"Still Pack a Bold Punch"

"Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy—not a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatism's peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not."

At Politico, Joshua Zeitz returns to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

But Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at Dissent call for "a break with the anxieties that drove Cold War liberalism."

"A Politico-Cultural Counterpart to the Marshall Plan"

"Despite the genuine threat to attendees' physical safety (the Soviets had kidnapped and 'disappeared' several critics from Berlin's Western sector), the event attracted such luminaries as A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Herbert Read, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carlo Schmid, as well as five honorary presidents–the eminent philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain. Delegates also included 'the cream of the anti-Stalinist left,' such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, some of whom had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Indeed, one of the forum's organizers, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had been incarcerated by both Hitler and Stalin."

At The American Interest, Michael Allen and David E. Lowe look back to the 1950 creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Vital Centrists

"It was one thing to defend the American Nazi Party's right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1977, when the liberal establishment and mainstream media were still intact and American Nazi Party was a marginal fringe group. The group was offensive, but neither its actions nor its ideas posed a threat to the political or social order, which was stable. The situation is different today, with an erratic President Trump in the White House, elites in disarray and white nationalism on the rise. In this situation, and against this foe, it may be worth remembering that our constitutional rights are not unchanging abstract principles, but, as Hook and Schlesinger argued, always evaluated in terms of their consequences for society at any given historical moment.
"At the same time, however, colleges and universities need to recognize that their liberal critics of, say, diversity policies or Title IX excesses are not political foes and should not be subject to censorship or censure. One reason the right has been able to so effectively exploit 'free speech' is because campuses have become places where the free exchange of ideas has been curbed by peer pressure, self-policing and a self-righteous call-out culture, as described by Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Chait and Mark Lilla. Until university presidents offer real leadership in reconciling the liberal critique of 'identity politics' with a new generation of diverse students, faculty and staff for whom such politics represent progress, they will be unable to protect their institutions from conservative attacks."

Jennifer Delton at The Washington Post looks to liberal anticommunists of the 1940s as models for combatting reactionary conservatives today.

"Expressive, Not Persuasive"

"Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters—men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt's speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear—freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for 'everyone in the world'—I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are."

Mark Lilla in The New York Times argues that "the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end." (Ross Douthat reacts, as does Lovia Gyarkye at The New Republic.)

Emmett Rensin at Vox, back in April, criticizes the "smug style" of liberalism.

And Kyle Scott Clauss at Boston reports on remarks by Bernie Sanders in which Sanders argues that to stop Donald Trump, Democrats "have to do it in a way that we have never done it before, and it's essentially reaching out to people who do not or may not agree with us on every single issue." (Graham Vyse at The New Republic reacts, and Max B. Sawicky at The Baffler defends Sanders.)

Michelle Goldberg in Slate joins the debate as well. (And she refers to Ellen Willis's essay "Identity Crisis" from 1992, republished by n+1 magazine.). Jamelle Bouie calls for a "renewed Rainbow Coalition."

Eric Levtiz at New York tries to bring everything together.

"American History Is Returning Full Circle"

"Downplaying or ignoring Jackson's conservatism, while conjuring a liberal ideology on his behalf, served a partisan interest for 20th-century Democrats. But there are also honest reasons that may have led historians like Schlesinger astray. From the standpoint of the 20th century, the United States had evolved into a two-party system in which the more liberal of the two parties had its strongest base in the Deep South. As this felt to many to be the inevitable direction of American politics, it seemed natural to peer back at the 19th century and see those coalitions in protean form. Despite its conservative views on race and suspicion of Washington, the white South probably appeared like a plausible base for the development of a liberal party.
"From the standpoint of the 21st century, things look very different."


Jonathan Chait in New York argues that Andrew Jackson "is, clearly, the father of the modern Republican Party."

The Way We're Droppin' Hamiltons

"What to make of all this? Well, people are complicated, and don't always line up along the conventional left-right axis. Hamilton has an especially unstable background, especially compared to Virginia planters who dominated the founding generation: Born in the British West Indies and orphaned, Hamilton had an early history so sketchy, we're not even sure of his birth year.
"But part of it is that we've gotten Hamilton wrong over the decades, perhaps thanks to high school history classes that framed Hamilton as the father of American conservatism and Jefferson as the founder of U.S. liberalism, with Andrew Jackson as his inheritor."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at reactions to the announced elimination of Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill.


Ron Chernow at Politico pleads to keep Hamilton on the bill.


Binyamin Appelbaum and Josh Barro at The New York Times discuss the issue.


And David Greenberg at Politico defends Andrew Jackson.

"Something Meritorious—Historical and Literary—Was Going On in the Writing of American History During the Mid- to Late Twentieth Century"

"Along with Richard Hofstadter, Schlesinger and Woodward were among the most influential and certainly the best-known members of an extraordinary generation of American historians, by which I mean historians of the United States and its colonial antecedents. Born between 1900 and 1920, the cohort included, among other luminaries, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin, John Higham, Edmund S. Morgan, David M. Potter, and Kenneth M. Stampp. They shared neither a common subject inside American history nor a single point of view. All of them wrestled creatively with the legacy of the so-called Progressive historians who preceded them, including Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, and 
Frederick Jackson Turner. That wrestling opened lines of investigation and reinterpretation that changed fundamentally the way historians and their readers think about 
the American past."


In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and The Letters of C. Vann Woodward .