The Anti-Liberal
Last spring, in The New Statesman, Samuel Moyn reviewed Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s massive new history of the revolutions of 1848. Like most everything Moyn writes, the review was witty, insightful, and provocative — another illustration of why Moyn has become one of the most important left intellectuals in the United States today. One thing about it, though, puzzled me. In the Carlyle lectures that he delivered at Oxford the year before, now published as Liberalism Against Itself, Moyn argued that liberalism was, before the Cold War, “emancipatory and futuristic.” The Cold War, however, “left the liberal tradition unrecognizable and in ruins.” But in the New Statesman review, Moyn claimed that liberals had already lost their way a century long before the Cold War. “One lesson of Christopher Clark’s magnificent new narrative of 1848,” he wrote, “is a reminder of just how quickly liberals switched sides…. Because of how they lived through 1848, liberals betrayed their erstwhile radical allies to join the counter-revolutionary forces once again — which is more or less where they remain today.”
Perhaps the contradiction is not so puzzling. Much like an older generation of historians who seemed to glimpse the “rise of the middle classes” in every century from the thirteenth to the twentieth, Samuel Moyn today seems to find liberals betraying their own traditions wherever he looks. Indeed, this supposed betrayal now forms the leitmotif of his influential writing.
This was not always the case. The work that first made Moyn’s reputation as a public intellectual, The Last Utopia, in 2010, included many suggestive criticisms of liberalism, but was a subtle and impressive study that started many more conversations than it closed off. Yet in a subsequent series of books, from Christian Human Rights (2015), through Not Enough (2018) and Humane (2021), and most recently Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and The Making of Our times, Moyn has used his considerable talents to make increasingly strident and moralistic critiques of contemporary liberalism, and to warn his fellow progressives away from any compromises with their “Cold War liberal” rivals. In particular, as he has argued in a steady stream of opinion pieces, his fellow progressives should resist the temptation to close ranks with the liberals against the populist right and Donald Trump. Liberalism has become the principal enemy, even as his definition of it has come to seem a figure of increasingly crinkly straw.
Moyn does offer reasons for his critical focus. As he now tells the story, the liberalism born of the Enlightenment and refashioned in the nineteenth century was capacious and ambitious, looking to improve the human condition, both materially and spiritually; and not merely to protect individual liberties. It was not opposed to socialism; in fact, it embraced many elements of socialism. But that admirable liberalism has been repeatedly undermined by backsliding moderates who, out of fear that overly ambitious and utopian attempts to better the human condition might degenerate into tyranny, stripped it of its most attractive features, redefined it in narrow individualistic terms, and all too readily allied with reactionaries and imperialists. The logical twin endpoints of these tendencies, in Moyn’s view, are neoconservatism and neoliberalism: aggressive American empire and raging inequalities. His account of liberalism is a tale of villains more than heroes.
This indictment is sharp, and it is persuasive in certain respects, but it is also grounded in several very questionable assumptions. Politically, Moyn assumes that without the liberals’ “betrayal,” radicals and progressives would have managed to forge far more successful political movements, perhaps forestalling the triumph of imperial reaction after 1848, or of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. Historically, Moyn reads the ultimate failure of Soviet Communism back into its seventy-year lifespan, as if its collapse was inevitable, and therefore assumes that during the Cold War the liberals “overreacted,” both in their fears of the Soviet challenge and in their larger concerns as to the pathological directions that progressive ideology can take.
In addition, Moyn, an intellectual historian, not only attributes rather more influence to intellectuals than they may deserve, but also tends to engage with the history of actual liberal politics only when it supports his thesis. He has had a great deal to say about foreign policy and warfare, but much less about domestic policy, in the United States and elsewhere. He has therefore largely sidestepped the inconvenient fact that at the height of the Cold War, at the very moment when, according to his work, “Cold War liberals” had retreated from liberalism’s noblest ambitions, liberal politics marked some of its greatest American successes: most notably, civil rights legislation and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The key moment for the ascent of neoconservatism and neoliberalism in both the United States and Britain came in the 1970’s, long after the start of the Cold War, and had just as much to do with the perceived failures of the modern welfare state as with the Soviet threat.
