On the cold war liberals – Stephen Holmes in LRB:

“Samuel Moyn didn’t begin his career as a crusading left-wing critic of liberalism. His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at Clinton’s National Security Council, beguiled by the ‘romance’ of human rights-driven foreign policy. As the US military pursued its mission in Kosovo, seen by many at the time as a model of beneficent liberal interventionism, Moyn helped to write an op-ed in the New York Times – under Clinton’s byline – headed ‘A Just and Necessary War’. It argued for the necessity of action, in whatever part of the world, against such crimes as ethnic cleansing.”

(…)

“His combative and self-assured tone helps. A characteristic example of his provocative style is his claim, made after Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were being ‘hysterical’ when they saw Trump as a danger to democracy, since democracy barely exists in America anyway.”

(…)

“His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they provided ‘a rationale for a Cold War struggle that unnecessarily killed millions’. The basis for this accusation is unclear. He alludes in a footnote to Berlin’s support for the Vietnam War but says little else about his subjects’ supposed hawkish tendencies. Perhaps he is suggesting, reasonably enough, that some Cold War liberals, in their focus on Soviet wrongdoing, ignored or denied or soft-pedalled crimes committed by the US and its allies.”

(…)

“One of Moyn’s most arresting claims is that Cold War liberal theory had little or no relation to Cold War liberal practice. There was a shocking ‘mismatch’, he writes, ‘between the libertarianism of Cold War thought and the emergence of the welfare state’. Turning briefly from the world of books, which is Moyn’s domain, to the practical politics that he mostly ignores, we learn that the Cold War was ‘a time when liberals around the world were building the most ambitious and interventionist and largest – as well as the most egalitarian and redistributive – liberal states that had ever existed’. This was spectacularly true of the uniquely prosperous postwar US, where the highest and most progressive marginal tax rates in American history suggest that mainstream politicians weren’t at all dogmatic ‘votaries of freedom from the state’, which is how Moyn describes his theorists. Bipartisan support for Eisenhower’s costly Interstate Highway System demonstrates the point. Government action, far from being seen as a mortal enemy to liberty, was understood as the most effective means for making a variety of freedoms available to the most people.”

(…)

“But what’s alarming is the nonchalant tone in which Moyn admits that his general characterisation of his Cold War liberals fails to do justice to the complexity of their thought. After piecing together his ideal type of the Cold War liberal, he proceeds to tear it to shreds. None of his four believed that the rejection of utopian thinking, including the illusion that history has a moral direction, made progress impossible. If we read them carefully, we realise that they didn’t oppose the welfare state and didn’t think democracy led inevitably to totalitarianism. Nor, as proponents of social insurance and desegregation, can they be fairly accused of entirely replacing hope with fear.
Moyn implicitly concedes all this. Viewed separately, none of his Cold War liberals endorsed all the tenets he ascribes to them as a group. His charge that they were necessarily allies of free-market fundamentalists illustrates the pattern. Not only did their thinking supposedly ‘evolve into neoliberalism’, it ‘collapsed into neoliberalism’. This is a bold but ultimately unprovable generalisation, and it is interesting to see the way Moyn immunises it against counterexamples by rescinding it. He freely accepts that the leading Cold War liberals ‘never embraced neoliberalism personally’.”

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“Shklar identifies only one significant group of theorists that could be called liberals and also shared this fatalism: the libertarians we today associate with Friedrich Hayek. Although their ‘conservative liberalism’ can’t be blamed for cultural fatalism, which was ‘inescapable’ at the time, there is ‘no reason why the theories advanced in its defence should be uncritically accepted’. She proceeds to eviscerate the baseless libertarian argument that ‘any economic planning by the state must and has led to political tyranny and implies the end of civilisation.’ She includes among these theorists Jacob Talmon, principally for his belief that ‘democracy is inherently totalitarian.’ This is ironic, since her main argument against Talmon’s The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) applies with equal plausibility to Moyn’s book. Ascribing ‘an exaggerated importance’ to philosophy ‘as an agent of social change’, conservative liberals try to make ‘the professional intellectual and his works ... directly responsible for every social misfortune’.”

(…)

“But the strangest aspect of Moyn’s account is the openly contradictory way he treats his own thesis. After insisting on the fatal fissure in the continuity of liberal theory caused by the Cold War, he ends up confessing that in fact this imagined rupture between good and bad liberalism never actually occurred. The conceit that Cold War liberals betrayed a morally inspiring prelapsarian liberalism is central to his argument. That earlier liberalism is said to have been ‘emancipatory and futuristic before the Cold War, committed most of all to free and equal self-creation, accepting of democracy and welfare’. It’s only by making a sharp distinction between earlier and later liberalisms that Moyn is able to argue that ‘Cold War liberalism was a betrayal of liberalism itself’ and that it ‘broke with the liberalism it inherited’.”

(…)

“Moyn knows perfectly well that the ‘millennial and post-millennial generations’ he praises for focusing on ‘environmental disaster’ entertain a far darker picture of the future than anything he has discovered in the writings of his Cold War theorists. Yet he doesn’t blame them for replacing hope for perfection with fear of apocalypse. After all, they are merely responding to the climate catastrophe unfolding before their eyes. Why doesn’t he extend the same absolution to his Cold War liberals? ‘Survivalism’ can’t be an index of censure for one generation and merit for the next – unless Moyn believes that the horrors of world war and the prospect of nuclear apocalypse were less real for his Cold War liberals than impending climate collapse is for his peers today.”

Read the review here.

Moyn’s position on Trump reminds me of French intellectuals (or politicians) who declared that there is no difference between Chirac or Le Pen or Macron or Le Pen. See: Mélenchon. Speaking of morality.

Popper’s repudiation of Hegel is at least funny. (The redeeming aspect of laughter should never be forgotten.)
And Samuel Moyn’s book is interesting exaclyl because it shows neatly the emptiness of that what should be called real existing idealism with universal ambitions. Either you go to war for your ambitions, or you start a church without a God but with a handful self-styled enemies.

I reviewed Moyn’s book, read it here. Alas, only in Dutch.