Revisiting The Vital Center

by Kevin Mattson

Sometimes where and when you first read a book matters. In graduate school while I was studying American intellectual history, my adviser, Christopher Lasch, suggested I crack open Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center. As a young leftist, it was easy for me to scoff at liberalism's inadequacies. It was even easier in 1990, because Lasch was putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus, The True and Only Heaven, where he ticked off the faults of liberalism. For Lasch, liberalism was naive about progress, had no sense of "limits" or any concept of "virtue," rejected a "heroic conception of life," and eventually degenerated into a snotty disdain toward ordinary people. Though I didn't agree with all of its arguments, Lasch's book helped my dislike of liberalism move onto more certain intellectual footing. But then I read The Vital Center. The experience was like a blow waking me from dogmatic slumber.

Here was a defense of liberalism that threw out ideas about optimism and progress. Schlesinger had learned from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his pessimism about human nature and sin. Just look at the "Soviet experience" and "the rise of fascism," Schlesinger told his readers in 1949, and it's clear that humans are "imperfect" and that "the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world." Considering that I had been reading Lasch, it was ironic to hear Schlesinger speak of "limits" throughout the book. Also strange was Schlesinger's belief that liberal democracy required certain virtues from its citizens. OK, Schlesinger may not have used the term virtue, but he certainly embraced such characteristics as "intricacy," "ambiguity," "a sense of humility," and Max Weber's ethic of responsibility-all as an alternative to the mindless certitude and "fanaticism" expected from the subjects of totalitarian political rule. Schlesinger believed citizens of a liberal democracy needed to face the "anxiety" of modernity-a heroic challenge of its own sort. This was no empty "proceduralism" nor was it the liberalism devoid of values that communitarians and "populists" like Lasch derided.

When I went back to The Vital Center recently to write about liberalism, I was struck again by its power. By now, Lasch's sophisticated critique of liberalism has been surpassed by a nonstop screed from the right's punditocracy. Liberalism was no longer devoid of virtue but downright treasonous, or so Ann Coulter and Michael Savage bellowed. I dreamed of mailing the right-wing punditocracy copies of The Vital Center accompanied with a note saying, Read this. Of course, I know better than to expect critical self-examination from the right in our sound-bite society. But the truth is that reevaluating Schlesinger's ideas and cold war liberalism seems as unlikely on the left, a left increasingly unwilling to rethink its own best ideas.

In the case of The Vital Center, much of the reason for this dismissal is that Schlesinger defined his own version of liberalism against communism and the "softness" of fellow-traveling "progressives," like supporters of Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign. Schlesinger's liberal anticommunism has gotten a bad reputation in left-wing academic circles (see Jeffrey Isaac, "Rethinking the Cultural Cold War," Dissent, Summer 2002). That's due to a long history of depoliticizing Marxism within the American academy. Who today reads Marx for his theory of revolution or his discussions of political strategy? No one. But you can find an army of graduate students and young professors who know all about Marx's theory of "alienation" or Lukács's "reification" or Gramsci's "hegemony." Heaven forbid that those same students discuss Lukács's Leninism or Gramsci's view of party leadership. After all, Marxism today is cultural theory, not political theory. The result is that the left can't understand those in the past-including anticommunists-who read Marx as a political thinker.

While Marxism has become just another repository of cultural theory, cultural theory has turned anticommunism into just another mindset that pillories "the other"-a paranoid, binary opposition operating in texts and language behind the backs of its believers. Even before graduate students were reading post-structuralists, there was a classic text that gave birth to the idea that anticommunism demonized its opponents. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible implicitly compared colonial America's "witch hunt" to the postwar "red hunt," equating cold war anticommunism with mob paranoia. Today, the depoliticized world of cultural studies has refueled this interpretation and loaded it up with postmodern jargon. Writing in a recent issue of the Journal of American History, one young historian takes on anticommunism and suggests that The Vital Center "offers a remarkable case study of the way erotic imagery and gendered dualisms can structure a historical narrative." Schlesinger, from this view, reinvented "the liberal according to the manly exigencies of Cold War politics." Jacques Derrida meets Arthur Miller meets The Vital Center.

Schlesinger's text does open itself to such criticism if read very selectively. So long as we stay with the passages where he derides "soft" (get it?) progressives who ally with communists, or aligns communist belief with sexual frustration, Schlesinger seems fair game. He argued that communists relied upon "lonely and frustrated people" who were "craving sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society." Such passages make Schlesinger sound obsessed with playing up his own brand of liberalism's machismo against a weak or effeminate "other." But to clamp a post-structural lens onto the text is to ignore the main argument of the book, Schlesinger's political and sociological critique of communism.