Finally, Moyn has increasingly tended to reify liberalism, to treat it as a coherent and unified and powerful “tradition,” almost as a kind of singular political party, rather than as what it was, and still is: an often inchoate, even contradictory collection of thinkers and political movements. Doing so allows him to argue, repeatedly, that “liberalism” as a whole could make mistakes, betray its own past, and still somehow drag followers along while foreclosing other possibilities. As he put it bluntly in a recent interview, “Cold War liberalism… destroyed the potential of liberalism to be more believable and uplifting.” If only “liberalism” had not turned in this disastrous direction, Moyn claims, it could have defended and extended progressive achievements and the welfare state — weren’t they themselves achievements of American liberalism? — rather than leaving these things vulnerable to the sinister forces of market fundamentalism. Whether better liberal arguments would have actually done much to alter the directions that the world’s political economy has taken over the past half century is a question that he largely leaves unasked.
Moyn today presents himself as a genuine Enlightenment liberal seeking to redeem the movement’s potential and to steer it back onto the path that it too easily abandoned. The assumptions he makes, however, allow him to blame the progressive left’s modern failures principally on its liberal opponents rather than on its own mistakes and misconceptions and the shifts it has made away from agendas that have a hope of rallying a majority of voters. Not surprisingly, this is a line of argument that has proven highly attractive to his ideological allies, but at the cost of helping to make serious introspection on their part unnecessary. They do not need to ask why they themselves have not produced an alternative brand of liberalism that might challenge the Cold War variety for intellectual ambition and rigor, and also enjoy broad electoral support. Moyn’s is a line of argument that also, in the end, fails to acknowledge just how difficult it is to improve the human condition in our fallen world, and how easily the path of perfection can turn astray, towards horror.
At the start it was not clear that Moyn’s work would take such a turn. After receiving both a doctorate in history and a law degree, he first made a scholarly reputation with a splendid study of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and with essays on French social and political theory (especially the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, a major influence on his thought). His polemical side came out mostly in occasional pieces, notably his sharp and witty book reviews for The Nation. In one of those, in 2007, he took aim at contemporary human rights politics, calling them a recently invented “antipolitics” and arguing that “human rights arose on the ruins of revolution, not as its descendant.”
Three years later Moyn published a book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which elaborated on these ideas, but in a careful and sometimes even oblique manner. In it, he sought to recast both the historical and political understandings of human rights. Historically, where most scholars had given rights doctrines a pedigree stretching back to the Enlightenment or even further, Moyn stressed discontinuity, and the importance of one recent decade in particular: the 1970s, when “the moral world of Westerners shifted.” Until this period, he argued, rights had had little meaning outside the “essential crucible” of individual states. Only with citizenship in a state did people gain what Hannah Arendt had called “the right to have rights.” The idea of human rights independent from states, enshrined in international law and enforceable across borders, only emerged with salience after the end of European overseas empires and with the waning of the Cold War. Politically, Moyn saw the resulting “last utopia” of human rights as an alluring but ultimately unsatisfactory substitute for the more robust left-wing utopias that had preceded it. He worried that the contemporary rights movement had been “hobbled by its formulation of claims as individual entitlements.” Was the language of human rights the best one in which to address issues of global immiseration? Should such a limited program be invested with such passionate, utopian hopes? Moyn had his doubts.
“Liberalism” did not appear in the index to The Last Utopia, but it had an important presence in the book nonetheless. To be sure, the romantic utopianism that Moyn attributed to the architects of contemporary international human rights politics distinguished them from the hard-headed, disillusioned “Cold War liberals” whom he would later criticize in Liberalism Against Itself. But in the United States, the most prominent of these architects were liberal Democratic politicians such as Jimmy Carter. Discussing the relationship between human rights doctrines and decolonization, Moyn wrote that “the loss of empire allowed for the reclamation of liberalism, including rights talk, shorn of its depressing earlier entanglements with oppression and violence abroad” (emphasis mine). And his suggestion that human rights advocates downplayed social and economic rights echoed critiques that socialists had made of liberals since the days of Karl Marx.
The Last Utopia already employed a style of intellectual history that focused on the way different currents of ideas competed with and displaced each other, rather than placing these ideas in a broader political context. The book spent relatively little time asking what human rights activism since the 1970’s had actually accomplished. Moyn instead concentrated on what had made it successful as a “motivating ideology.” And so, while he admitted that human rights “provided a potent antitotalitarian weapon,” he adduced figures such as Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel more to trace the evolution of their ideas than to assess their role in the collapse of communism.
