There's something about the New Deal that invites generational revision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism still defined the parameters of public policy, historians celebrated the New Deal as the culmination of modern reform—the federal government's relentlessly pragmatic, strikingly successful response to the burdens of an industrial age. The fierce politics of the late 1960s shattered that interpretation. The New Deal was a terrible disappointment, said the era's younger historians, its grand promise undermined by the Roosevelt administration's refusal to confront capitalist power while embracing—even reinforcing—racial, gender, and class hierarchies.Footnote ¹

Then came the triumph of Reaganism in the 1980s, and the interpretation shifted again. With imposing sophistication, Alan Brinkley, Nelson Lichtenstein, Steve Fraser, and others argued that the New Deal created a moment of real opportunity, when policymakers and activists raised fundamental questions about the shape of America's political economy. The opportunity closed in the late 1930s when liberals abandoned sweeping economic questions for a truncated program of Keynesianism, anticommunism, and the pursuit of civil rights. Postwar liberalism had its triumphs, they concluded, but in the long run its acceptance of corporate power and emphasis on identity politics undermined the political coalition the New Dealers had built, thus clearing the way for conservatism's counter-revolution.Footnote ²

It's been almost twenty years since that counter-revolution. In that time, conservatism has become so firmly entrenched it now seems perfectly natural, the way American politics is supposed to be ordered. And once again the New Deal's meaning changes.

To be sure, Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore's marvelous essay doesn't completely overturn the previous interpretation. Drawing directly on Brinkley's brilliantly executed book, The End of Reform, they argue that the early New Deal offered hope of “a new idea of collective economic citizenship” that would replace American's traditional sense of individualism with a “vision of shared sacrifice, accountability, and recovery.” At the moment of its greatest triumph, though—labor's extraordinary breakthrough of 1937—the administration started its swing toward “the Keynesian dream of full employment and broad-based consumption.” By the end of the Second World War the shift was complete, the consequences profound. “As liberals dismissed more redistributive policies that significantly curtailed corporate prerogatives,” Cowie and Salvatore say, “the potent connection that once tied the individual to a communal vision sharply ebbed.” Thus did postwar liberalism sow the seeds of its own destruction.

Cowie and Salvatore's signal achievement is to place that well-established story into a broader, more complex context. Over the course of American history, they argue, the nation's “founding mythos of individualism” has undermined the state's claim to serve the common good. The New Dealers' disastrous turn to Keynesianism, they say, stemmed not from a failure of will but rather from their inability to move beyond the individualism that is so central to American thought. The liberals' embrace of individualism had two consequences: it cut the legs out from under a surging labor movement poised to challenge corporate power; and it created a chasm between the liberal elite and those Americans—Catholics foremost among them—who clung to a communitarian, corporatist ethic. From the start, moreover, the New Deal project was undermined by another longstanding American tradition: the corrosive power of race, which bitterly, sometimes violently, divided liberalism's core constituencies. Given these “inherent and … unresolved contradictions,” Cowie and Salvatore conclude, it's a wonder that the New Deal order lasted as long as it did before succumbing to the nation's deeply imbedded antistatism.

Cowie and Salvatore are hardly the first scholars to say that the American context limited reform. The most common iteration of that argument, though, focuses on the constraining structures of the American state. By stressing the centrality of American political culture—the nation's habits of mind—Cowie and Salvatore are able to unpack much more thoroughly than previous historians the ideological baggage New Dealers and their many constituencies carried with them. In the process, the liberal project suddenly becomes more tentative, more fractured, and ultimately much more fragile than historians have thought it to be. If Salvatore and Cowie are correct—as I think they are—they've overturned the assumption that has guided New Deal historiography from the start: the unquestioned belief that the New Deal did offer an opportunity for truly dramatic change, if only liberals had been willing to seize the moment. That's a truly imposing accomplishment.

So it seems a bit awkward—if not downright ungrateful—to say that I wish Cowie and Salvatore had pushed their argument even further.

