The Crisis of Liberalism

Summary

History As It Happens: The Crisis of Liberalism Hosted by Martin Di Caro | Release Date: November 29, 2024

---

Introduction

In the episode titled "The Crisis of Liberalism," Martin Di Caro delves into the historical underpinnings and contemporary challenges facing liberalism, the dominant political philosophy of the American century. Joined by historian Daniel Besner from the University of Washington, the discussion navigates through decades of political, economic, and social transformations that have culminated in what many now perceive as a liberal crisis.

---

Historical Context: The Rise of American Liberalism

Martin Di Caro sets the stage by tracing the origins of American liberalism back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal era. Highlighting FDR’s vision, Di Caro notes:

“I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people. ... to restore America to its own people.” [00:41]

Roosevelt’s New Deal not only addressed the Great Depression but also laid the foundation for post-World War II prosperity. The subsequent establishment of the national security state, union growth, and the expansion of the middle class underpinned a period of unprecedented economic growth and social progress.

Daniel Besner expands on this, explaining how American liberalism evolved distinctly from its European counterparts:

“Modern American liberalism emerges out of progressivism, which had both left and right-wing variants... since the late 1940s, against which other people define themselves.” [02:25]

This period saw liberalism promoting private property, social welfare programs, and a strong internationalist stance, distinguishing it from the conservative movements of the time.

---

Challenges of the 1970s: Vietnam, Inflation, and Political Turbulence

The 1970s marked the beginning of liberalism’s challenges. The Vietnam War, economic stagflation, Watergate, and oil shocks eroded public confidence in the liberal order. Bill Clinton’s assertion encapsulates the sentiment of the era:

“The era of big government is over.” [01:06]

Martin highlights how these factors led to a crisis of confidence:

“The bags of groceries that cost you $100 last December now cost $112. It is a crisis of confidence.” [00:49]

This period exposed vulnerabilities in liberal policies, particularly their inability to manage economic instability and societal unrest effectively.

---

The Rise of Neoliberalism: Reagan, Thatcher, and Globalization

Responding to the 1970s crises, neoliberalism emerged as a dominant force, advocating for tax cuts, deregulation, and reduced government intervention. Martin Di Caro discusses how Reagan and Thatcher reshaped liberalism:

“Reagan cut taxes, slashed regulations, boosted defense spending, and bolstered our alliances in the liberal internationalist tradition.” [05:10]

This shift emphasized market economies and free trade, setting the stage for globalization. By the early 1990s, the liberal order appeared invincible with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which epitomized a victory for democracy and capitalism:

“This is a victory for democracy and freedom.” – Bill Clinton [05:36]

---

The Clinton Era and NAFTA: Promises and Consequences

The Clinton administration continued neoliberal policies, most notably through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Martin critiques the optimistic outlook that NAFTA proponents like Clinton held:

“You have to have wage protection and employment protection ... they were put into side agreements, labor protections, environmental protections, and they were never enforced.” [38:08]

Daniel Besner critically assesses NAFTA’s impact, highlighting unintended consequences such as increased illegal immigration and the destruction of Mexican agriculture:

“It opened Mexican agriculture to competition with big U.S. agribusiness. Now subsistence farmers ... are ruined by NAFTA.” [35:49]

Clinton’s vision of NAFTA fostering world peace and economic growth is contrasted with its real-world repercussions, laying the groundwork for public disillusionment with liberal policies.

---

The Crisis Unfolds: From Trump to the Democratic Dilemma

The election of Donald Trump signifies a pivotal moment in the perceived decline of liberalism. Martin observes:

“Donald Trump's election triggered a crisis for the Democratic Party. Could we have lost to him? And now our democracy is set to be in peril.” [01:31]

Daniel Besner argues that the crisis is not merely political but ideological:

“Liberalism itself is a failing ideology. It is unable to confront the questions of the day. It used to be able to and is no longer.” [13:13]

He contends that liberalism has become ossified, disconnected from the economic realities and needs of the broader populace, leading to widespread disenchantment and the rise of populist movements on both the right and left.

---

Populism and the Current Political Climate

The episode explores how liberalism’s failure to address economic inequality and the changing global landscape has fueled populist backlash. Besner notes:

“Liberals have been and conservatives both have been fucking over blue collar workers. It's just now coming for the white collar workers.” [22:23]

This economic neglect has empowered figures like Trump, who capitalize on public frustration with the status quo. The discussion also touches upon the intersection of cultural and economic issues, with liberalism maintaining cultural liberalism while failing economically.

---

Prospects and Future of Liberalism

Looking ahead, Martin and Besner ponder the sustainability of liberalism in the face of emerging challenges such as artificial intelligence and shifting global power dynamics. Besner asserts:

“The United States is not going to be hegemonic in East Asia in 10, 20, 30 years.” [41:56]

He also highlights the impact of AI on the white-collar workforce, suggesting that economic transformation threatens the very foundations of the liberal order. The conversation contemplates whether liberalism can adapt or if new political ideologies will take its place, potentially exacerbating global instability.

---

Conclusion: An Inevitable Transition?

The episode concludes on a somber note, reflecting on the irreversibility of certain liberal transformations and the uncertain future awaiting American political and economic systems. Daniel Besner emphasizes:

“The fate of it is inevitable. The US is going to be a great power, maybe Primus inter Pares even for a little while longer. But it’s certainly not going to be hegemonic in all world regions.” [21:10]

Martin Di Caro encapsulates the overarching theme:

“Global free trade, China into the WTO ... these are often called neoliberalism.” [39:40]

The episode underscores the complexity of liberalism’s decline, intertwined with economic policies, globalization, and shifting societal values, leaving listeners with profound questions about the future trajectory of American and global politics.

