Phillip Abbott is too modest. His essay seeks to defend, against its many critics, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, which was published half a century ago. Abbott bases his defense mainly on his discovery that certain concepts of Hartz's—“the liberal enlightenment,” “the American democrat”—remain valid and helpful in explaining the politics of the 1960s and after. Yet the merits of Abbott's interpretation of that phase in our political history rise or fall on his own thinking, not Hartz's—his use of Hartz's book, and not Hartz's book itself. If Hartz's work gets him where he wants to go better than Judith Shklar's or Rogers Smith's does, that's fine. Gratitude is a worthy sentiment, too often forgotten in our narcissistic academic culture. But by now, Hartz is mainly a figure of historical interest. I'm less interested in whether Louis Hartz was right than in whether Phillip Abbott is right—not about Louis Hartz but about the events of 1960s and their legacies.

Hartz's book has, to be sure, been widely misunderstood. Although published in 1955, it is more a book of the 1930s and 1940s, registering a former leftist's education in the some of the realities of American politics and why they precluded the success of an American socialism.

The young Hartz was drawn, it appears, to what Abbott calls the “multiple-traditions approach.” In his first important publication in 1940, Hartz observed that the history of labor ideas before the Civil War was “a field all too much neglected by historians today,” and he retold the story of the Jacksonian-era New England labor radical Seth Luther. At a glance, Luther was anything but an irrational Lockean. The tobacco-stained, leather-lunged agitator at times seemed, Hartz wrote, “to adumbrate the later Marxian theory of the historical inevitability of armed struggle.” But Hartz discovered that this was only a mirage. Luther's philosophy was actually rooted in the natural-rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and Christian reformism. A typical labor leader of his day, he never stepped beyond the limits of the American liberal tradition, even when he excoriated the evils of industrial capitalism.¹

Based on this perception, Hartz might have argued that the natural-rights tradition (what he later called, in shorthand, Lockeanism) was so open to clashing interpretations and fierce political allegiances that it provided world enough for fundamental political conflicts. But Hartz remained too much an intellectual of the 1930s and 1940s for that; and the persistence later showed, paradoxically, in The Liberal Tradition in America. (The idea that his book was a kind of instant response to the Cold War or McCarthyism mistakes Hartz's long-developing views for a zig in the Zeitgeist.) Strikingly, although Hartz built a strong case about Americans' imperviousness to Marxist political categories, his own historical and social categories—peasant and proletarian, bourgeois and petit bourgeois—remained encased in a Marxist, or at any rate European, vocabulary. For Hartz, Marxism meant Europe, and Europe basically meant France: hence his endless analogizing of Americans to Frenchmen, to show just how enthralled the Americans were to their strange, provincial loyalty to private property and natural law. Contrary to left-wing fantasy—“[t]he American Marxist learns nothing and forgets nothing,” he wrote—Daniel Shays was no Gracchus Babeuf, Andrew Jackson was no Flocon, and George Fitzhugh was, at best, a fraudulent Joseph de Maistre.”²

One strength of this approach—delivered in Hartz's gatling-gun, no-nonsense delivery—was that it cleared away leftist and Progressive myths about the equivalence of our political traditions with those of the Old World, as well as certain left-of-center conceits about His Majesty, the People. Compared to radicals and even liberals in other countries, Americans were, Hartz contended, philosophically pallid, their debates narrowly gauged. The most reactionary of American slaveholders were still basically capitalist accumulators, like everybody else; and the most radical of radicals, including Seth Luther, believed that a widened suffrage and the right to organize would bring labor (and, Hartz might have added, ex-slaves) into the promised land. As for the People, they were as prone, maybe more so, to endorse the self-made American, trickle-down, democratic myths of the Whig Party as they were to endorse attacks on the banking aristocracy and the malefactors of great wealth. Hartz never made clear how he, an American liberal, had managed to escape the overarching consensus—and the bathetic blather of American liberals and radicals posing as figures out of “The Grapes of Wrath,” exemplars of the worldwide struggle. That is, he never fully acknowledged the irony that his own analysis was steeped in Marxism. But this was a common, excusable syndrome of the sharper ex-leftist critics of the 1950s, including Lionel Trilling and Richard Hofstadter. A disillusioned leftism, still beholden to leftism while cutting through myth and convention, at least had the value of cutting through myth and convention.

