The Strange Death of American Liberalism.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Political Booknotes: left for dead

THE STRANGE DEATH OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM

by H.W. Brands Yale University Press, $22.50

IT WOULDN'T BE FAIR TO CALL H.W. Brands's new book a casualty of the September 11 attacks just because it posits an essential and deep-seated American anti-governmentalism that doesn't seem to apply at the moment. One of Brands's main points is that the only purpose for which this country believes a national government is needed is defense. Therefore the only time when government has truly expanded has been during war. So if government is growing now, at the dawn of the war on terrorism, that would confirm Brands's theory, not overturn it.

This is a short book, written, as Brands puts it, more as an "argument" than a history (although he is a historian, at Texas A&M). The argument is a simple one: Americans have never accepted the idea of a big central government. Brands himself, though he writes in a voice of scrupulous neutrality, appears to be an old-fashioned anti-government conservative of the Robert Taft variety, suspicious not only of the Democrats but also of both the moralist and super-hawkish tendencies within the Republican Party. Partly because his basic premise is so forceful, Brands has to spend much of the book explaining why every expansion of government since the American Revolution doesn't disprove it. Therefore, The Strange Death of American Liberalism reads like a long string of caveats, though a consistently interesting one.

The biggest caveat concerns the Cold War, which, if you're willing to accept it as a war, as Brands does, then brings under the capacious umbrella of Brands's theory everything government took on domestically during the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, from Medicare to environmental protection to the War on Poverty to wage and price controls. In each case, Brands produces a nugget of evidence that links the domestic program to the global struggle. John F. Kennedy settled a steel strike because steel production was essential to weapons production, Dwight Eisenhower pushed through federal funding of education in the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act, and so on. Then, when the Cold War ended, we began inexorably returning to the American state of nature...