---

Notable Quotes

• Franklin D. Roosevelt [00:00, 00:06, 00:41]:

  "I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people... the Great Society."

• Daniel Besner [13:13]:

  "Liberalism itself is a failing ideology. It is unable to confront the questions of the day."

• Bill Clinton [05:36, 36:59]:

  "This is a victory for democracy and freedom."

  "We have made a decision... to promote more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace."

• Martin Di Caro [01:31, 35:49]:

  "Donald Trump's election triggered a crisis for the Democratic Party."

  "What you have to do is expand beyond them to see what Cold War liberalism was like in practice."

---

Final Thoughts

As liberalism grapples with its internal contradictions and external pressures, "The Crisis of Liberalism" offers a nuanced historical perspective on why the once-dominant ideology is now at a crossroads. Through rich discussions and critical insights, Martin Di Caro and Daniel Besner illuminate the factors contributing to liberalism's current predicament, prompting listeners to reflect on the potential paths forward for American society and its political landscape.

---

For more insightful discussions, tune in to "History As It Happens" every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribe to Martin Di Caro’s newsletter at HistoryAsItHappens.com.

Transcript

[Martin DeCaro]

History as it happens. November 29, 2024. The crisis of liberalism.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people. We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos. Having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, it seems now more.

[Daniel Besner]

Certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

We must whip inflation right now.

[Daniel Besner]

So the bags of groceries that cost you $100 last December now cost $112. It is a crisis of confidence.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

In this present crisis, government is not the solution. Government is the problem.

[Bill Clinton]

The era of big government is over.

[Daniel Besner]

The rich appear to be getting richer and it may be at the expense of everyone else. Inequality is at its highest that has been probably ever. For the sake of America, vote no on this nafta.

[Martin DeCaro]

We are in the midst of the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. The drug is fentanyl.

[Daniel Besner]

This country's opioid crisis overdoses up.

[Bill Clinton]

Their victories have not been your victories.

[Martin DeCaro]

Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. Donald Trump's election VICT triggered a crisis for the Democratic Party. How Democrats cry. Could we have lost to him? And now our democracy is set to be in peril. Well, maybe liberalism is in crisis. The regnant political philosophy of the American century. It appears to be a spent force at home and abroad. That's next with Daniel Besner as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Daniel Besner]

So you have different types of movements. So the one that modern American liberalism emerges out of is progressivism, which had both left and right variants, but really, again, left and right don't really make sense in the United States until really the 1940s.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

Let it also be symbolic that in so doing.

[Martin DeCaro]

July 2, 1932, Chicago. Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepts the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people. Give me your help. Not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

[Martin DeCaro]

And in November, FDR trounced the hapless Herbert Hoover. As the Great Depression tore at the fabric of American life, let me assert.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

My firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

[Martin DeCaro]

And this may be as good a place as any to begin this episode. Because what followed the New Deal and victory in the Second World War helped create the most prosperous quarter century in American history, at least to that point. Union membership soared. The middle class expanded to fight the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats established the national security state and built an enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.

[Martin DeCaro]

Racial justice was delayed. It arrived in the mid-1960s, a century after the abolishment of slavery. Congress passed the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights act, and Lyndon Johnson in May 1964 delivered one of the most utopian speeches by an American president ever.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice to which we are totally committed in our time.

[Martin DeCaro]

American liberalism, a political philosophy Democrats and Republicans subscribed to while disagreeing how best to accomplish its aims, seemed to be at its height. But then, as this story goes, came Vietnam, inflation, stagflation, Watergate, oil shocks, two of them in the 1970s, deindustrialization, and our crisis of confidence, our soulless materialism.

[Daniel Besner]

It is a crisis that strikes at.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

The very heart and soul and spirit.

[Daniel Besner]

Of our national will.

[Bill Clinton]

We can see this crisis in the.

[Daniel Besner]

Growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.

[Martin DeCaro]

The 1970s were followed by what some call the dawn of neoliberalism, the Reaganite Thatcherite attack on the welfare state. Reagan cut taxes, slashed regulations, boosted defense spending, and bolstered our alliances in the liberal internationalist tradition. There was, after all, a liberal world order to maintain. And by the early 1990s, it appeared history was moving in our direction. The Soviet Union vanish.

[Bill Clinton]

This is a victory for democracy and freedom.

[Daniel Besner]

It's a victory for the moral force of our values.

[Martin DeCaro]

Market economies and democracy spread. Then came nafta, what looked like democracy in Russia and China in the WTO with permanent normal trade relations move some believed would inevitably lead to political liberalization in communist China.

[Bill Clinton]

We can work to pull China in the right direction, or we can turn our backs and almost certainly push it in the wrong direction. The WTO agreement will move China in the right direction. It will advance the goals America has worked for in China for the past three decades. And of course, it will advance our own economic interests.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, two decades later, a former real estate developer and reality TV host would mount a successful presidential campaign, fueled in part by public anger at the free trade consensus. You know, a couple of days after Donald Trump's second victory, this time over Kamala Harris historian Daniel Besner posted on X, formerly Twitter. I feel like people are missing the fundamental lesson of the election. It is not the Democratic Party that is in crisis. Liberalism itself is in crisis, he said. Liberalism itself the dominant political and governing philosophy of the American century capitalism, democracy, civil liberties, anti communism, a powerful national security state, and internationalism. Think of NATO and the United Nations. One reason why critics say liberalism has failed is because it has betrayed or abandoned its commitment to the economic well being of the working class while pursuing military misadventures overseas in the name of fighting communism or terrorism or, as President Biden might put it today, fighting a battle against autocracy. So where did it start going wrong for liberalism? Where can we trace the roots of today's populist backlash against the establishment, against incumbents like Kamala Harris who say they will defend an unpopular system against a disruptor like Trump? Historian Nelson Lichtenstein's book is one place to look. Page 438 of A Fabulous the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. Lichtenstein writes, the idea that a new economy had transformed American politics proved to be a powerful illusion. When Clinton and Gore opened their Little rock summit in December 1992, a sense of crisis pervaded the discussion of how the American version of world capitalism might be transformed. Seven and a half Years later, in April 2000, Clinton convened a White House conference on the new Economy at Techno. Triumphalism pervaded the conclave, with Clinton announcing, we meet in the midst of the longest economic expansion of our history and an economic transformation as profound as that that led us into the Industrial Revolution. Thus, Lichtenstein writes, by the end of the Clinton presidency, this new economy construct had become a pervasive and powerful vision, offering a techno social solution to virtually every problem confronting the nation.