This philosophical debunking put American political conflict in a clearer, less romanticized perspective—more responsive to what actually occurred than to what the participants claimed was occurring. The basic point was not original to Hartz. The fictional “everyman” philosopher Mr. Dooley delivered it at the height of the Progressive-era excitement: “Th' noise ye hear is not th' first gun iv a rivolution. It's on'y th' people iv the United States batin' a carpet.”³

The great weakness of Hartz's approach was that, as a unified field theory of American political thought, it turned politics in a modern liberal polity into fake battles fought with wooden swords. Historians and political theorists, after a period of infatuation with Hartz's brash, overstated corrective, realized this could not be true. Hofstadter, an ambivalent upholder of consensus views similar to Hartz's, made the point by describing an imaginary political cartoon. It is 1865, and Billy Yank and Johnny Reb meet up, both showing the scars of war, and they gaze out over the war-torn landscape and the graves of more than half-a-million killed. “Well,” one says to the other, “at least we didn't break outside the liberal consensus and fight for ideas that really matter.”⁴

According to Hartz's boxy categories, America is a postfeudal society; therefore, it lacks the organic basis for either monarchist or socialist challenges to liberal capitalism; therefore, American politics generates a great deal of passionate rhetoric that disguises conflicts of interest as conflicts of philosophy, when everything boils down to variants of Lockean liberalism. The trouble, of course, is that those variants of liberalism—as inflected by America's experience of slavery, racial subordination, intense labor conflict (more violent, historically, than in Europe), immigration and nativism, religious differences—along with a huge array of suspicions between countryside and city, traditionalist and modernist—have been quite enough to generate abiding ideological cleavages as well as material differences.

That James Madison's and the framers' reformulation of popular sovereignty—a radical idea in 1776—has stood up for more than two centuries is a mark of good fortune, a great deal of carpet beating, and the victory of the Union Army more than it is of postfeudal pallor. At the very least, American Lockean liberalism has come in two distinct, ever evolving versions: a liberal version—open to change, vulnerable to utopian flights, eager to apply human intelligence to social and economic problems; and a conservative version—suspicious of change, a check on utopianism, resistant to purposeful reform especially when reform threatens the existing distribution of wealth and power. Both versions have their strengths and weaknesses, but the two might be characterized, as they were by Emerson, as the party of the future and the party of the past, the party of hope and the party of memory.

Both sides may appear to share certain ideas. They may even speak in the same political language. So a rebel private in the 44th Virginia Regiment wrote from the battlefield in 1863 that he was fighting in “a struggle between Liberty on one side, and Tyranny on the other.” So, months earlier, a Confederate lieutenant-colonel from Tennessee wrote that “the perpetuity of Republican principles on this Continent depends upon our success.” And so, at a freshly dug graveyard at Gettysburg in November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, chief tyrant to these Confederate idealists, could proclaim that on the Union's effort would rest liberty's fate and whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Irrational Lockeans all. But that was beside the point at issue.⁵

What of the 1960s? Another imaginary cartoon comes to mind: an Alabama state trooper raises his truncheon to split the skull of a civil rights marcher on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, above a caption that reads, “Don't get me wrong, I'm for private property, too.”

But Phillip Abbott's interpretation is much too subtle for such caricature. If I read him correctly, he sees the period unfolding in three phases. First, under the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a bounded, even timid liberalism tried to advance reform by tinkering with capitalism, broadening prosperity, and applying technocratic solutions to social problems. Except for its veneer of ironic skepticism and pragmatism, New Frontier liberalism was basically a return to the kind of Progressive liberal reform that Hartz found entrapped by irrational Lockeanism. Celebrations of Camelot as a leap out of the past into a politics of modernity—and sad reflections of what might have been “had JFK lived”—are based mainly on wishful thinking and unwarranted projection.