This way of telling the story gave Moyn a way to explain the failures of left-wing movements in the late twentieth century without dwelling on the crimes and the tragedies of communism. If so many on the left had succumbed to the siren song of human rights, he suggested, it was because, in the 1970s, the alternatives — for instance, Eurocommunism or varieties of French gauchisme — amounted to pallid, unattractive “cul-de-sacs.” Discussing the French “new philosopher” André Glucksmann’s move away from the far left, Moyn wrote that his “hatred of the Soviet state soon led him to indictments of politics per se.” Left largely unsaid were the reasons for Glucksmann’s entirely justified hatred, or any indication that the Soviet Union represented a terrible cautionary tale: a dreadful example of what can happen when overwhelming state power is placed in the service of originally utopian goals.
But overall, The Last Utopia remained ambivalent about human rights doctrines, and left itself open to varying ideological interpretations. The conservative political scientist Samuel Goldman praised it in The New Criterion, while in The New Left Review the historian Robin Blackburn blasted Moyn for downplaying the Clinton administration’s use of human rights rhetoric to justify interventions in the former Yugoslavia. Many other reviewers focused entirely on Moyn’s historical thesis, and did not engage with his political arguments at all.
In his next two books Moyn did much to sharpen and clarify his political stance, even while continuing to concentrate on the story of human rights. In Christian Human Rights, he traced the modern understanding of the subject back to Catholic thinkers of the mid-twentieth century. The book was deeply researched, treating intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain with sensitivity, and it had illuminating things to say about how Catholic thinkers developed concepts of human dignity in response to the rise of totalitarian regimes. But Moyn spelled out his overall thesis quite bluntly: “It is equally if not more viable to regard human rights as a project of the Christian right, not the secular left.” In other words, not only was human rights activism an ultimately unsatisfactory substitute for more robust progressive policies; its origins lay in an unexpected and unfortunate convergence between well-meaning liberals and conservative, even reactionary Christian thinkers. This was an interpretation that seemed to embrace contrarianism for its own sake, and implied unconvincingly that the genealogy of ideas irremediably tarred their later iterations.
In Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn then returned to the political arguments he had first sketched out in the The Last Utopia, but ventured far more explicit criticisms of organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for embracing only a minimal conception of social and economic rights. Human rights, he charged, have “become our language for indicating that it is enough, at least to start, for our solidarity with our fellow human beings to remain weak and cheap.” He resisted calling human rights a simple emanation of neoliberal market fundamentalism, but argued that the two coexisted all too easily. In this book, allusions to neoliberalism far outnumbered those to liberalism tout court. Still, Moyn revealingly cast the entire project as a response to the “self-imposed crises” of “liberal political hegemony,” and the need to explore “the relevance of distributive fairness to the survival of liberalism.”
The book also went much further than The Last Utopia in exploring what Moyn presented as alternatives to human rights activism. Notably, he considered the New International Economic Order proposed in the 1970s, by which poor nations from the global south would have joined together in a cartel to raise commodity prices. “In almost every way,” Moyn wrote, “the NIEO was… the precise opposite of the human rights revolution.” It prioritized social and economic equality rather than mere sufficiency, and it sought to enlist the diplomatic power of states, rather than the publicity efforts of NGOs, to advance its goals. It was not clear from his account, though, why progressives could not have pushed for global economic redistribution and human rights at the same time. Moyn also sidestepped the fact that while the NIEO might have represented a theoretical alternative path, it was never a realistic one. The proposals went nowhere, and not because of any sort of ideological competition from human rights, but thanks to steadfast opposition from the United States and other industrialized nations. And while supporters claimed that under the NIEO states could redistribute the resulting wealth to their citizens, it was not obvious, to put it mildly, that ruling elites in those states would actually follow through on that promise. The history of systemic corruption in too many states of the global south is not encouraging.
