The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left. Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life. The threat of international communism

he accepted that strong unions were necessary to moderate the power of corporations and spread the affluence of American capitalism through the social order.

Liberals had become far more fearful of being tagged as communistic themselves or, in the language of the age, “soft on communism.” According to this line of interpretation, liberalism lost its fighting elan and became much more modest—and much more like conservatism—in its aims. A few commentators hailed the scaling back of liberal expectations as

Truman and others paired Nazism and communism as twin manifestations of a novel and malignant form of dictatorship. This was a tyranny different from that of monarchs, sultans, or small-nation oligarchs. It was modern. It used new technologies of surveillance and media to penetrate every aspect of society, to achieve in the words of Hannah Arendt

A strong centralized state was a communist imperative; the nationalization of industry and all other private centers of wealth and privilege would be among its first acts. Communists made clear that they were implacable foes of capitalists, and of liberals, old and new, whom they saw as capitalism’s handmaidens. They did not hesitate to strip both

Communism had a potent message: deliver the poor of the world from their oppression; turn the vast productive system developed under capitalism to public purpose; substitute intelligent planning for market chaos; eliminate all manifestations of inequality. Its striving to create a society in which everyone could be freed from want and domination

Americans regarded communism as an existential threat to economics, politics, and culture. No other single force rivalled the influence of this political movement across the twentieth century.

facilitating the GOP’s acquiescence to the New Deal order may have been Eisenhower’s most significant domestic political accomplishment.

A commitment to the public good over private right; happiness and expressiveness through consumption; the capacity of the marketplace to deliver on America’s egalitarian promise; and a faith in the ability of expertise to nurture individuality: These were the components of the New Deal order’s moral perspective.