"Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe — for liberalism," Yale historian Samuel Moyn argues in his new book "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times." But Moyn never successfully defines either term, so in important ways his argument never gets off the ground. He does, however, succeed in raising awareness of how the moral confusion of so many liberals today stems from the early Cold War era and the events that preceded it. It's a selective view — de-emphasizing race, for instance, in a period when it was central to both global and domestic politics — but the underlying dynamics of liberal self-sabotage still hold important lessons.
At the same time that "liberals around the world were building the largest — as well as the most most egalitarian and redistributive — liberal states that had ever existed," Moyn writes, political theorists and historians like Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Lionel Trilling (each the subject of separate chapters) were radically downsizing what liberalism had traditionally meant. He argues they abandoned "many of liberalism's central features before the Cold War came —above all its perfectionism and its progressivism," instead "casting its truths as an embattled but noble creed that the free world had to preserve in a struggle against a totalitarian empire."
