Modern liberalism in the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Modern liberalism, according to academic Ian Adams writing in 1993, describes something both of America's major parties have shared all along. Adams argued that every major U.S. party was, in his words, 'liberal and always have been.' He said each was built on classical liberalism, a form of Whig constitutionalism combined with the free market. The real dividing line, Adams wrote, comes from how much social liberalism gets added on top of that shared base. That claim raises the real question behind this story. If liberals and conservatives in America grow from the same root, what actually separates them? Where did this specifically American form of liberalism come from, and why does the same word mean something different once you cross the Atlantic?

• 2. The Liberal Creed

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  In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt defined what he called the liberal party. He said it was built on a government duty to act once new problems outrun what individuals can solve alone. Roosevelt described that duty as using 'all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls.' The goal, he said, was securing liberty, political life and the pursuit of happiness for the average citizen.

  In 1960, John F. Kennedy took on the same label directly. He asked what opponents meant when they called Democrats 'Liberal.' Kennedy rejected the idea that a liberal was soft abroad, opposed to local government or careless with the taxpayer's dollar. Instead, he described a liberal as someone who looks ahead rather than behind and welcomes new ideas. Such a person cares about people's health, housing, schools, jobs and civil rights. 'I'm proud to say that I'm a Liberal,' he said.

  Economist Paul Krugman later put it plainly in his book The Conscience of a Liberal. 'I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty,' he wrote. 'I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it.' Keynesian economic theory anchors this thinking, with modern liberals holding that government must manage the economy to keep unemployment low, inflation controlled and growth strong. Fiscal policy under this creed backs a robust social safety net while also pushing income-proportional tax reforms meant to shrink deficits. Liberals argue that liberty only exists in practice when health care and economic opportunity reach everyone. That belief is part of why they champion protecting the shared environment.

  Writing in 1956, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. made a sharp comparison. He said liberalism 'has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain.' In Europe, the same word usually points to classical liberalism, a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economics. That sometimes lines up more closely with what Americans call libertarianism. A handful of European groups still use the social liberal label. Among them are the Beveridge Group inside the Liberal Democrats, the Danish Social Liberal Party, the Democratic Movement and the Italian Republican Party.

  That transatlantic gap explains nothing about why this ideology took shape in America in the first place, or what crisis pushed it into being.

• 3. Born In Crisis

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  Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal and New Nationalism, along with Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, gave modern liberalism its earliest roots. The Great Depression later forced the ideology into the shape it holds today.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society carried that lineage forward. The Affordable Care Act and the Build Back Better Plan joined that list much later.

  Conservative northern Republicans and Southern Democrats formed a conservative coalition. It dominated the U.S. Congress from the late 1930s until the Johnson administration. Both major parties, in fact, held sizable conservative and liberal wings for the first half of the century. Northern Democrats grew more supportive of civil rights and organized labor starting in the Depression era. Politicians in the once-Solid South resisted them from inside their own party.

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke that arrangement apart. Conservative Democrats began leaving the party afterward and backed Republican Richard Nixon in the 1968 election.

  That partisan realignment had a much older prehistory, in an 1890s reform movement led by scholars few Americans remember today.

• 4. The Progressive Roots

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  The progressive movement emerged in the 1890s, led by intellectuals such as sociologist Lester Frank Ward and economist Richard T. Ely. They reshaped Victorian-era liberalism, keeping its commitment to civil liberties and individual rights. At the same time, they dropped its faith in laissez-faire economics. Ward's ideas later helped define the modern welfare state that took shape after 1933.

  The Social Gospel movement was a Protestant intellectual current running roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s. It applied Christian ethics to problems like poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tension, slums, child labor and the danger of war. Lyndon Johnson's parents were active in the movement and held a lifelong commitment to it. Johnson himself treated social problems as moral ones, a habit that later shaped the Great Society and his push for racial equality. It also shaped his foreign policy, framed as a kind of Christian internationalism.

