How the US Gave Up On Liberalism
The country is arguably the philosophy’s greatest victory. But “post-liberals” on both left and right are turning away from that inheritance.
Illustration: Harol Bustos for Bloomberg
The great historian of Germany, Fritz Stern, wrote a column in 1988 in the New York Times pointing out that liberalism was both America’s “noblest tradition” and “the best promise of the West.” “Attacks on the L-word debase us all,” he wrote.
The column came in the wake of the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where President Ronald Reagan had volubly denounced the Democrats as being “liberal, liberal, liberal.” Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany and the author of classic books on the rise of the Nazis, including The Politics of Cultural Despair, retorted that the US was, in fact, liberalism’s greatest achievement, just as Nazism was its most terrible negation. Liberalism’s “greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.”