Why have American liberals been losing most political contests in recent decades? Theorist Thomas A. Spragens argues that the core of liberalism's problems lies in an ill-conceived transformation in public philosophy. In a “political treatise informed by scholarly resources” (p. ix), he defends an older liberalism, which he describes as populist and progressive, and decries a new one that he associates with the social justice approach of John Rawls. Shifting his attention back and forth from theory to practice, Spragens constructs an argument that liberalism will not recoup its political fortunes until it rediscovers its “populist heart” (p. xvii). Bearing some resemblance to previous treatises by Richard Rorty and Michael Sandel (along with important differences that Spragens notes), Getting the Left Right is provocative and powerful as theoretical critique and advocacy, but is less effective in providing a historical explanation for contemporary liberalism's troubled state.

Spragens's traditional liberalism is an ideal type devised with acknowledged academic license, yet he anchors it in a nineteenth-century assortment of political and intellectual figures. The founders of his liberal tradition were the political leaders of the democratization that remade America in that century's early decades: Thomas Jefferson and the Jacksonians. However, the author pays far more attention to the writers who subsequently developed the ideals and values of populist-progressive liberalism: Abraham Lincoln, John Dewey, and especially Walt Whitman. (John Stuart Mill is also enlisted as a foreign friend of American liberal ideals.) These writers turned liberalism into an optimistic faith in human progress, defined on the collective side as self-rule and on the individual side as self-actualization. Their liberalism was expansive, aiming for the elevation of the common folk. Hostile to powerful elites, traditional liberalism found its historical agent—and its political base—in what Anti-Federalist Melancton Smith called “the respectable yeomanry.”

According to Spragens, traditional liberalism was battered after World War II by social science studies that called into question the rationality and democratic commitments of the ordinary citizen, and by the ominous appeal of McCarthyism to what historian Richard Hofstader famously labeled as the paranoid streak in American political culture. The Civil Rights movement, admirable as it was in fulfilling democratic values, also had the unfortunate effect of shifting liberals' concerns from self-rule and self-actualization to the elaboration of a new regime of rights, situated not in majoritarian political processes but in the courts and the bureaucracy. At this historical juncture, John Rawls, whom Spragens describes as the “high priest” (p. 49) of the new liberal movement, articulated the public philosophy that would lead liberalism astray. Making distributive justice primary, Rawls's work not only downplayed self-rule and self-actualization but also disparaged the work ethic and severed the link between effort and reward that had been the signature demand of American populists. In Rawls's new moral/political geography, beneficent liberal elites acted on behalf of the least advantaged, while the (white) working class, the erstwhile agent of liberal progress, now became the principal obstacle to “liberal” reform.

Spragens develops an extensive critique of Rawls's deontological liberalism. He suggests that Rawls stretches the ideal of social justice to impossible lengths, shrinks the liberal conception of moral agency, and depends in the end on an abstract platform for distributing primary goods that cannot motivate a mass base in the political world. If Rawls were only an academic philosopher, these failings would not matter so much, but as the intellectual architect of the new liberalism, his errors have been politically costly.

In a chapter with the Whitmanesque title of “New Democratic Vistas,” Spragens lays out his platform for a reformed liberalism. Political prospects for liberalism will continue to be grim so long as its adherents stick to Rawlsian talk of social justice but will brighten if the older liberalism of self-rule and self-realization is revived and updated. “For American liberalism to regain its moral equilibrium and appeal,” Spragens writes, “it needs to demand less of justice, to bolster its hopes for democratic community, and to expect more of its people” (p. 219). He follows this recommendation of a transformation in liberal public philosophy with a concrete policy agenda, much of which is not noticeably different from the agenda of the liberalism he is criticizing. The most striking argument in the chapter involves the generational change that he believes might be necessary to cure liberalism of its Rawlsian mistake. The preoccupation with social justice, he suggests, “is to some extent locked into the perceptual prisms and emotional responses of those American liberals whose moral and political sensibilities were crystallized in the sixties and seventies. In contrast, those for whom the Selma march is something in a history book and who grew up in a multicultural world where most college graduates are women … will be preoccupied by different social issues” (pp. 215–216).

