Rethinking the Postwar Liberal Dream

What happened to the progressive vision of the Civil Rights/Great Society era?

Evanston public school students perform “We Shall Overcome” at a ceremony honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the late 1960s. Source: Evanston Review, October 19, 1969. Photo previously published in Mary Barr, Friends Disappear The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Many of us are feeling alienated from the political faith we once held, be it progressive liberalism (as in my case) or something quite different. To the extent that this sense of lost faith galvanizes a rethinking of what sort of social vision we remain committed to and why, it’s a good thing. If it hurls us into conspiracy theories, woke or Trumpist fanaticism, “burn it all down” nihilism, or angry resentment, however, it’s only fueling our collective downward spiral.

In this post, I try to model the first, better option, sharing some thoughts on why I used to feel so committed to progressive liberalism and how I now see that from my newly disillusioned perspective. As I’ve said previously, the point of this reflection is not to trash my former political faith. On the contrary, I think there’s much good there that needs to be recovered, if in newly reconfigured ways.

Nor should it be read to imply that progressive liberalism is the only political creed in need of serious rethinking today – on the contrary, I think they all do. Finally, it’s not meant to suggest that the story of my own political socialization is more important than anyone else’s. In my view, it’s just one piece in the much larger puzzle of what the hell is happening in society today. But since it’s the one I know best, for me at least, it’s a good place to start.

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Liberal Roots

The roots of my progressive liberalism aren’t hard to find. I was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that has long prided itself on its racial diversity and commitment to progressive politics. In 2019, Evanston made national news as the first municipality in the country to fund reparations for Black residents; in 2021, it was the first public school district to have a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against it for mandating allegedly discriminatory “anti-racist” curricula and training.

And way back when I was starting kindergarten in 1967, my Evanston public school cohort was the first in the nation to launch a voluntary (as opposed to court-ordered) system-wide desegregation program. Evanston’s plan was extensive, including bussing to integrate neighborhood schools, hiring more Black teachers and administrators, offering anti-bias training to teachers and staff, and implementing a new curriculum committed to racial justice.

One of my earliest memories is being herded into what seemed at the time like a cavernous elementary school gym along with scores of my fellow five-year-olds. We were instructed to form a big circle, cross our arms in an “X” in front of us, hold hands with the kid on either side, and sing “We Shall Overcome” together. At the time, I was too young to understand the significance of this signature song of the Civil Rights movement. I was plenty old enough to feel the powerful current of energy in the room, however. No one needed to explain it: I got the message that what we were doing was important, meaningful, and good.

This visceral sense of solidarity and rightness was emblematic of the secular faith I was socialized to believe in. The Zeitgeist of that time and place infused me with an optimistic sense of being part of a collective social project that was making America – and, by extension, the world – a better place. Like everyone else I know who grew up in Evanston at the time, I still feel fortunate to have been raised in a community that was so powerfully infused with such an inspiring vision.

But what, precisely, did that vision consist of? Answering that question isn’t easy, as it requires both simplifying a much more complex history and translating deeply felt experiences into concepts and words. Because the progressive liberalism I grew up with wasn’t some abstract philosophy we memorized out of a book. Rather, it was a living, organic culture, a sensibility that was felt and shared rather than intellectualized and dissected (as I’m trying to do here).

Caveats aside, I’d say that the progressive liberalism I grew up was best characterized by its commitments to civic equality, on the one hand, and individual freedom, on the other. At the time, these conjoined societal and individual projects seemed naturally complementary. Activist government, we believed, was needed to create a more truly equitable society. Correspondingly, a more equalitarian social order was necessary to provide individuals with a meaningful opportunity to develop their unique talents and dreams freely.

This was a deeply appealing logic, one that I still believe in today. But it was also hugely aspirational, focused more on a fuzzily imagined future than thornily complex realities. Here, an underlying faith in (capital “P”) Progress filled the gap: If we weren’t where we wanted to be yet, we felt certain that we were definitely moving in the right direction.

This assumption was so baked into the progressive liberal perspective I grew up with that it didn’t need to be stated, let alone defended. Anything that was that powerfully felt and pervasively assumed simply had to be true . . . or so, at least, I was subliminally socialized to imagine.

