John Lukacs: When Did Liberalism Become a Dirty Word?

John Lukacs, in the Chronicle of higher Ed (subscribers only) (12-6-04):

The history of politics -- more, the history of human thinking -- is the history of words. Consider what happened to the word"liberal" in the United States.

It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans. Confident that a large majority of the American people have come to regard, see, or hear the adjective"liberal" as definitely pejorative, the president of the United States found it proper and useful to affix it to his opponent in campaign speeches day after day, across this vast country. Meanwhile, his opponent thought it best not to identify himself as a liberal.

This accusatory label is reminiscent of the habit of some political speakers 50 years ago who declared that their opponents were"Communists" or"Communist sympathizers." Such a similarity, while not precise, is at least interesting, since the increasingly rapid fall of the popularity of"liberal" began just about 50 years ago. It may be worth tracing the curve of its descent.

In the year 1951 no less a demagogue than Sen. Joseph McCarthy still used"liberal" positively, at least on one occasion. In a speech he accused Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being part of"a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men." In that very year Sen. Robert A. Taft, idol of recent American conservatives, thought it necessary to state that he was not a conservative but"an old-fashioned liberal."

But lo and behold: By 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower would declare that he was a" conservative." A tectonic shift in the development of American thinking, and of politics, had begun.

I put"thinking" before"politics," since the history of the latter is often a slow -- and belated -- consequence of what is happening under the surface of publicity. In 1964 Barry M. Goldwater, the first outspokenly conservative candidate for the presidency, lost in a landslide. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, a self-designated conservative, won in a landslide. Thereafter, the congealing of the meaning of"liberal" as something bad and anti-American became one mark of the recent presidential campaign. But what was happening was something well beneath the verbal habits of electioneering.

"Conservative" was a word (and a political idea) that Americans eschewed for a long time. During the 19th century much of the political history of Europe and, in particular, of Britain was marked by the debate between conservatives and liberals. In the United States that was not so.

There was no Conservative Party in the United States. There were a few American authors and thinkers in whose writings and statements we can detect properly conservative elements; but they, too, with practically no exceptions, shied away from affixing the conservative label to themselves. Moreover, again practically with few or no exceptions, Americans believed in the concept of"progress"; indeed, it may be said that the more liberal a man was, the more he believed in and advocated progress. That American configuration, seen in politics in the association of liberalism and progressivism, prevailed until about the middle of the 20th century. In 1950 the cultural critic Lionel Trilling declared that the only dominant philosophy in America was the liberal one. In 1955 a Harvard professor, Louis Hartz, wrote that the perennial and prevalent American creed was liberalism.

They were wrong. Those reputable academics pursued the obvious (to quote Oscar Wilde)"with the enthusiasm of shortsighted detectives." Right before their eyes antiliberalism was rising fast. Within a few years antiliberals would adopt" conservative" as an adjective; they began to affix it to themselves proudly (and often imprecisely, but that is not the point). Symptoms and examples would fill a large book. Consider just one: In 1955 the first self-described" conservative" weekly of opinion appeared, The National Review, edited and directed by William F. Buckley Jr. It had few subscribers. Twenty-five years later its circulation was larger than that of The Nation and The New Republic combined. Its enthusiastic readership was the vanguard of the massive popular wave that propelled Ronald Reagan to power....