As someone who is as concerned as Spragens about the trajectory and fate of liberalism, I find much with which to agree in his diagnosis of liberalism's current maladies. Many liberals have indeed expressed a condescending view of the fears and dreams of the white working class, despaired of the majority's rationality, and become overly reliant on courts and bureaucrats to advance the rights of the disadvantaged. As a lapsed political theorist, I do not want to venture too far into his domain, although I wonder about granting Rawls such hegemonic status in liberal intellectual circles and neglecting the many democratic theorists, along with such political scientists as Theda Skocpol and Robert Putnam, who share Spragens's belief in the centrality of the civic virtues. In the spirit of this critical dialogue, I will instead briefly bring to bear a critical perspective toward Spragens's account of liberalism that is drawn from the historical approach associated with American political development (APD).

Taking an APD angle—and drawing on such authors as Michael Rogin, Rogers Smith, and James Morone—the starting point of my commentary is that Spragens's ideal type of traditional liberalism is unduly benign. Liberal virtues historically did not come bundled in a neat package. Jefferson and the Jacksonians were more democratic than their political opponents but also more racist. Even Whitman, for all of the egalitarian sentiments in his poetry, was a foe of abolitionism and an advocate of colonization in his journalism. The party of The People, the Democratic Party, was until the New Deal the party of the South and of antiblack immigrants. Its elitist opponents had a kinder (albeit paternalistic) approach toward people of color, and it was from Whig/Republican social circles that the original feminists emerged. In short, what Spragens takes as universal goals of traditional liberalism—self-rule and self-actualization—were in practice preserved for white men and depended upon excluding all others from pursuing these aspirations.

In celebrating the optimistic teleology of traditional liberalism, Spragens also slights its frequently combative tone. Much of the history of popular liberal politics was a struggle against the rich and powerful forces that threatened to diminish The People—for example, by turning independent artisans into factory hands or the yeomanry into tenant farmers. In this struggle, it was the populist-progressive forces, at least in later incarnations, who advocated policies (like the progressive income tax) that promoted distributive justice. “Social justice” was not an invention of 1960s liberals; as Sidney Milkis has recently pointed out (Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy, 2009), it was a watchword for the Progressives of 1912. As Alan Brinkley and Michael Sandel have lamented, contemporary political liberals are actually less likely than their forebears to seek economic redistribution, relying instead on sophisticated macroeconomics to generate economic growth.

Once traditional liberalism is considered in this historical framework, the transformation of recent decades that Spragens decries appears in a changed light. The alienation of so many members of the white working class from the Democratic Party has less to do with the influence of Rawlsian thought than with the social movements of the sixties and seventies. The movement for Civil Rights by African Americans, and the subsequent movements it inspired among women, gays and lesbians, and antiwar activists, shook the social order to its core, unsettling relations of power and identity alike. Spragens is right to point out (p. 139) that it was the white working class that disproportionately bore the burdens of racial change in their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Nonetheless, as he readily acknowledges, an unequal social order needed to be unsettled.

The Civil Rights movement established a compelling logic of equal treatment in the minds of contemporary liberals, and once extended to African Americans, it could not be denied when it was further extended to other people of color, women, or gays and lesbians. It sparked a reevaluation of American history that was similarly compelling, even if its revisionist findings were unpopular among those accustomed to a more flattering portrait of the American past. To be sure, the new liberalism that was inspired by the social movements was given to excesses, especially in its early years. Further, it was politically disadvantaged for the most part (although time may now be on its side with generational and demographic changes). But morally speaking, there was no turning back for liberals. Perhaps Spragens is right that a new generation will regard the Selma march and its ilk as standard material in the history books, without any special moral resonance. If so, I will consider that fact to mark a failure on the part of educators, rather than a precondition for a more appealing liberalism.

Moreover, I question whether it is adequate to depict contemporary liberalism merely as prioritizing rights and distributive justice. Perhaps we have forgotten that when the social movements of the sixties and seventies erupted, they spoke of their goals in terms of “liberation” and “freedom.” African Americans hoped to be liberated from Jim Crow and northern ghettoes, feminists from the sphere of domesticity, and gays and lesbians from the closet. Their demands were for the chance at self-actualization that existing social and political structures had denied to them, and their struggle for rights long denied was a necessary basis for such personal development. In this regard, they were closer to Spragens's ideal of universal human flourishing than the traditional liberals to whom he credits this aspiration.

None of this historical analysis obviates the political dilemmas that Spragens rightly diagnoses in contemporary liberalism. It does suggest that social equality cannot be jettisoned as a central liberal ideal, and that contemporary liberals need to search for new ground upon which it can reside alongside populist self-rule.