Schlesinger knew Karl Marx had insight about industrial capitalism and believed that some socialist writers had discovered "humane and liberal aspects of Marxism." But Marx's major error was to reduce all politics to economics. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously described the "modern state" as a "committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." Schlesinger believed this "mistaken analysis" was "responsible for the failure of" Marx's prophecies and the triumph of "bureaucratic collectivism" in the Soviet Union. Crucially, it neglected the possibility of liberal reform. "The capitalist state has clearly not been just the executive committee of the business community." If the state was liberal, there would be a struggle among groups vying to influence government policy: the liberal state was a pluralist state.

The term pluralism raises hackles on the left. Critics such as C. Wright Mills believed pluralism was an ideology that cloaked the enormous influence of a "power elite" in American politics. It's important, therefore, to remember that Schlesinger believed pluralism was not a descriptive but a normative term. American politics-if it was to be truly "liberal"-needed a plurality of groups fighting for influence. For sure, Schlesinger believed that the New Deal had helped solidify a pluralist politics in America, but when Dwight D. Eisenhower won office in 1952, Schlesinger was the first to criticize his presidency for returning America to a "single" interest state. The pluralism of The Vital Center was a program, not an apology.

This becomes clear when we examine Schlesinger's account of human nature. Following Niebuhr, he argued that conflict could never be eradicated from any society because self-love could never be eradicated from the human heart. Self-love and self-interest drove conflict, and a pluralistic civil society of voluntary associations provided the best cure for their corrosive effects. Prefiguring the arguments of Robert Putnam and others, Schlesinger believed group activity ensured a healthy conflict between "the individual and the community." Tension was itself a core liberal value-both between groups and within individuals torn between self-interest and civic responsibility. Marx's hope for an "end to history," an epoch free of conflict, was dangerous and impossible.

Besides erring politically, Marx erred sociologically. The standard narrative of postwar history depicts left-wing writers recognizing that Marx's bipolarized view of class-bourgeois versus proletariat-and his belief in imminent capitalist crisis failed to explain America's newfound economic abundance. Workers weren't suffering from immiseration, the arguments went, they were buying televisions and automobiles. Schlesinger would follow this drift, to a certain extent, but interestingly enough, The Vital Center was written at a time when many critics still feared America could slip back into a depression after the war.

In The Vital Center, Schlesinger did not reject all talk of class. He rejected Marx's talk of class. He pointed to a long American tradition of confronting class inequalities, found in the writings of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Schlesinger quoted Andrew Jackson condemning "the rich and powerful" for bending "the acts of Government to their selfish purpose" against the best interests of "the humble members of society." But Schlesinger also pointed out that Jackson believed in governmental reforms that would prevent this selfishness from culminating in crisis. Here then was a liberal way of talking about class: "Economic conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination; yet economic conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society."

If Schlesinger's anticommunism was more thought-out than scholars working in cultural studies would have us believe, it was also more measured than Miller's play suggests. Liberal anticommunism was not hysteria but rather a balancing act. It recognized the threat of communist espionage while protecting civil liberties. As a historian, Schlesinger knew the America of the post-World War I red scare. To prevent anything like this from happening again, Schlesinger insisted that "acts, not thoughts" mattered. People had the right to hold "loathsome ideas," but they didn't have the right to pursue espionage. Rid the government of spies, Schlesinger argued, but this imperative could not justify "conformity" or "stagnation" or the repression of "free discussion." Here was Schlesinger's liberal balancing act.

Prudence and precision mattered to Schlesinger, and he turned these characteristics of mind to foreign affairs as well. Though the cold war sometimes appears as an era in which political differences melted into a mind-numbing "consensus," it was actually a time of sharp disagreement. Soon after the Second World War, many on the right abandoned their tradition of isolationism and embraced a bolder foreign policy. Ex-communists such as James Burnham called for a "preemptive" attack on communist power, and Whittaker Chambers believed such a battle was a necessary moral crusade. These weren't just ideas published in the National Review. General Douglas MacArthur threatened to put them into practice by extending the Korean War all the way to China (for which President Harry S Truman famously deposed him), and Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, spoke openly of "rolling back" communism.

In contrast, Schlesinger argued for "containment"-"checking Soviet expansion"-and "reconstruction"-"the removal in non-Communist states of the conditions of want and insecurity, which invite the spread of Communism." Today, containment is seen as an amoral military strategy. But it was actually grounded in Reinhold Niebuhr's warnings against the sin of "national pride" and hubris (which had an enormous influence on George Kennan, the original architect of containment). Niebuhr reminded his fellow citizens that "patience" was one of the hardest virtues for Americans to practice when acting abroad. So too did Schlesinger, when he cautioned in The Vital Center against trying to "hurry the process" of fighting communism by using force. If a liberal citizen had to cultivate a sense of humility, so too did the liberal nation.