In Humane, Moyn finally moved away from the subject of human rights. This book promised, as the subtitle put it, to examine “how the United States abandoned peace and reinvented war.” While it purported to study the moral and strategic impact of new technologies of war, in practice it focused more narrowly on a subject Moyn knows better: the jurisprudence of war. Since the Middle Ages, legal scholars have generally organized this subject around two broad issues: what constitutes a just cause for war, and how to conduct a war, once started, in a just fashion. Moyn argued that in the twenty-first century United States, the second of these, known by the Latin phrase jus in bello, has almost entirely displaced the first, known as jus ad bellum. Americans today endlessly argue about how to fight wars in a humane fashion, and in the process have stopped talking about whether they should fight wars in the first place. The result has been to both facilitate and legitimize a descent into endless war on behalf of American empire, a “forever war” waged “humanely” with drones and precision strikes and raids by special forces replacing the carpet bombing of earlier times, about which the public has ceased to notice or care.
Moyn himself insisted that this shift to jus in bello had gone in exactly the wrong direction. Taking Tolstoy as his guide and inspiration, he argued that we should direct our energies squarely towards peace, since the very notion of humane war comes close to being an absurd contradiction. He quoted Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Tolstoy’s great character from War and Peace: “They talk to us of the rules of war, of mercy to the unfortunate. It’s all rubbish… If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worthwhile going to certain death.” In his conclusion, Moyn even suggested that war would be just as evil if fought entirely without bloodshed, because it would still allow for the moral subjugation of the adversary. “The physical violence is not the most disturbing thing about it.” The writer David Rieff memorably riposted, after recalling a particularly bloody moment that he experienced during the siege of Sarajevo: “no, sorry, the best way to think about violence is not metaphorically, not then, not now, not ever.”
As in The Last Utopia, Moyn did not blame liberals directly for the shift he was tracking. But, again, his most sustained criticism was directed at liberals whose focus on atrocities such as Abu Ghraib supposedly led them to disregard the greater evil of the war itself. He wrote with particular pathos about the lawyers Michael Ratner and Jack Goldsmith, whose attempts to rein in the Bush Administration’s conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unintentionally “led the country down a road to… endless war… Paved with their good intentions, the road was no longer to hell but instead horrendous in a novel way.” Moyn meanwhile reserved “the deepest blame for the perpetuation of endless war” for that quintessential liberal, Barack Obama.
Humane adopted many of the same methods of Moyn’s earlier work and suffered from some of the same weaknesses. Once again, he cast his story essentially as one of competing ideologies: one aimed at humanizing war, the other aimed at ending it altogether. Apparently, you had to choose a side. Moyn did concede that opponents of the Iraq War highlighted American atrocities so as to delegitimize the war as a whole (they “understood very well,” he put it a little snidely, “that it was strategic to make hay of torture”). But noting that this tactic failed to block David Petraeus’ “surge,” Moyn concluded that “it backfired as a stratagem of containing the war.” It is an odd argument. Would the opponents of the war have done better if they had not highlighted the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, and simply continued to stress the Iraq war’s overall injustice? Moreover, the stated purpose of the surge was to bring the increasingly unpopular Iraq conflict — unpopular in large part because of the Abu Ghraib revelations — to a swift conclusion and to make possible the withdrawal of American forces.
Like The Last Utopia, Humane also paid relatively little attention to events on the ground, as opposed to the discourse about them. Already by 2018, when Moyn published it, both major political parties in the United States had lost nearly all their appetite for overseas military adventures, even of the humane variety. Since then, the idea that the Bush and Obama administrations locked the United States into endless war has come to seem even less realistic. In 2021, President Biden incurred a great humanitarian and political cost by abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, but he never considered reversing course. Today those authors who still believe the United States is fighting a forever war have been forced to contend that aid to Ukraine is somehow the present-day equivalent of the Iraq War. It is an absurd and convoluted position. The only way to construe the conflict as anything but Russian aggression is to imagine that Vladmir Putin, one of the cruelest and most corrupt dictators the world has seen since the days of Stalin and Hitler, does not act on his own initiative, but only in reaction to American pressure. Does anyone seriously think that if the United States had not forcibly expanded NATO (or rather, had NATO not agreed to the fervent requests of former Communist bloc countries to be admitted), Putin would be peacefully sunning himself in Sochi?
By the time Moyn published Humane, Donald Trump was in office, and loud arguments were being made that progressives, liberals, and decent conservatives needed to put aside their differences, close ranks, and concentrate on defending against the unprecedented threat that the new president posed to American democracy. Moyn would have none of it. In a series of opinion pieces, he argued that the danger was overblown. “There is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally,” he wrote in 2017, “and there is no reason to think he could succeed.” In 2020 he added that obsessing about Trump, or calling him a fascist, implied that America’s “long histories of killing, subjugation, and terror… mass incarceration and rising inequality… [are] somehow less worth the alarm and opprobrium.” Uniting against Trump distracted from the fact that America, thanks to its neoliberal inequalities and endless wars, itself “made Trump.” But America’s failures, and their very real role in generating the Trump phenomenon, say nothing at all about whether Trump poses a threat to democracy. Moyn’s dogged insistence on characterizing Trump as a distraction, meanwhile, led him to ever less realistic predictions. “If, as seems likely, Joe Biden wins the presidency,” he wrote in 2020, “Trump will come to be treated as an aberration whose rise and fall says nothing about America, home of antifascist heroics that overcame him just as it once slew the worst monsters abroad.” Not exactly.
Today, with American democracy more troubled than ever, it would seem the moment for liberals and progressives to unite around a forward-looking program that can bring voters tempted by Trumpian reaction back together with the Democratic Party electorate. Samuel Moyn could have helped to craft such a program in our emergency. He is certainly not shy about offering prescriptions for what ails American politics. But these prescriptions are not ones that have a chance of winning support from moderate liberals, still less of ever being enacted. They tend instead towards a quixotic radical populism. In the New York Times in 2022, for instance, Moyn and co-author Ryan Doerfler first chided liberals for placing too much hope in the courts and thereby embracing “antipolitics”; in this, the authors confused the anti-political with the anti-democratic — courts are the latter, not the former. Then the piece bizarrely suggested that Congress might simply defy the Constitution and unilaterally assert sovereign authority in the United States, stripping the Supreme Court and Senate of most of their power and eliminating the Electoral College. This is a program that Donald Trump might well approve of, and it evinces a faith in the untrammeled majority that the history of the United States does not support, to say the least.
That was just an opinion piece, of course. Moyn’s principal work remains in the realm of history, where the goal is above all to show how we got into our present mess, rather than offering prescriptions for getting us out of it. But histories, too, can offer positive suggestions and point to productive roads not taken. In Moyn’s most recent book, unfortunately, these elements remain largely undeveloped. Instead he concentrates on casting blame, and not in a convincing manner.
Liberalism Against Itself follows naturally from Moyn’s earlier work. Once again, the story is one of binary choices, and how certain influential figures made the wrong one. Just as a narrow conception of human rights was chosen over a more capacious one of social and economic rights, and jus in bello over jus ad bellum, now the story is about how a narrow “liberalism of fear” (in Judith Shklar’s famous and approving phrase) prevailed over a broad and generous and older Enlightenment liberalism. Once again, Moyn attributes enormous real-world influence to a set of complex, even recondite intellectual debates. And once again, there is surprisingly little attention to the broader historical and political context in which these debates took place, which allows him to cast the choices made as not only wrong, but as virtually perverse. The result is an intense, moralizing polemic, which has already received rapturous praise from progressive reviewers — not surprisingly, because it relieves progressives so neatly of responsibility for the left’s failures over the past several decades. But how persuasive is it, really?
Liberalism Against Itself takes as its subject six twentieth-century intellectuals, all Jewish, four of them forced from their European birthplaces during the continent’s decades of blood: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling. At times, the book seems to place the responsibility for liberalism’s wrong turn almost entirely on their shoulders. As the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller has quipped, it can give “the impression that we would be living in a completely different world if only Isaiah Berlin, in 1969, had given a big lecture for the BBC about how neoliberalism… was a great danger to the welfare state.” Moyn calls these men and women the “principal thinkers” of “Cold War liberalism,” although six pages later he says he chose them “because they have been so neglected.” (They have?) In general, he presents them as emblematic of the twentieth century’s supposed disastrous wrong turn: how “Cold War liberals” abandoned a more capacious Enlightenment program and set the stage for neoliberal inequality and neoconservative warmongering.