Historical Context

It was the late 1960s. Back then, the social equity component of left-of-center liberalism meant extending the legacy of the New Deal by eliminating poverty and racial discrimination. Many (particularly white) Americans were enjoying the unprecedented affluence of the postwar boom. At the same time, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, along with the pivotal civil rights legislation of the mid-60s, had revolutionized American society.

In Evanston, this confluence of historic developments created a deep current of faith in the power of government-mandated regulation and social programs, on the one hand, and anti-discrimination laws and policies, on the other. At the time, it was easy to believe that with the right sort of government action, the unprecedented power of modern American capitalism could be harnessed to build a society that prioritized both the well-being of the working- and middle-classes, and the achievement of racial justice.

It even seemed reasonable to imagine that this democratic promised land could – and, with sufficient effort, would – be reached in the not-too-distant future. Back when I started elementary school, the utopian vision of then-President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative was still shimmering in Evanston’s cultural imaginary:

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect . . . where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

The fact that I had no understanding of the Great Society per se until I studied it many years later in grad school didn’t matter: I’d absorbed its utopian vision of American democracy through osmosis. Growing up in Evanston during the 1960s-70s, it was part of the air I breathed.

So, too, was progressive liberalism’s faith in the value and desirability of individual freedom. For me – a white teenager growing up in an exceptionally liberal community during the late ‘70s – this meant cathecting to the “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll”-fueled vision of untrammeled personal liberation generated by the 1960s counterculture. Much too young to have experienced such iconic events as Woodstock directly, I looked back on this already faded cultural moment through envious rose-colored glasses.

My friends and I absorbed the cultural message that unbounded experimentation, creativity, and freedom were unambiguous goods, as equally in life as in art – which, ideally, were to be experientially fused. At 14, I discovered Patti Smith, who’d released her iconic album “Horses” a year earlier, and was instantly enamored. Her synthesis of rock, poetry, art, fashion, androgyny, and the anything-goes vibe of the then-flourishing NYC punk/new wave scene epitomized this life-as-art vision. Seeing her perform in 1976 at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom, a decrepit yet spectacular relic of the 1920s movie palace era, was a cherished coming-of-age experience.

Attending Evanston Township High School during late ‘70s facilitated this mindset. Without a doubt, my cohort experienced far less adult supervision than any before or since. Our enormous campus of almost 4,000 students was open; we could come and go as we pleased. We students had our own school-sanctioned smoking lounge; cigarettes were available for $1 a pack via vending machine in the funky BBQ joint across the street. There was even a popular pot-smoking spot right in front of the school. Everyone knew it was illegal, but during that brief peak of post-60s liberal permissiveness, none of the adults in charge seemed to care. (This would soon change. By the time I was a senior, the school was shifting in the opposite direction, with regulations tightening and police starting to appear regularly on campus.)

Inspiring Visions

Growing up in that time and place instilled me with a strong sense of political values. Looking back, I can see that while they were utterly secular, they were nonetheless infused with ethical commitment and quasi-spiritual meaning. There was a shared faith that a much better — and particularly, much more racially just — society was possible, desirable, and worth working towards.

Ethically, there was a commitment to the principle that every individual must be presumed equal irrespective of race, gender, socioeconomic status, or any other such marker of social difference. There was also a sense that each of us should try to contribute in our own small way to the collective project of building a better society, one in which every individual would truly have the opportunity to realize their capacities and pursue their dreams.

Spiritually, this ethic embodied a faith that positive human connection across socially demarcated differences was not only possible but desirable. Interpersonal and community relationships that bridged such divides were both personally and socially valuable. Such connections enlarged our own humanity and, in the process, helped lay the necessary foundation for a fully democratic society.

A taken-for-granted sense that this political vision had the force of (capital “H”) History behind it infused it with a powerful sense of optimism, solidarity, and hope. Whatever societal problems we might see or experience could be categorized as surmountable bumps in the road to a better future. Feeling part of this teleological force of Progress provided an important sense of personal efficacy, an impetus to work cooperatively with others, and a bolstering faith in the future.

Hubristic Blind Spots

Looking back from the disillusioned perspective of 2022, however, I can now see some major blind spots in this progressive liberal vision of late 20th-century vintage. Three strike me as particularly important.

First, the progressive liberalism I was raised with paid far too little attention to the social structural dynamics of socioeconomic inequality, or class. A combination of factors including the post-World War II economic boom, Cold War anti-communism, and America’s then-undisputed position as the global leader of the “free world” made it easy to presume that the growth of the newly affluent working- and middle-classes, which peaked during the 1950s-60s, would continue indefinitely. As we now know, this was most certainly not the case.