It was in the second phase, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, that politics seemed disjointed and fractious—but all was not what it seemed. By declaring a war on poverty as well as racial discrimination, and by laying the groundwork for compensatory affirmative action, the Johnson administration's rhetoric offered what Abbott aptly calls “an image of a door unbolted.” In the area of civil rights, LBJ certainly spoke of freedom and liberation in new ways, identifying himself with the idea of racial equality more than any president before him. Yet radicals were quick to see through these changes as cosmetic, hiding an ideology of cooptation and containment of the poor and promising the entrenchment of establishment experts and bureaucrats. Out of those criticisms, and revulsion at the Vietnam intervention, came a genuine radicalism that forced LBJ (as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never forced to do) to defend the Lockean principles of liberal reform. A Thermidor was in the offing, led by the quintessential petit bourgeois American democrat, Richard M. Nixon. In the final, Nixonian phase of the 1960s, widespread resentments of limousine liberals and the undeserving poor—stoked by anger at the indulgence of violent lawlessness, antimaterialism, and antipatriotism—brought the downfall of 1960s liberalism. It also brought the eradication of an evanescent 1960s radicalism. Yet because Nixon's Thermidor was basically liberal and not reactionary, it left in place some of the basic reforms of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As an antidote to the grandiose, apocalyptic imagery of the 1960s that still remains current among scholars and pundits—whether it be Charles Murray or Barbara Ehrenreich—Abbott's interpretation has much to recommend it. That the period, as lived and experienced, felt so different from how Abbott describes it only makes his description's cool-headedness more appealing. Yet a historian still wonders if Abbott's account, like Hartz's unified field theory, simplifies the past—and whether its schematic categories are more helpful in explaining what did not happen than in what did.

The Kennedy White House, for example, evolved much more, even in its short life, than Abbott allows. One need not be a nostalgic or a “multiple-tradition writer” to see this. In 1961 President Kennedy was wary of the civil rights movement, willing to placate the segregationists in his own party (if only because they controlled so much on Capitol Hill), and generally more absorbed with foreign affairs than with domestic policy. But reality intruded—and Kennedy changed. By the summer of 1963, his brother's Justice Department had become, in many respects, closely allied with the civil rights movement. In June, President Kennedy spoke of the great change that was at hand as a “revolution,” based on “a moral issue, as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”⁶

That Kennedy remained an American liberal, beholden to the natural rights tradition, is unquestionable—but historically, this observation is about as useful as wondering what might have happened had Kennedy lived (a counterfactual speculation that, I admit, I have occasionally indulged in myself). Within the limits of his liberalism, Kennedy had moved from cool indifference to engagement on an issue that, as far as the social and legal structures of the South were concerned, truly did mark a revolution—or, as the historian C. Vann Woodward, among others, called it, a Second Reconstruction.⁷

Abbott's assertion that the radicalism of the later 1960s was more marginal to American politics than its defenders and enemies contended (and still contend) is surely correct. Having barely won the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon won a crushing victory in 1972 over an opponent—and a Democratic Party—that had become closely identified (no matter how unfairly) with counterculture radicalism. But, again, I wonder if Abbott's borrowed image of the American democrat slights how much Nixon and his party were changing as well. Until the 1960 election, Nixon still laid claim to the GOP's mantle as the party of Lincoln. Before then, it was Nixon, and not Kennedy or LBJ, who had made gestures of reaching out to Martin Luther King Jr. All of that was over by 1972, when the Republican strategy of becoming the party of the conservative white South had kicked into full gear. If all of America was Canarsie,⁸

Abbott's analysis of the 1960s liberal Thermidor would be stronger than it is. But the reaction against the civil rights movement and the Great Society was founded chiefly on the realignment of the vast majority of the white South—across the lines of class, religion, and subregion—into the Republican Party. It was a revolt of local Southern elites—the country club, and, later, the white suburban crowd described so well by Diane McWhorter—as much as it was of the trapped, forgotten American middle.⁹ Its politics ran closer in many ways to those of 1877 than to Hartz's (and Abbott's) favored example, the Whig victory of 1840.

As Hartz himself conceded, his analysis of the liberal tradition did not do terribly well at explaining the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. And in spirit, as well as in substance, the reaction against the liberalism of the 1960s looks a great deal like a retreat from the Second Reconstruction and the beginning of a Second Gilded Age.

Finally, writing in the aftermath of the 2004 election, I wonder if Abbott's interpretation of the 1960s is sufficiently alert to the depth of the political change that may now be at hand. In 1970 Richard Nixon's attorney general, John N. Mitchell, warned that “this country is going so far to the right you are not even going to recognize it.” Mitchell's prophecy became the political mission of the president of Nixon's College Republicans—Karl Rove. The bounded liberal Thermidor of the 1960s, with all of its compromises and Lockean underpinnings, may turn out to have been but the prelude to a longer counterrevolution in our politics that nobody who came of age reading The Liberal Tradition in America could quite have imagined. It may well be true that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and Antonin Scalia are Lockean liberals. Whether or not they are, we will learn, over the years to come, how much any of that really matters.