Freeing the individual and his or her consciousness from the grip of large, stultifying institutions; privileging disruption over order; celebrating cosmopolitanism—and multiculturalism—and the unexpected sorts of mixing and hybridities that emerge under these regimes: All of these beliefs, each of which marinated for years in the political and

Fascism and Nazism can be understood as radical right responses to communism’s rise.

But the threat of communism, I argue, actually worked in a quite different direction: It inclined capitalist elites to compromise so as to avert the worst. American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America’s welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War.14 The

Ronald Reagan convinced many Americans that joining his political crusade would unshackle the economy from regulation and make them free. He framed that freedom as every American’s birthright; the pursuit of that freedom, he told his followers, was the reason the American Revolution had been fought, the reason the American nation had come into

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

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

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

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