Reasons for thinking that war is a good thing

Eric Foner

• The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H.W. Brands
  Yale, 200 pp, £16.00, January 2002, ISBN 0 300 09021 8

‘In the United States at this time,’ Lionel Trilling announced in 1950, ‘liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’ How things have changed. Today in the US, liberalism seems extinct, except as a term of political abuse. Since Bush the Elder struck political gold during the 1988 Presidential campaign by castigating his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal, virtually no American politician will voluntarily accept the label. One unlikely exception is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s new billionaire Republican Mayor, who during the campaign proclaimed: ‘I am a liberal.’ In New York, liberalism still survives – and, besides, Bloomberg is so rich he can say anything he pleases.