Word: brinkley
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...Newt, the Washington evoked in Alan Brinkley's masterly The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Alfred A. Knopf; 371 pages; $27.50) seems like another planet. In the late 1930s and '40s, the word liberal was a badge of honor, not an epithet. Federal officials castigated "economic royalists," denounced predatory monopolists and seemed to regard the words free enterprise as a cloak for corporate exploitation. Big Business, not Big Government, was seen by Americans as the source of economic injustice...
...impulses of the early New Deal--in which modern industrial capitalism was seen as a flawed system that needed to be repaired--gave way to a rights-based liberalism that accepted capitalism as it was and concentrated instead on civil rights and a full-employment economy. The subtext of Brinkley's book is that the unremembered battles fought by idealistic liberal bureaucrats in the '30s and '40s are part of a never ending American struggle between the conflicting national impulses that Alexis de Tocqueville described as communitarianism versus individualism...
...Brinkley sketches out the beginning of the era of mass consumption, recounting how America evolved from an economy driven by production to one stimulated by consumer spending. The prophet of this change was the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who preached that the way out of the U.S.'s 1937 recession was the triggering of demand, not the revival of investment. This idea was new to the industrial age, which had always followed Say's Law of Markets in asserting that production drove consumption...
...Brinkley's scholarship suggests that while the convictions of liberals have changed, those of ordinary Americans have remained consistently contradictory. In 1936, he writes, "much of the American electorate welcomed (even expected) assistance from government in solving their problems but nonetheless remained skeptical of state power." As evidenced by the 1994 elections, that skepticism has apparently intensified; millions of voters benefit from Social Security and Medicare and simultaneously complain that government is evil and inept...
William O. Douglas once remarked that liberalism is the spirit that is not too sure it's right. Brinkley suggests that liberals were certain they were right but were never exactly sure what they stood for. Brinkley illuminates the rather arcane arguments in which some liberals urged "managed competition" (a phrase the Clinton Administration considered and abandoned for its health plan), while others advocated economic decentralization, and still others promulgated an expanded welfare state...