Growing up in progressive liberal Evanston, I was taught to care about the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the ongoing struggle for racial justice. The history of the labor movement and the (also still ongoing) fight for decent working conditions and wages, however, was completely erased. Conceptually, class was subsumed by a particular conception of race, one that essentially presumed poverty to be a Black problem. With the ongoing robustness of a middle-class-centered economy taken for granted, the primary cause of socioeconomic inequality was assumed to be racial discrimination and inadequate human capital development. While the latter was understood to include particular pockets of white Americans – most stereotypically, the “Hillbillies” of Appalachia – it was not seen as relevant to whites in general, the way it was with Blacks.

Put more abstractly, the progressive liberal view of economics assumed that blockages to market access and participation caused inequality, not the structure of markets themselves. In keeping with this perspective, it was widely assumed that the implementation of strong anti-discrimination laws, better educational opportunities, and targeted social programs would easily create socioeconomic equity. More strictly economic questions such as the structure of the labor market, the financial sector, and international trade agreements were not understood to be part of the equation (which, we now see, was a fundamental miscalculation).

A second major problem with the progressive liberal culture I was raised with was that there was a powerful if unspoken taboo against ever acknowledging that living out an ethos of individual liberation could come at a steep cost. Progressive liberalism valorized the freedom to experiment with sex, drugs, and whatever lifestyle might speak to you personally. A powerful cultural tide pushed us to celebrate the personal pleasures and positive social changes that such freedom facilitated. And, to be sure, there were (and are) many.

But our celebration of what was good was coupled with an absolute refusal to see what was bad. Reflexively, we ignored, minimized, or denied the challenges, risks, and dangers that the promotion of unfettered individual freedom inevitably posed, both to ourselves and others. When combined with our lack of class awareness, this one-sided perspective unintentionally favored the racially and economically privileged, who were typically (although not always) much better able to navigate these pitfalls.

As Barr (2014) and Fleming (2000) document, many kids who grew up in Evanston when I did suffered tremendously from the fallout of the 1970’s libertine culture. Parental neglect, substance abuse, mental health problems, school underperformance, and negative sexual experiences were common. In some cases, such issues escalated into addiction, sexual abuse, illegal activity, mental health crises, homelessness, prison, and early death. As a white female, I knew lots of kids who experienced the first, less catastrophic set of problems. I also knew or heard about a smaller number devastated by the second.

What I didn’t realize until reading Mary Barr’s Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston, however, was just how much kids’ chances of recovering from such downward spirals were over-determined by race and class. In Evanston, white families tended to be middle- or upper-middle-class, while Blacks were primarily lower-middle-class or poor. Given their twinned racial and class advantages, white youth who suffered from liberationist cultural fallout tended to fare exponentially better than their Black peers.

While there were certainly exceptions, on the whole white kids had many more supports available to make a fresh start, including family resources, employment networks, cultural capital, and – should it come to that – fairer and more compassionate treatment from the police and criminal legal systems. (Class differences among whites weren’t an issue in Evanston, as so few low-income whites lived there — a typical pattern for such progressive liberal communities. This doesn’t mean, however, that class differences among whites aren’t important in this regard as well. On the contrary, they most certainly are.)

Another major problem with the progressive liberalism I was raised with was that the presumption of being “on the right side of history” made it much too easy to paper over these and other issues — all of which have only grown worse over time. Having a bolstering sense of faith in the future is a good thing. But reflexively assuming that some supra-historical Force of Progress is guiding your politics regardless of whatever problems they might evidence is not.

The more such a belief operates as a default cultural setting, the more it encourages willfully denying and papering over problems, rather than critically assessing and grappling with them as they arise. This is precisely the situation that, I believe, very much applies to the state of the progressive liberal Establishment today (the Democratic Party, legacy media, blue-check Twitteristas, etc.) Tragically, the hollowness, hypocrisy, and/or just plain cluelessness of these institutions and leaders has discredited or erased the best of the postwar progressive liberal vision, while doubling down on the worst. Improving this situation will require not only calling them out on their BS, but — and much more challengingly — rethinking how best to further the dream of civic equality and individual freedom in today’s 21st-century context.