[Bill Clinton]

I believe the computer and the Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history. I believe we can harness the power of the new economy to help people everywhere fulfill their dreams.

[Martin DeCaro]

The idea that a globalized economy combining high technology and entrepreneurial innovation had generated a new sort of capitalism proved intoxicating. The concept became an all purpose rationale for almost any sort of political or social program. For Robert Reich, the new economy promised to transform labor relations and worker skills. For Alan Greenspan, who would keep interest rates low because new economy productivity levels would mean that wage increases and full production were no longer inflationary. And for others, writes Lichtenstein, rapid communications and efficient transport networks linked together a new era of free trade and democratic reform. For Larry Summers, Al Gore, and President Clinton himself, a technologically sophisticated new economy provided the modernizing rationale for the deregulation of telecom, banking and international finance. Again, that is Nelson Lichtenstein writing in A Fabulous Failure, a book about the 1990s transformation of American capitalism and all that prosperity and economic growth that may have been built on sand, as many working class people might say today. Are the 1990s the right place to start? How about the 1940s? You know, ideas are not static. Liberalism has changed over time. The world has changed. Liberalism, or liberals have influenced the course of events, but events have shaped liberalism. For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's how liberals responded to such events that matters. With the USSR gone and Yeltsin's Russia temporarily weakened, liberal internationalists pursued NATO expansion.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

And the alliance will prove every bit as important to American and European security in the decade ahead. The importance of the alliance and its Democratic underpinnings is the message I now take to Europe.

[Martin DeCaro]

So, as you can tell, this is a sprawling topic covering decades of history, domestic and foreign policy. We can't cover it all in a single podcast episode. But looking at the rise of Trump through a wide lens is wiser than getting bogged down in small bore analysis. If only Kamala Harris had said this or said that, or appeared on this podcast instead of that one, or proposed this middle class program instead of something else. Now, it is true that most elections, including this one, are decided on the margins. It was not a landslide. Trump won about 50% of the popular vote, Harris about 48 and a half percent. It was a decisive victory in the Electoral College. But rather than wondering what Harris might have done to eke out a victory, the better question is why wasn't it a landslide in her favor? Why are so many Americans disenchanted with a liberal status quo, if you will, that they once again elected an illiberal man who unleashed a hurricane of lies and violence to try to steal the 2020 election, crimes that would have been immediately disqualifying in an earlier age. Daniel Besner is a historian in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the co host with Derek Davison of American Prestige Podcast. Daniel Besner, welcome back.

[Daniel Besner]

Thank you for having me.

[Martin DeCaro]

Again, our last connection, we discussed fascism. I promise not to debate the definition of fascism.

[Daniel Besner]

Well, Martin, you would say that I won that one, right? I feel like the tide has turned in my favor. I feel like the fascism explainers have retreated either to Blue sky or to not really talking about it anymore.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, I think we agree that the fascism analogies were. Weren't very good. I don't know if we agreed on how to define fascism. But that's okay. We don't have to go there anymore. Anyway, we're going to talk about a different political and philosophical concept today because you posted on Twitter or X a couple weeks back amid the hurricane of postmortems about the election and what went wrong, what's wrong with Democrats, what's wrong with American voters, etc. You said something about the problem here is that liberalism is in crisis. You know, I don't want to spend any significant amount of time on small bore analysis, but I mean, some of this stuff isn't terrible, right? I mean, elections are decided on the margins, right?

[Daniel Besner]

I don't understand how people talk about that shit like every day as part of their jobs. It's so boring and pointless. That's my take on small bore analysis.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, yeah, the reason why I have you on here as a historian is to broaden our perspective because I get bored with it as well. But you know, the pendulum can swing back in four years or even two years. And this has happened before where one party feels like, oh, they're dead, they're never going to get the White House back again, and then they get the White House back again for sure.

[Daniel Besner]

I think the thing that we might see, and I'm not the first to say this, is swings back and forth between the parties because no party is really doing anything to address the fundamental structures of the economy. I don't think Trump is going to. I don't think Kamala did would have, and I don't think Biden did. Would it be a surprise if we have these swing elections, which is a sign of general instability, and then the question is, why is there such instability? I think the gerontocratic structure of our politics is crucial. But I think most important, liberalism itself is a failing ideology. I think it is unable to confront the questions of the day. It used to be able to and is no longer. And I think that explains a lot of the chaos in our politics.

[Martin DeCaro]

Good segue to the main order of business here. So when we talk about liberalism, we're not talking about John is a liberal, George is a conservative, and they have a disagreement over who should be appointed to the Supreme Court. We're talking about liberalism as the political philosophy, political ideology, the dominant one of the 20th century, post 1945. So how does.

[Daniel Besner]

Precisely.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, how does Daniel Bessner Expand upon that definition. How do you define liberalism that we're going to discuss here?

[Daniel Besner]

Sure. So liberalism is really a European philosophy. It has its most ardent ideological proponents and articulators. In Europe, throughout most of the 19th century, people have called Abraham Lincoln liberal. And it's like, okay, I kind of get it. There was this transatlantic movement of ideas, but it didn't really coalesce as a political movement here in the way that it did particularly in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Central and Western Europe, in France and Germany in particular. What the United States had basically until the 1930s and 1940s was progressivism, which emerged in the 1890s and is basically more relevant to the United States political matrix. Liberal and conservative are both terms that developed in 19th century Europe to describe particularly European phenomena, with basically conservative on the right being reactionary monarchists and liberals on the left being being people who tried to steer between communism, which is further to their left, and monarchism to the right. This is why Benjamin Constant, Madame Germain de Stael and France, pretty much the first genuine liberals, were, and that's in the early 19th century, were trying to basically navigate between revolutionary terror on the left and then reactionary monarchism on the right. And that broadly remains true for the entirety of Central and Western Europe throughout the 19th century. America is different. America has a different constellation, Democrat and republican. Doesn't really align to left and right. It still kind of doesn't really align to left and right in the same way. So you have different types of movements. So the one that modern American liberalism emerges out of is progressivism, which had both left and right wing variants. But really, again, left and right don't really make sense in the United States until really the 1940s when New Dealers cum Cold War liberals basically seize the reins of the American state and institutionalize their philosophy. So they like private property, they like elites, they like tinkering with the government, they like forms of social democratic welfare, particularly those connected to military spending. And this becomes the dominant ideology of the United States since 1945, even a bit earlier with the New Deal, but really since 1945, against which other people define themselves. Even a Ronald Reagan who reshaped the New Deal order is operating within a liberal framework. Broadly speaking, in some sense, Reagan is just a particular type of liberal who emphasizes things like private property and freedom from government interference, as opposed to more social democratic liberals who emphasize social welfare programs. Both could reasonably be fit under the rubric of a 19th century liberalism. Reagan's not calling for the restoration of monarchy for Example, which is a genuinely 19th century conservative position. So liberalism defeated the left. I mean, it's really Harry Truman and then Eisenhower, who destroyed the American left very consciously, essentially forcing communists and other radical unions out of the cio, declaring that any genuinely left wing organization was subversive, prosecuting the American Communist party, et cetera, et cetera, embracing a form of social democratic welfare, Keynesianism. And that's essentially what's reigned since the late 1940s. What's happened now is that clearly liberals have been ossified, they're sclerotic, they're unable to make actual changes to their positions, and they're unable to actually address any of the fundamental economic problems that face Americans. And I think this is reflected in the Democratic party, which has been totally professionalized. The professional managerial class essentially runs, it goes to, you know, a relatively small number of, let's say top 50, top 100 colleges, has particular beliefs about the world, about the economy, about foreign policy, about culture that aren't necessarily speaking to the interests of most Americans. I mean, personally, I think most Americans are kind of on the liberal wavelength in terms of culture. For the most part there are issues. Probably the biggest disagreement is over trans athletes playing in women's sports. That seems to be like the gigantic dividing line on cultural issues. But generally, I would say most Americans are accepting of gay marriage, they're accepting of, you know, gay property inheritance, they're accepting of trans people.

[Martin DeCaro]

I think we're a fairly tolerant country, all things considered.

[Daniel Besner]

Culture, we've become more so over the course of our lifetimes. I don't think that was true in the 80s and the 90s. I think gay bashing was a genuine thing. Trans people are still victims of violent crimes. My understanding is to be much higher, higher rate of violent crime victims are trans than the quote, unquote, average person. So there's still work to be done, but I don't think it's a major, the major issue facing people. I think it's really the economy and to some surprising theory, actually recently, foreign policy as well. And liberalism has just been unable to address any of those issues.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, that was a comprehensive answer. It's been nice talking to you, Daniel. That's it. You ranged far.

[Bill Clinton]

Yeah.

[Daniel Besner]

Writing on this. So like I, I super know this.

[Martin DeCaro]

Would you agree that the current crisis facing liberalism has its origins in the post Cold War period, the early 1990s? I can explain why.

[Daniel Besner]

No. Liberalism was fundamentally unable to deal with capitalism. It provides the ideological cover for capitalism, and I think capitalism inevitably tends towards these destabilizing crises. So I think the foundational problem is in the ideology's relationship to the political economy itself. But I do think liberals have failed to even provide their natural constituents, for example, college educated people, with relief like student loan. Like, it's just an obvious political thing for a Democrat to do is to grant widespread student loan relief. So that wins younger people who are not so young anymore over to their side for a generation. The fact that they're unable to do that shows something that is cancerously wrong with the party. So I think maybe the liberals got over their skis once they defeated or was perceived as defeating the Soviet Union to some degree. I think the Soviet Union failed more than was defeated in this election. The Democratic Party failed more than was defeated by Trump. They probably thought that this was the, you know, the inevitable end of history and that liberalism would be the dominant ideology. And in some sense, Fuki, someone like Fukuyama, who argued that was both right and wrong, he was wrong in the sense that it was liberalism. But he was right about capitalism. Capitalism is the fundamental foundational political economic system of basically every country in the world except North Korea.

[Martin DeCaro]

It's the only game in town, as I say.

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah, so that was correct. Correct. It's just that you apparently could have autocratic forms of capitalism, oligarchic and kleptocratic forms of capitalism, without the liberal democratic form that emerged in the United States.

[Martin DeCaro]

We can go back even to the 1940s, 1950s, when, you know, the clamps were put on the New Deal. No more expansions of the New Deal order. I mean, Eisenhower preserved it. I'm glad you made the point that both Democrats and Republicans are operating within the liberal tradition. Eisenhower, he didn't end the New Deal. He just said no more new programs. Right. And then the national security state was established in the late 1940s, early 1950s, but also some really important liberal institutions. We're going to talk about foreign policy as well. The United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, known as gatt, NATO, European Economic Community, or conceptualizing what a liberal world order looks like when we're not talking just about abstractions. Right. But the 1990s, that's when liberalism seemed to be at its height. Democracy and market economies on the march. But I think the failures of what we thought was coming our way. Right. That history was moving in our direction has soured so many people on what we're discussing here. The idea that the system that seemed to have won the battle of ideas could leave so Many people behind, you know, the hollowing out of the middle class and all this stuff. You know what I mean?

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah. I mean they've been doing this for 50 years. The difference is that it's coming for white collar workers. Starting in the 1960s, liberals have been and conservatives both have been fucking over blue collar workers. It's just now coming for the white collar workers. So the elite media is noticing. I mean, in the last 20 years, journalism, academia and now entertainment writing have been destroyed. Right. These are like classic white collar professions of the educated classes. And now it's going to start coming for the middle managers, the lower level executives, et cetera, with AI. Liberal ideology is allowing capitalism to eat itself and something will come from it. But the question is whether something positive enough will come from it to prevent against climate change. That is the big question, right? Like clearly this is fading and clearly something will emerge. Maybe it's Chinese autocratic capitalism, but even within the west something different is going to emerge. But whether it's able to actually face a genuine existential crisis is unclear.

[Martin DeCaro]

So liberals started to go wrong. Maybe we'll talk about Democratic Party here as well. Again referencing the 1990s. Did you read Nelson Lichtenstein's book about the Clinton years and the changes in global capitalism? He hopped on board and said, let's do this. There's no way to hold back the change, so let's try to make it for the best.

[Bill Clinton]

But I want to say to my fellow Americans, when you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change, to embrace it, to move forward. Nothing we do, nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories or informations can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye. Nothing can change the fact that technology can be adopted once created by people all across the world and then rapidly adapt in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way the technology works. For two decades, the winds of global competition have made these things clear to any American with eyes to see.

[Daniel Besner]

That was the whole Atari Democrat. What is it, the Democratic Leadership Committee or council?

[Martin DeCaro]

I forget the dlc Techno optimism. Right? So you don't need an activist big government, so to speak, state anymore or a large welfare state. You put your faith and confidence in technological innovation to solve long running problems or something.

[Daniel Besner]

I mean, I think it was like kind of vague. What are you going to do? Absent some form of universal basic income which is probably coming actually because I think there's just going to be not that many jobs left. So you'll have a subsistence level, universal basic income, you know, white collar people trying to go from gig to gig and then a class of plutocrats who govern everything.

[Martin DeCaro]

Samuel Moyne's book has caused a major debate about what liberalism is or if there's such a thing as Cold War liberalism. I had him on the show to discuss the book again. These framings I'm choosing here, you can dismantle them, we'll try to peel them away one later.

[Daniel Besner]

I'm actually writing a book on Cold War liberalism. My big disagreement with Moin is that he thinks that this is like a portrayal of liberalism. And what I argue in my forthcoming thing is that it is more the apotheosis of certain strands of liberalism that have been present in it from the beginning. Anti democratic, imperialist, anxious strands. Moin is trying to sort of rehabilitate liberalism in some sense by saying there was this better version of it, but I think that it was always, always destined towards this end. And so yeah, I wrote like a big piece and Moin, like many people who study Cold War liberals, focus on like a small group of intellectuals. What I try to do in my piece is actually take a holistic perspective on the Colbodor liberal project that expands beyond the well worn names. Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Laurent, Karl Popper, Judith Sklar, Daniel Bell, you know, the usual people. I think you need to expand beyond them to see what Cold War liberalism was like in practice.

[Martin DeCaro]

What's challenging for me about that book is that I'm not great on high intellectual history. So he talked a lot about philosophers and a lot of abstractions. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't mean abstractions pejoratively, but apply these ideas and you know, that quarter century after 1945 I did mention the establishment of the national security State, but this is often seen as the golden age or the most prosperous period in American history because of the the legislative and institutional achievements of the New Deal, the liberal international order I mentioned. The institutions before us. Victory in World War II are now an unrivaled global military and economic power. Union membership soars. Home ownership soars. Thank you. GI Bill. College education as well. In the GI Bill, mostly for whites, income inequality wasn't as severe as it is now. Social progress eventually is made. The Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights act in the mid-1960s. How do you feel about that framing? Looking at that quarter century, century after 1945, is that when Liberalism got it right.

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah. So they were. There was social democratic elements of liberalism linked to military Keynesianism. Then after the war, enough people were demanding things that they gave social democratic programs like the GI Bill and eventually made racial progress. I think a lot of actually more progressive things were strangled in the crib during that moment. You have, for example, black Americans had been building strong international solidarity. Black American liberals had been building strong international solidarities in the 30s and the 40s that they're essentially cut off by, by the embrace of Cold War liberalism. As I mentioned, the CIO kicked out, I believe it was the 11 left wing unions, communist unions basically, that were also best known for doing interracial organizing. You have the social democracy linked to not only whiteness, as you said, but also the military. You know, the military essentially becomes a jobs program that replaces like the WPA and the ccc. So it comes along with like an incredible militarization and mobilization of American society that. That cannot be disconnected from the triumph of liberalism and capitalism. So, you know, two things happen in the early 70s. You get the draft ended and then you get the end of Bretton woods. And essentially that's the end of this Cold war of liberal moments with the embrace of neoliberalism and the end of mass conscription. I would even say to some degree it was the end of mass society itself. That society in that moment, in the early 1970s began becoming more atomized. People became disconnected from their communities, People became more depressed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what about Vietnam?

[Martin DeCaro]

Vietnam as well, I mean.

[Daniel Besner]

Well, that's the draft, right? That's linked to the draft.

[Martin DeCaro]

But I guess, you know, the Great Society has a terrible reputation, especially, you know, among the editors of the National Review. But it did reduce poverty and it was sacrificed, pardon the hyperbole, but it was sacrificed on the altar of Vietnam.

[Daniel Besner]

The spending, more expansive social program. But the problem is, interestingly, that the war on poverty came along with the war on crime. Crime, and this was always the problem with liberalism. There's a new book out, I forget the author's name, but he essentially shows that with the New Deal that also the New Deal programs came also along with a war on crime. So there's also this dialectic of liberalism, right? You can't do the social democracy without attacking the crime. And the crime is oftentimes, not always, but when we're talking about nonviolent crime is oftentimes linked to poverty and violent crime as well, frankly. So, yeah, you know, there's always problems there Inherent. But certainly Vietnam prevented the realization of LBJ's more expansive social programming. I mean, he led to inflation too. That's actually why the conservatives turned against it. And of course, it's Nixon who wins in 68 because LBJ doesn't run.

[Martin DeCaro]

Just listening to your remarks there, the criticism of liberals for maybe not going far enough right, or tempering, as Moin would say, tempering their liberalism. Isn't that also just living in a political culture that is maybe inherently conservative? I'll give you an example. When FDR gave Frances Perkins her marching orders on how to craft the Social Security legislation, he told her, you can't make it something that people get simply for being alive. It can't come out of the general fund has to be tied to people's work record. You know, it's not just a human right. It's based on your work record. I mean, the same debate around universal health care, you know, universal health care was proposed by Harry truman in the 40s. We're still debating it.

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah, there's this fetishization of work that is inherent to American capitalism, which is connected to and distinct of from American liberalism. But yeah, it's, it's Protestant ethic. You know, people dismiss Weber, but there's certainly something there about the value of work and the need to basically get rewarded for one's labor, which is inherent always in the American social democratic project. The American social democratic form.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt]

Today a hope of many years standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last. This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health. We can never insure 100% of the population against 100% of the hazards and vicissitudes of life. But we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty. Straight an old age.

[Martin DeCaro]

Foreign policy. When you hear the term liberal world order today, given what we know about the post Cold War period, I would say we're in a post post Cold War period. Not to digress about whether we're living through the change of time periods here, a la the Oxford History of the United States. When you put down one book and you pick up the next one in the series, you're now in a different era of American history. But when you hear the term liberal world order, what do you think?

[Daniel Besner]

I don't think many people buy it any longer. I don't think Most people under 45 or 40 believe in it. Right after Trump was elected, there were some members of the foreign policy establishment that wanted to reaffirm faith in the rules based international order or the liberal international order. And as Pat Porter said, I believe in around 2020 in his book the False Promise of liberal Order. It's almost a contradiction in terms because world ordering is an inherently violent, illiberal project. But even beyond that, what Biden's done with Gaza has basically given the lie to that entire thing. All those people were very staunch liberal international order advocates, and everyone now just knows it's total fucking bullshit. Someone says liberal international order at a talk, raise your hand and say Gaza. Yeah, I mean, it's okay that that's the liberal international order in practice.

[Martin DeCaro]

You know, going back to my frame of reference, the optimism after the early 1990s, I mean, this was an anomaly when you look back at it. The idea that there could be a unipolar world. There's always been multipolarity. Even during the bipolar Cold War, there was a non aligned movement, right? So this notion that the United States would have unrivaled power, or to use Paul Kennedy's formulation, you know, the ebb and flow in relative power, you know, the notion that Russia would maybe one day become a democracy or would stay prone after its disastrous 1990s, or a country the size of China with all that untapped potential wouldn't eventually become a more powerful and prosperous country that wants to exert its hegemony in East Asia. You know, going back to that early 1990s, mid-1990s period, that idea that the world was moving in our direction and it might stay this way for the foreseeable future, well, we fucked it up.

[Daniel Besner]

So much, we was guaranteed not to stay that way. Like what we did with Russia. Not incorporating Russia into the western liberal political economy in a real way was one of the stupidest fucking things people did. It's wild that they just went in and let, like, private capital destroy that country. There's different paths that could have been taken that would have given liberalism more staying power, but they didn't do that. They immediately went and destroyed Russia. And then they got mad. Once China started to assert itself in international organizations in the 2010s. Yeah, I think it was always doomed, partially because of the specific choices that they made in the 1990s not to expand their own political projects in a genuine way.

[Martin DeCaro]

Man. NAFTA and free trade in general, that was seen by its proponents as maybe the logical next step to fulfill. Right. Well, some people would say this was neoliberalism, but the liberal world order, the negative consequences were downplayed or just simply overlooked. And I'll give you an example. So nafta, it led to illegal immigration, which has had a destabilizing effect in our country and in Europe, too, post War on terror dislocations. But NAFTA, right, it opened Mexican agriculture to competition with big U.S. agribusiness. Now subsistence farmers, something like 2 million Mexican corn farmers are ruined by NAFTA. So what do these people do? They migrate to Mexican cities, and they eventually migrate across the border so they can make a living here in the United States.

[Daniel Besner]

So that was one which, by the way, small business owners in this country a lot play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why I have expressed my doubts about Trump's deportation scheme, because I think there's such a significant part of the republic. Not that he's not racist and wouldn't do it if he could. I think he would. But such a significant part of the Republican coalition relies on that essentially extraordinarily cheap labor. I don't see how you do that. It would destroy not only elements of the American economy to get rid of that basically extraordinarily cheap, exploited labor. But in the Republican Party, it's such a constituency in favor of that that they needed. That's why E VERIFY has never been implemented, because that they don't want it to be implemented. Really. The Republicans are kind of funny. They ran on Roe, not wanting ROE to be overturned for fear that it would blow back against it. Turns out that it really didn't in 2024, at least. Similar thing with immigration and undocumented labor. They need it for their own constituency.

[Martin DeCaro]

Our economy relies on it. I guess my point is liberalizing projects or ideas like, say, global free trade, China into the wto. When you go back and listen to what Bill Clinton said about what NAFTA would lead to, he even said world peace.

[Bill Clinton]

I spoke with one of the folks who was in the reception just a few moments ago who told me that he was in China watching the vote on international television when it was taken. And he said you would have had to be there to understand how important this was to the rest of the world, not because of the terms, terms of nafta, which basically is a trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada, but because it became a symbolic struggle for the spirit of our country and for how we would approach this very difficult and rapidly changing world, dealing with our own considerable challenges here at home. I believe we have made a decision now that will permit us to create an economic order in the world that will promote more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace.

[Martin DeCaro]

So there is no talk in there about how NAFTA might cause illegal immigration to increase from Mexico and there could be a backlash against it. We're seeing that now.

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah, well, I think, quote, unquote, illegal immigration. I use the term undocumented because like, like the United States has just been so brutal and awful to the countries from which most immigrants come, mostly Mexico and Central America, that I do think that we have an ethical responsibility to provide help to those people after having consciously manipulated, invaded, really undermined these countries for centuries. At this point, if people are worried about undocumented labor driving down wages, that's not a problem fundamentally of undocumented labor. It's a problem of wages. And they should do things like raise the wages by, for example, taxing extraordinarily rich people. Not even that extraordinarily rich people taxing, just rich people in general, spending less on the military, et cetera, et cetera. There's ways to do that. So I think it's almost like a dodge. I'm not saying you're doing that, but when people focus on, quote, unquote, illegal.

[Martin DeCaro]

Immigration, this is where some people say it's neoliberalism. So when NAFTA was being debated and drafted and put together, there were people in the Clinton administration and lobbying forces in the United States who said, listen, you have to have wage protection and employment protection, environmental standards written in to this agreement. You know, they were put into side agreements, labor protections, environmental protections, and they were never enforced because why would then a automaker in the United States take the time and the effort and the money to relocate to Mexico if you had to pay people a fair wage? That's the whole point of going over there. So I guess this is what is often called neoliberalism.

[Daniel Besner]

It's natural, right? Like Moin probably wouldn't say this about the economic parts, but I mean, it's just inherent to the project. Right. This is what was eventually going to happen. It was eventually just going to become hyper capitalism, like someone like George Soros is Like oh wait, it's gone too far. Well guess what buddy, that's what it fucking does. You know, it's not going to be able to be tempered through wise regulation. What about the way American politicians have acted for the entirety of their history would suggest that that would be the case after a world ending war in which masses of people participated, which will never happen again. The United States was kind of social democratic a lot through the military. This is not a blueprint for what is actually going to be a useful way of moving forward.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, I keep Talking about the 90s and the Clinton years, but the foundation for this was laid. You can even go back to the 70s. New Deal liberalism is a spent force. The global economy is changing. We have de industrialization, the collapse of New Deal liberalism, opening way to the Reaganite Thatcher idea. Tax cuts, deregulation, dismantling of the state. The very premise that the state can be a force for good, which had been part of New Deal liberalism now runs into this new reality. And Clinton built on this. He said the era of big government.

[Daniel Besner]

The military is a pretty significant part of the state. People don't like to talk about that. Yeah, like the parts of the state that help ordinary people. So yeah, I mean it's just like which parts of the state they emphasize, which parts of the state they don't emphasize. And the ideological and class reasons behind that are so obvious that you know, it's, it's almost like not worth pointing out.

[Martin DeCaro]

So the failure of the forever wars, really the undermining of the so called rules based order in the United States, not the only culprit here. But we are talking about the US on this podcast has breathed life into this, I don't know what you want to call it. A right wing populism in the United States where people who vote for Bernie Sanders and or vote for Donald Trump. There's some overlap there. I don't want to call them anti war, but they seem to see eye to eye on this, on this issue. The mainstream of both parties is still very much invested in trying to maintain US hegemony. Do you think we're seeing any kind of real change here?

[Daniel Besner]

I think that you still have old people in positions of power who think that you can, who think that the United States should fight World War three over time, Taiwan. But I think that is more and more of a minority position the younger and younger you get. So it's just a pro one. Another problem with the gerontocratic society is that people have been so politicized and had intellectually developed in a particular moment that no longer exists, that they're literally atavists. They're atavisms. I think that's a pretty big problem. But I think obviously the writing on the wall is anyone who has their eyes open. The United States is not going to be hegemonic in east Asia in 10, 20, 30 years. Definitely within 30, I'd say by 25. The United States is not hegemonic in East Asia. So you could either that and reform your geostrategy and try to help allies you claim to care about to build up their own defenses whatever then no one's going to do that because you don't have far seeing leaders in positions of power. But yeah, I think that the fate of it is inevitable. The US is going to be a great power, maybe Primus inter Paris even for a little while longer. But it's certainly not going to be hegemonic in all world regions like it was for much of the post Cold War period.