In particular, I would have liked them to move more forcefully away from the declension narrative central to the now-dominant interpretation of the New Deal order. Cowie and Salvatore don't need to argue that the early New Deal held out the promise of a liberal “collective economic citizenship.” The Roosevelt administration's only real flirtation with a collective economic vision—the National Recovery Administration—was essentially conservative. When that experiment collapsed in 1935, the New Dealers immediately swung to the individualist politics Cowie and Salvatore so effectively describe. Take the two most important legislative achievements of that critical year. While the Wagner Act supported working people's collective action, it explicitly did so to promote a proto-Keynesianism that, as Steve Fraser showed years ago, had been central to progressive thought since the 1920s. The unionism that it fostered was premised on a factory-level rule of law that actually reinforced workers' sense of individualism, most dramatically through one of its most powerful provisions, a strictly-enforced seniority system. The other great achievement of 1935—the Social Security Act—was more collective in that it redistributed income from those still working to those who had retired But the administration hid that fact by telling Americans that they were contributing directly to their own pensions, an individualist illusion that still defines public understanding of the Social Security system.Footnote ³

Similarly, Cowie and Salvatore could have extended their analysis of the New Deal's embrace of racial injustice. They're absolutely right to say that liberals were forced to concede to southern conservative demands that New Deal programs discriminate against African Americans. But the Roosevelt administration also institutionalized discriminatory practices white southerners didn't demand. There's no more important example than the New Deal's embrace of discriminatory housing policies, which solidified the northern system of segregation. What's more, some New Deal programs gave whites new ways to enforce segregation on their own, again largely in the north. Fledgling CIO unions in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, for instance, used the Wagner Act's protection to create seniority systems that locked African Americans into a narrow band of job categories.Footnote ⁴

Given all of this, it seems fair to say that the New Deal wasn't a failed or fumbled attempt to create a collective form of economic citizenship. It was a largely successful attempt to give the federal government the power it needed to restore economic stability and promote growth through mass purchasing power. From 1940 onward, the United States economy experienced remarkable economic expansion, driven by an extraordinarily vibrant consumer base. But the New Dealers hadn't made their economic regime universal. On the contrary, they had embedded it into an overwhelmingly racialized (and gendered) state.

If we accept that definition of the New Deal project, postwar liberalism takes on a very different cast. Progressive programs of the 1950s and 1960s weren't pale imitations of the New Deal's expansive promise; they were very much in keeping with the main thrust of the Roosevelt years. The Great Society is a case in point. As Cowie and Salvatore say, Lyndon Johnson rejected suggestions that his War on Poverty should embark on a 1930s-style program of job creation. By expanding public works and the welfare state, however, the Great Society did create massive numbers of jobs, many of them in state and local government. As Jane Berger recently argued, a substantial portion of those jobs went to African Americans, particularly African-American women—one of the key reasons why Black poverty rates plummeted in the 1960s.Footnote ⁵

Therein lies the key difference between the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. Because of the pressure brought to bear by a surging civil rights movement, the Johnson administration tried to dismantle—sometimes against its own will—the governmental racial regime that the New Dealers had helped create. This wasn't just a matter of destroying Jim Crow, as stunning as that achievement was. The Johnson administration also attacked racial discrimination in hiring; expanded welfare benefits on both sides of the color line; and, in the fevered summer of 1968, backed legislation designed to undermine discrimination in the housing market and thus foster neighborhood desegregation.

It was only then that the New Deal coalition cracked wide open, as the Catholic vote makes clear. Cowie and Salvatore are undoubtedly correct to say that many Catholics were uncomfortable with the liberal ethos Roosevelt created, perhaps even more uncomfortable with the foreign policy he pursued, a topic Cowie and Salvatore don't explore. But Catholics' discomfort didn't affect their behavior at the polls, at least on the national level. Lyndon Johnson took seventy-nine percent of the Catholic vote in 1964, about the same percentage Franklin Roosevelt won in 1936. Only in 1968 did Catholics begin to desert the Democratic Party. That year Hubert Humphrey's share of their vote tumbled to fifty-five percent.Footnote ⁶

There were many reasons for such a precipitous decline. But it would be naïve to believe that race didn't rank high among them. When blue collar whites complained in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the liberals had deserted them, they weren't wrong. New Deal policy essentially promised to protect the racial position of the white working class, where Catholics were heavily represented. To its enormous credit, the Great Society rescinded that promise. After Johnson's fall from power liberals pushed even harder on racial issues, endorsing the integration of northern school systems, cross-district busing, and affirmative action. As they did so, the Democratic Catholic vote all but collapsed.

By sketching out this quick counter-narrative, I don't mean to question Cowie and Salvatore's core arguments. Mid-twentieth century liberals certainly did battle against the entrenched power of antistatism, though the New Dealers didn't envision using state power to promote collective economic citizenship as much as they hoped to create an economic policy premised on liberal Keynesianism. The New Deal coalition was fractured in many ways, most fiercely by racism, which cut through its key constituencies north and south. Together, those forces did make the New Deal order a very fragile undertaking. But this many years into a conservative era, we no longer need to cling to the idea that American public life might have moved in a better direction had liberals followed a different path. It's time to set aside that still-dominant paradigm and accept the more chastened—and yes, more discouraging—interpretation that Cowie and Salvatore have begun to fashion.