In fact, the six are not actually so emblematic. While Arendt associated with many liberals, she always refused the label for herself; she was in many ways actually a conservative. Himmelfarb began adult life as a Trotskyite and became best known, along with her husband Irving Kristol, as a staunch Republican neoconservative. Popper’s principal reputation is as a philosopher of science, not of politics. Meanwhile, Moyn leaves out some of the most influential liberal thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, who do not fit so easily into his framework: Raymond Aron, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and perhaps Reinhold Niebuhr. Their beliefs were varied, and often at odds, and including them would have made it far harder to characterize mid-twentieth-century liberalism as uniformly hostile to the Enlightenment, or unenthusiastic about the welfare state, or dubious about prospects for social progress. Niebuhr, with his Augustinian emphasis on human sinfulness, would in some ways have fitted Moyn’s frame better than any of the book’s protagonists, although he didn’t always think of himself as a liberal. But, ironically, Niebuhr criticized liberalism for being precisely what Moyn says it was not: optimistic as to human perfectibility, and failing “to understand the tragic character of human history.”
Moyn also makes his protagonists sound much more extreme in their supposed rejection of the Enlightenment than they actually were. They held that “belief in an emancipated life was proto-totalitarian in effect and not in intent.” They “treat[ed] the Enlightenment as a rationalist utopia that precipitated terror and the emancipatory state as a euphemism for terror’s reign.” Indeed, among them, “it was now common to say that reason itself bred totalitarianism.” Is Moyn confusing Isaiah Berlin with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who wrote that “enlightenment is totalitarian”? Moyn cannot actually cite anything this crude and reductionist from any of his six liberals. He instead tries to make the charges stick by associating them with the much less significant Israeli intellectual historian Jacob Talmon, whose The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, which appeared in 1952, indeed made many crude assertions of the sort, although directed principally against Rousseau and Romanticism, not the Enlightenment. “Talmon mattered supremely,” Moyn unconvincingly insists, despite the fact that his books were widely criticized at the time — notably by Shklar — and have largely faded from sight. Moyn even argues that much of Arendt’s work “can read like a sophisticated rewrite” of Talmon. By the same token, one could make the (ridiculous) statement that Samuel Moyn’s work reads like a sophisticated rewrite of the average Jacobin magazine column. Sophistication matters. Often it is everything.
Moyn does very little to place his six “Cold War liberals” in their most important historical context: namely, the Cold War itself. They “overreacted to the threat the Soviets posed,” he writes, without offering any substantial consideration of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. But what should his allegedly misguided intellectuals have made of a regime that killed millions of its own citizens and imprisoned millions more, that carried out a mass terror that spun wildly out of control, that consumed its own leading cadres in one explosion of paranoia after another, and that imposed dictatorial regimes throughout Eastern Europe? Moyn seems to think that it was unreasonable to worry that movements founded on exalted utopian dreams of equality and justice might have a tendency to collapse into blood, fire, and mass murder. Was it so unreasonable of liberals during the Cold War, witnessing the immense tragedy and horror of totalitarianism, to consider such an idea? And, of course, the twentieth century would continue to deliver such tragedy and horror on a vast scale in China and in Cambodia. Moyn is absolutely right to argue that we cannot let this history dissuade us from pursuing the goals of equality and justice, but who says it should? Social democracy, after all, may not be the only way to pursue equality and justice. Moyn tendentiously mistakes his protagonists’ insistence on caution and moderation in pursuit of these goals for a rejection of them.
Although he largely disregards this pertinent Cold War context, Moyn does dwell at length on another one: imperialism and decolonization. He criticizes liberals for either ignoring these struggles, and the enormous associated human toll, or for actively opposing anti-colonial liberation movements. Arendt comes in for especially sharp criticism, in a chapter that Moyn pointedly titles “White Freedom.” He calls her a racist and characterizes her book On Revolution as “fundamentally about postcolonial derangement.” Such charges help Moyn paint his subjects in a particularly bad light (which some of them at least partially deserve), but they do not, however, do much to support the book’s overall argument. Liberals, he writes, did not suddenly decide to support imperialism during the Cold War. Liberalism was “entangled from the start with world domination.” But if that is the case, then other than reinforcing liberal doubts about revolutionaries speaking in utopian accents (such as Pol Pot?), anti-colonial struggles could not have been the principal context for liberalism’s supposed wrong turn.