[Martin DeCaro]

Maybe there is no going back. Are you familiar with Robert Gordon's book or the arguments in it? The Rise and Fall of American Growth. His thesis as to why.

[Daniel Besner]

I've never read it. No.

[Martin DeCaro]

Okay. His thesis as to why growth since 1970 has stagnated compared to the prior century. You know, I refer to that golden age, so to speak, of prosperity after 1945. But he argued that for instance, our current IT revolution is less important than any one of the five great inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970. Electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceutical, internal combustion engine, modern communication. These are one time things. That's why Gordon is not a techno optimist. He still believes that we need to have some kind of activist state. So maybe there simply is no going back. I mean especially the issue of unionization. Right. An area of liberals I think have not done a very good job. The traditional union, I know, well, they.

[Daniel Besner]

Don'T really care about it. I mean that's just the truth. And they purged the elements that cared about it from their coalition 70 years ago. We're certainly not going back. But I also think we're not going forward. I think we're pretty much boned.

[Martin DeCaro]

I guess my point is I have a roundabout way of getting to my points here, Daniel. The traditional unionized industries don't aren't here in the United States anymore. They've.

[Daniel Besner]

Yeah, because we kicked them out. So basically what the white collar workers thought it wouldn't come for them and now it's coming for them. I mean, that's really the history of the last 20 years.

[Martin DeCaro]

I'm glad I can make a living just sitting in my study at home.

[Daniel Besner]

Talking into a microphone until someone just AI's you.

[Martin DeCaro]

That wouldn't be different. Cold. All right, last thing. This idea that we're entering a new phase or a new period, given the rise of illiberal right wing and left wing populists across the globe, which is real. Freedom House does their annual survey on freedom in the world. This is the 18th consecutive year, or whatever it is, of democratic decline. Do you think we're entering?

[Daniel Besner]

You know, Martin, those are ridiculous. Like, those, those measurements are like, crazy. That's like saying, like, oh, I don't know, my awesomeness scale went from 11 to 4 this year. It's absurd. Everyone should mock those things. Ridiculous.

[Martin DeCaro]

All right, maybe I won't reference them anymore, but my question is, are we entering a new period?

[Daniel Besner]

Yes, I think that we are. I think that the ideological presumptions of the past are appreciably different amongst certain generations of people, and that the political economy is appreciably different. And I think AI is actually going to be pretty significant in terms of eating away at the white collar workforce. So I think it's also coming from the business side of the equation. Like a lot of executives, middle managers, their jobs are going to be able to be done fairly well by artificial intelligence. There's a reckoning coming for people who thought that the reckoning wouldn't come for them. What it looks like, I don't know what will be the defining features of it, I don't know. But I do think that something is ending and something new is coming into being.

[Martin DeCaro]

I hate to use Hackney terms, but we are in a post, Post Cold War period. Maybe.

[Daniel Besner]

Definitely, yeah. We don't know what the Cold War that is the defining thing will be yet, though. You know, Cold War liberals weren't called Cold War liberals until the 60s, the new left as a criticism. So, you know, we don't know what will actually shape the various.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, maybe the post Cold War period ended while ago. We've just been under the illusion that we're still living in this.

[Daniel Besner]

Totally. I mean, Trump's election shows that he's a. He's like kind of a world historical figure in his influence. He's not after the first one and he is after the second one. Even if he doesn't do anything for real, or even if he just makes things worse, which is very much possible, his very election is important. His second election is Important. The winning of the popular vote is a pretty important thing.

[Martin DeCaro]

Brexit, the strength of far right parties in Europe. I mean, sometimes this is overstated because the center is holding in many places, not in Hungary. The rise of China, an illiberal, autocratic, most populous country in the world. Right. Who doesn't have the same concept of, of, let's say, free commerce as, say, the United States does. What I'm struggling to grasp right now is if liberalism is failing and cannot be resuscitated, I hope the alternative isn't what we're seeing now. The political scientist and historian Roger Griffin has used this term on my podcast, where the only two people have used this word. Daniel. Incurvation, by which Griffin means countries turning away from things like free commercial.

[Daniel Besner]

They can't do that, though, because the political legitimacy of basically every bourgeois society, or rising bourgeois society like China, is consumption. So that's a big problem. To me. The big problem is that political legitimacy literally rests on consumption. Consumption kills the planet. That's the dialectical tension of the next century.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah. And Griffin also means by incurvation, a rejection of others, hostility to immigration, international cooperation. You know, it's like a nationalist age, nationalist populist age when we had this.

[Daniel Besner]

But it's not really right. This is why first time is tragedy, second time is force. Because he can't be. If you, if you're, if you're consuming, you cannot truly be a national. Whatever J.D. vance is, it's not possible. So that's the big problem. It's all bullshit. This is, It's. This is why conservatism is, Is a spent force as well. Political legitimacy has rested on consumption since at least the 60s, 60 years. It's generations of political subjects being formed, so they can't do it. So this is the big problem and no one's even going to talk about it.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, Trump just did his 25% tariff proposal on Twitter that he wants to do on D1, and. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, we'll see how long it takes for global supply chains to be disrupted by something like that. And then, you know, public opinion, you know, if you thought eggs were expensive now. Oh, sorry. Thank you, Daniel Besner.

[Daniel Besner]

Thank you, Martin. Always a pleasure.

[Martin DeCaro]

And remember, you can listen to Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison on American Prestige Podcast. And remember, History As It Happens publishes new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter comes out every Friday. Sign up at History As It Happens dot com.