One of the most noteworthy events of the last 30 years in American politics has been the collapse of liberalism as a prominent force. The catastrophic events of 1968 -- the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the summer urban rioting, the Vietnam escalation, and the street battles outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago -- sundered the New Deal coalition once and for all, setting the stage for a revival of conservatism and the Republican party. The landslide 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency (and the subsequent impotence of political liberalism) was a tribute to Reagan's ability to appeal to socially traditional blue-collar workers who had been alienated by the radical changes to Democratic party positions and procedures pushed through by Senator George McGovern and his supporters during the early 1970s.

In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Alan Brinkley has compiled a series of 17 disparate essays which examine from various angles the questions, "What is liberalism? What has happened to it?" [pg. ix]. Brinkley's prior work has focused on the Franklin Roosevelt administration (his 1982 book Voices of Protest remains highly acclaimed), and that focus is reflected in his essays, half of which deal mainly with the period before 1945.

This pre-1945 focus is both the strength and the weakness of the book. On the positive side, these essays provide valuable insights into the bases of the later troubles of liberalism. "The New Deal and Southern Politics" is a fascinating, well-written survey of the rifts between Northern and Southern Democrats during the 1930s. "The New Deal Experiments" and "The Late New Deal and the Idea of the State" outline the disagreements over the meaning of the New Deal; disagreements which prefigured the fatal split of liberalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Brinkley covers the triumphs and defeats of liberalism (and the reasons for each) between 1914 and 1945 thoroughly and usefully.

Liberalism and Its Discontents becomes frustratingly sketchy, however, on the subject of what happened to liberalism in the late 1960s and beyond. "The Therapeutic Radicalism of the New Left" and "Allard Lowenstein and the Ordeal of Liberalism" are all that Brinkley gives us, and these tightly focused essays, well-written though they are, give little indication of the larger picture. Brinkley would have done well to omit "Taming of the Political Convention" and "The Passions of Oral Roberts" and substitute in their place two or three new articles about the effect that the lives, actions, and political movements of leaders such as Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mario Cuomo, and Jesse Jackson had on both liberals and their various oppositions. "The Passions of Oral Roberts" and "The Problem of American Conservatism," taken on their own, are both informative about their respective subjects, but they do not address their subjects' discontent with liberalism as clearly as they should.

Liberalism and Its Discontents is excellent reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations laid for modern liberalism by the Progressive movement and the New Deal. After those essays, unfortunately, the book loses coherence and depth, becoming a scattershot review of the last 50 years.

Review posted: 16 June 1998

Revised: 31 July 1999