UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines the underappreciated history of what is commonly known as ‘cold war liberalism’ in relation to the rise of United States global power at the end of World War Two. More accurately described as ‘left-liberal anticommunism,’ this ideological orientation was produced through an alliance between three distinct species of political-intellectuals: democratic socialists personified by Norman Thomas, New Deal liberals typified by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and anti-Stalinist leftists (former Trotskyists) embodied by Sidney Hook. These factions came together in the early 1940s, united in resistance to what remained of the pro-Communist ‘popular front’; the initial phase of their partnership culminated in the successful derailment of Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. In the early 1950s their union was reconsolidated around a renewed effort to thwart Stalinist subversion at home and Soviet expansion abroad; the left-liberal anticommunist coalition concurrently helped shape a CIA-sponsored counterpropaganda campaign that came to be known as the ‘cultural cold war.’ In the mid 1950s this alliance of cold war comrades became fractured over the issue of McCarthyism, as a group that included former Trotskyist ‘New York intellectuals’ refused to join a condemnation of the Wisconsin senator’s redbaiting. With the defection of many on this proto-‘neoconservative’ flank, which was becoming fixated on anti-Stalinism, those who remained in the left-liberal anticommunist camp cemented a commitment to the civil rights and labor movements, while redoubling their support for Cold War foreign policy. The final iteration of their alliance, framed by the promotion of ‘rational’ as opposed to ‘obsessive anticommunism,’ lasted through the late 1960s, when it finally collapsed under the strain of an increasingly radical New Left and neoconservatives coalescing in opposition. Before disintegrating, the left-liberal anticommunist coalition pursued a domestic agenda of progressive reform attached to the legacy of the New Deal. Yet their utopian ideals were tempered by the realities of a global power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. By articulating their advocacy of social and economic justice from a standpoint of ‘anti-totalitarianism,’ left-liberal anticommunists unwittingly hastened the demise of a once-robust social-democratic tradition, while helping sustain the development of post-1945 American empire.