Many historians have explored how totalitarianism chastened liberal thought and pushed it toward the political center. Moyn adds to this conversation by showing how some liberal thinkers were already altering their own tradition from within before forces like the Vietnam War and economic stagnation undermined the liberal consensus. Neoconservatism and free-market neoliberalism filled the gap and ushered in a more unequal society and a more conservative political landscape.
The Need for Niebuhr
To reverse these setbacks, Moyn hopes that liberals will rediscover strains of their history that emphasize the power of reason to positively shape human affairs, individual emancipation, and the importance of mass political action for a healthy democracy. This challenge merits consideration, but his dismissal of Cold War liberalism as a “catastrophe” is overstated, and carries risks of its own. As Cold War liberalism’s defenders have argued, there is a lot worth salvaging in this tradition, especially its ethos of restraint, caution, and humility. This tradition is particularly valuable for rethinking the premises of U.S. foreign policy after decades of liberal fantasies and overreach.
No figure better elucidated than the influential Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Moyn omitted Niebuhr from this book in order to highlight less-known but equally interesting figures. Dodging Niebuhr, however, weakens the case against Cold War liberalism as a whole by avoiding its most profound thinker.
Niebuhr not only exemplified the strengths of Cold War liberal thought but demonstrated that its appreciation of human weaknesses was no obstacle to positive action. In his early career, he aligned with the progressive Social Gospel movement, but Niebuhr subsequently moved away from this optimistic creed beginning in the 1920s. He built a philosophy that he called “Christian realism” on the premise that the selfishness, pride, and lust for power embedded in human nature placed limits on idealistic plans to improve the world.
For Niebuhr, nothing exemplified this tendency more than the Soviet Union, which in 1952 he described as “a system which has, demonically, distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise of a higher justice.” Communism’s cruelty derived from “the fanatic certainty that it knows the end toward which history must move; and by its consequent readiness to sacrifice every value of life for the achievement of this end.” Recognizing the Soviet system’s inhumanity, Niebuhr and many of his liberal contemporaries became committed if critical Cold Warriors.
Communism, for Niebuhr, was particularly dangerous because it was so appealing to liberals. Niebuhr lamented that prewar liberalism was “too enamored of the function of reason in life,” naive about human nature, and overly sympathetic to the Soviet idea that life could be managed by centralized, rational planning. Furthermore, he believed that idealists like Henry Wallace and many liberal Protestants needed to recognize that institutions like the United Nations and a conciliatory foreign policy could not defend the free world from aggressors like the Nazis or Soviets.