Though terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists are not replicas of communist governments, it seems obvious that Schlesinger's prudent mindset remains relevant. He believed that Americans must recognize the evil lurking within the hearts of their opponents-the "children of darkness" as Niebuhr called them-but at the same time search their own actions for signs of hubris. Recently, Schlesinger made this explicit by publishing a critique of the Bush administration's theory of preemptive war. There is a straight line from The Vital Center to War and the American Presidency (2004). Schlesinger's cold war liberalism and its talk of containment grounded in humility might now have more appeal-considering the big promises made going into Iraq and the mess that exists there now.

The Vital Center warned against national hubris by reminding Americans that all was not right on the home front. For Schlesinger, the cold war was no time for national triumphalism-as in Henry Luce's celebration of the "American Century"-but a time for national self-scrutiny and introspection. Schlesinger wanted Americans to confront their own sins, including, for white Americans, "the sin of racial pride." "The racial cruelties in the United States or in most areas of western colonialism," Schlesinger explained, "compare unfavorably with the Soviet nationalities policy (at least as described in Soviet propaganda) and with the long Russian traditions of racial assimilation." For the United States to stand for democracy in the world, it had to stand for democracy at home. Today, historians like Mary Dudziak remind us that this argument helped grease the wheels of the civil rights movement.

By linking the international policy of containment with domestic policy on civil rights, Schlesinger started to articulate a liberalism grounded in the idea of "national greatness." If America accepted world leadership, it had to set an example and become, once and for all, "a city on a hill." This was a distinctly liberal vision of nationhood. Schlesinger believed that one "failure of the right" was its inability to rally citizens to anything besides individual self-interest. Though liberals had to discard optimism about human nature, they could certainly make demands on their fellows that the right never could. The idea of "national greatness" was a liberal idea through and through.

Remembering how liberalism was once wedded to "national greatness" highlights an enormous absence in American political culture today. Think back to September 11, 2001. Bush's most famous miscalculation afterward was to jeopardize international trust by rushing into the Iraq War. But there was a domestic miscalculation as well. Instead of pressing for Americans to think harder about civic and national obligation, Bush called for a return to "normalcy"-to shopping and, of course, tax cuts. His presidency did nothing to build national trust, and the country's division since then makes that painfully clear. But there was no response to this crisis from a liberalism with its own conception of "national greatness," and this fact has marred our politics and made liberals more marginal than they need be.

Even when Bush called young Americans to sacrifice their lives in Iraq, he never balanced this with shared sacrifice at home. The Iraq War is the first war in recent memory fought by a president committed to cutting back social services (even to veterans) and privatizing the remaining vestiges of the welfare state, the first to be coupled with tax breaks for the wealthy. Or consider Bush's recent electoral pandering to the religious right on gay marriage. This president-and the right in general-has no vision for building a national community of inclusion. His vision of national pride seems a shell game.

The possibility of "national greatness" liberalism is not the only thing to be gleaned from The Vital Center. The book exemplifies a frame of mind needed on the left today. In reading Schlesinger, one sees a man confronting difficult questions, realistically assessing them, and then coming to well-defined answers that utopians and ideologues on the left and right will likely reject. The book's central arguments-recognize the evil of your enemies, but don't become hubristic; face the threat of communism, but don't trash civil liberties; criticize fellow-traveling progressives, but don't take the heat off the right; recognize the best of your own national tradition, but don't become arrogant-capture the spirit of Schlesinger's "tough-minded" liberalism. Here was a pragmatism that never denigrated guiding principles. We see this when Schlesinger defines "the great tradition of liberalism" as "a reasonable responsibility about politics and a moderate pessimism about man."

In reading Schlesinger's arguments, we need not ignore the book's faults and datedness. For instance, Schlesinger overestimated the staying power of Soviet totalitarianism, but in this he was like other anticommunists at the time, including George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. He also granted the New Deal's welfare state and Keynesian economics a legitimacy they may no longer possess. Schlesinger's alternative to communism now seems under attack, and the pluralist state must be fought for and reconstructed.

These faults, however, are outweighed by Schlesinger's insightful use of history. By the time he wrote The Vital Center, Schlesinger had already won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson (1945). In that book, he made history speak to contemporary concerns: "History can contribute nothing in the way of panaceas. But it can assist vitally in the formation of that sense of what is democratic, of what is in line with our republican traditions, which alone can save us." Schlesinger helped forge a "usable past" for what he labeled "a new and distinct political generation" coming of age after the New Deal. Today, another generation is coming of political age, a generation that didn't live through the 1960s and the tragedy of the Vietnam War. It's my own generation, and it could usefully look back to the cold war liberalism that boomers on the left so vehemently rejected. There's no better place to start than by reading The Vital Center.

Kevin Mattson is author most recently of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism.