald Reagan’s victory the following year—decisively shifting American politics to the right.
A distinguished sociologist and public intellectual, Bell helped to define the Cold War American political center over the course of a long career, for which his encounter with Carter might serve as an allegory: He was highly influential, and yet his ideas frequently backfired. Bell, who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday this year, was both valued for and stymied by his political restlessness. When asked to define his beliefs, he would describe himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” Yet Bell was never quite content to be a member of any of these political families.
Raised in the left-wing Jewish circles of 1930s New York, Bell gradually lost his faith in radical class politics. He became a central figure in postwar networks of liberal anti-communist intellectuals, but came to question the precepts of Cold War liberalism—particularly its triumphalist notion of progress—as well. Shaken by the political revolts of the 1960s, he determined that the booming postwar consumer economy he had once celebrated had in fact produced cultural discontent and youth revolts against established authority; in 1976 he published a book on the subject, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, that was widely admired among members of his milieu who shared his increasing pessimism. Yet here he once again parted ways with his many of his peers: while compatriots like Irving Kristol swung to the right, and indeed adopted The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as a founding text of neoconservatism, Bell remained attached to the ideal of social democracy. He refused to follow these new conservatives into the Reagan coalition—though he too disliked the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”-obsessed counterculture, he could not stomach an alliance with Christian fundamentalists and others far to his right.