This wrong turn is at the heart of Moyn’s anti-liberal stance, and again, the argument is an odd one. Moyn himself concedes that at the very moment liberal thinkers were supposedly renouncing their noblest ambitions, “liberals around the world were building the most ambitious and interventionist and largest — as well as the most egalitarian and redistributive — liberal states that had ever existed.” He acknowledges the contradiction in this single sentence, but immediately dismisses it: “One would not know this from reading the theory.” (The remark reminds me of the old definition of an intellectual: someone who asks whether something that works in practice also works in theory.) The great turn against redistributionist liberalism in the United States came with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, long after Moyn’s subjects had published their major works. So how did they figure into this political upheaval? By having retreated into the “liberalism of fear,” thereby leaving the actual liberal project intellectually undefended.
But would Reaganism, and Thatcherism, and the whole constellation of changes we now refer to as “neoliberal,” really have been blocked if the “Cold War liberals” had mounted a more robust defense of the welfare state? The argument presumes that the massive social and economic changes of the 1960’s and 1970’s — especially the transition to a postindustrial economy, and the consequent weakening of organized labor as a political force — mattered less than high-level intellectual debates. It also presumes that the welfare states created in the postwar period were fulfilling their purpose. In many ways, of course, they were not. They created vast inefficient bureaucracies, grouped poor urban populations into bleak and crime-ridden housing projects, and failed to raise these populations out of poverty. It was in fact these failings, as much as the Soviet threat, which left many liberal intellectuals disillusioned in this period, and thereby helped to prepare the Reagan Revolution. (A key venue for their reflections was the journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol and my father, Daniel Bell.) Moyn does not touch on any of this history.
But even if we were to agree with Moyn, and to concede that a failure to properly defend the broader liberal project is what put us on the road to disaster, why should the “Cold War liberals” bear the responsibility? Did everyone on the moderate left have to follow them, lockstep, pied piper fashion, into the neoliberal present? Why did no thoughtful progressives step into the breach and develop the program Moyn says was needed? What about their responsibility? Significantly, the name of Michael Harrington, perhaps the most prominent democratic socialist thinker and activist of the period, goes unmentioned by Moyn. Why did he not succeed in developing a more attractive program?
Liberalism Against Itself remains, significantly, almost entirely silent on the failure of the progressive left to offer a convincing alternative to what Moyn calls “Cold War liberalism.” One reason, quite probably, is that if Moyn were to venture into this territory, he would have to deal with the way that the progressive left, starting in the 1970’s, increasingly turned away from issues of economic justice towards issues of identity. This is not territory into which he has shown any desire to tread, either in his histories or in his opinion journalism, but it is at the heart of the story of the contemporary American left.
Nor has he offered much advice regarding how the progressive left might build electoral support and win back voters from the populist right. The Biden administration has had, in practice, the most successful progressive record of any administration since Lyndon Johnson’s. It might seem logical to applaud it, to enthusiastically support the Democratic candidate who has already beaten Donald Trump at the polls, and to build on his achievements. But Moyn prefers the stance of the perennial critic, of the progressive purist. Last spring, he retweeted an article about Biden’s economic foreign policy with this quote and comment: “‘Biden’s policy is Trumpism with a human face.’ So true, and across other areas too.” Yes, it was just a tweet. But it reflects a deep current in Moyn’s work and in the milieu from which it springs.
Samuel Moyn is entirely right to condemn the rising inequalities and the foreign policy disasters that have helped bring the United States, and the world at large, to the dire place in which we find ourselves. His challenging and provocative work has focused attention on key debates and key moments of transition. But over the course of his influential career, Moyn has increasingly opted to cast history as a morality play in which a group of initially well-intentioned figures make disastrously wrong choices out of blindness, prejudice, and irrational fear, and bear the responsibility for what follows. But liberalism was never designed to be a version of progressivism; it is a philosophy and a politics of its own. The aspiration to perfection, whose disappearance from liberalism Moyn laments, never was a liberal tenet. History is not a morality play. The choices were not simple. The fears were not irrational. And anti-liberalism is not a guide for the perplexed.