  Political writer Herbert Croly helped define this new liberalism through The New Republic magazine. He used it to argue for a planned economy and greater spending on education. His 1909 book The Promise of American Life proposed raising the standard of living through economic planning. A later book, The Techniques of Democracy in 1915, argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic socialism.

  Historian Vernon Louis Parrington won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Main Currents in American Thought. The book traced Jeffersonian democracy from the colonial era into the early twentieth century. In his 1945 book The Age of Jackson, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. made a similar case. He argued liberalism also grew out of Jacksonian democracy and the labor radicalism of eastern cities. Jackson biographer Robert V. Remini agreed, writing that Jacksonian democracy 'stretches the concept of democracy about as far as it can go and still remain workable.' Remini credited it with inspiring Populism, Progressivism and the reform programs that followed.

  This progressive current did not stay confined to one party. Inside the Republican Party itself, an entire wing of self-described liberals was about to make its own mark.

• 5. Republicans Who Called Themselves Liberal

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  Theodore Roosevelt typified the Republican Party's liberal element between 1907 and 1912, though he leaned more conservative at other points in his career. Other Western Republicans carried the same banner into the 1940s. Among them were Senator Robert La Follette and his sons in Wisconsin, active from about 1900 to 1946, and Senator Hiram Johnson of California.

  Beginning in the 1930s, a cluster of mostly Northeastern Republicans took modern liberal positions on labor, spending and New Deal policy. Among them were Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, Governor Earl Warren of California and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York was the most prominent of them all. The press nicknamed the whole group Rockefeller Republicans, even though it never formed an organized movement or had one recognized leader. They pushed economic growth and high government spending while accepting high taxes. They supported civil rights, women's rights and environmental protection. In 1952, they threw their support to the internationalist Dwight D. Eisenhower over the conservative Robert Taft.

  Conservative Barry Goldwater's supporters called this bloc 'the Eastern Establishment' and fought it directly. They defeated Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican primaries and gradually retired most of its members. Some, including Senator Charles Goodell and New York Mayor John Lindsay, eventually became Democrats. As president, Richard Nixon still adopted many of the liberal wing's positions on the environment, welfare and the arts. Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois then left the party in 1980 to run as an independent against Ronald Reagan. After that, the liberal Republican element faded away for good.

  None of those defections touched the deeper machinery Roosevelt's own administration had already built to fight the Depression. It was a system organized around three distinct goals that reshaped the American economy for decades.

• 6. Building And Segregating The New Deal

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  Roosevelt's administration organized its Depression-era response into three kinds of programs: relief, recovery and reform. Relief aimed to help the roughly one-third of the population hit hardest. It expanded Herbert Hoover's Federal Emergency Relief Administration and added the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration. Starting in 1935, it added the Works Progress Administration and the Social Security Act.

  Recovery efforts drew on a Hoover-era institution, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to fund the rebuilding effort. They pushed deficit spending, dropped the gold standard and raised farm prices to return the economy to pre-Depression levels. Reform assumed the Depression stemmed from an unstable market. It produced the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Securities Exchange Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, also called the Wagner Act. Roosevelt rejected outright socialism. Only the Tennessee Valley Authority put the government directly in the business of owning power plants and electrical grids.

  Inside the Works Progress Administration, the largest relief program by far, black and white workers rarely worked side by side. The agency ran segregated units, as did its youth affiliate. Of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South, only 11 were black. Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the North were integrated when they opened in 1933. By July of 1935, they were fully segregated nationwide.

  Interior Secretary Harold Ickes was a former president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. He was one of the administration's most prominent supporters of black Americans. In 1937, Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina accused him of trying to dismantle segregation laws. Ickes wrote back denying it, adding that segregation existed in fact in the North even without segregation laws on the books.

  The New Deal's compromises with segregation left deep cracks in the coalition built to defend it. Those cracks widened once organized labor entered the picture in force.

• 7. The Coalition And Its Fracture

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  Starting in the late 1940s, a powerful labor-liberal coalition built strong grassroots support and well-funded organizations. It united the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which merged into the AFL-CIO in 1955. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers led liberalism's labor wing, and his union's autoworkers helped fund the cause. Groups such as the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans for Democratic Action supplied the coalition's political muscle. In Congress, senators including Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Paul Douglas of Illinois backed them.

  Anti-Communist liberals led by Reuther and Humphrey expelled the far left from labor unions and the New Deal coalition after 1945. That fight tied the Democratic Party to a hard line against Communism built around NATO and containment. The far left's last gasp came in Henry Wallace's 1948 third-party presidential run. Wallace launched it to continue New Deal reform and oppose the Cold War. The far left then took over his campaign, and he retired from politics in disgust.

  President Lyndon Johnson turned this coalition's energy into the Great Society between 1963 and 1969. He won passage of Medicare, an expanded welfare system, federal aid to education, subsidies for the arts and a push against poverty. More than 200 new federal grant programs to states, cities, counties and school districts were authorized under his leadership.

  Martin Luther King Jr. led escalating demonstrations across the South, including the 1963 Birmingham campaign. There, police violence against protesters outraged television audiences nationwide. King delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the August 1963 March on Washington. The movement culminated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. That activism helped push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending legal segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing black Americans the vote.

  By 1966, a Black Power movement had emerged that accused white liberals of trying to control the civil rights agenda. It favored an ethnic model of power rather than integration. In that same era, the Vietnam War split liberals into pro-war hawks, such as Senator Henry Jackson, and doves, such as Senator George McGovern.

  President Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy then fought for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy's assassination removed him from the race. Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged from the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention as the nominee. Alabama Governor George Wallace ran a third-party campaign that pulled working-class white voters from the party. Richard Nixon won the presidency that year. He went on to establish the Environmental Protection Agency, open relations with Communist China and end the draft. New Left leader Noam Chomsky later called him, 'in many respects the last liberal president.' Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal in 1974.

  That liberal consensus Nixon still operated inside had already begun cracking elsewhere. Organized labor's membership was about to fall from roughly a third of the private workforce to a small fraction of it.

• 8. After The Consensus

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  Union membership in the private sector fell from 33% to 7% over the decades that followed. That decline sapped organized labor's political weight. Public-sector unionization grew in the meantime, eventually covering 42% of local government workers. In 1995, liberals took control of the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union. In 2005, that union's new leader, Andy Stern, broke away to form the Change to Win Federation.

  A new environmental movement took shape in the 1970s. It appealed to the educated middle class while alarming lumbermen, farmers, ranchers and oil companies whose interests it threatened. Liberals backed the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club. They helped limit the pesticide DDT, reduce acid rain and protect endangered species. By the 21st century, they were focused on reversing global warming and cutting carbon emissions.

  Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 marked the first non-Keynesian administration and the first to apply supply-side economics. That same year, Senator Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, because Carter's record had disenchanted liberals. Kennedy lost decisively, and Carter then lost to Reagan. Some liberals had already moved rightward into neoconservatism during the 1970s, taking strong anti-Soviet, pro-Israel positions. Many later joined the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.

  Bill Clinton's Democratic Party pursued what became known as the Third Way. It blended center-right economic policy with left-leaning social policy, favoring balanced budgets and personal responsibility over income redistribution.

  A 2005 Pew Research Center study found liberals were the most educated ideological group in the country. Forty-nine percent held college degrees, against a 27% national average, and 41% reported household incomes above $75,000, against a 28% national average. On campus, 44 to 62% of academics identified as liberal, up from 40 to 46% in surveys taken between 1969 and 1984. A 2015 Gallup poll found socially liberal and socially conservative Americans roughly equal, at 31% each. By 2025, liberal identification had climbed to 28%, against 35% conservative and 33% moderate.

  The Northeast, the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southwest and the West Coast remain the country's main liberal strongholds. Self-identified conservatives in Massachusetts are as low as 21%. Voters in the urban cores of large metropolitan areas lean more liberal and Democratic. That produces a persistent divide between American cities and the rural areas around them.

  One thread from that era still stands apart from the rest of this story. In 1962, Kennedy sent federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to admit its first black student, James Meredith. Liberals still point to that use of federal power as proof of what the ideology was built to do.