What Was the Vital Center?
In 1949, the 32-year-old historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, which became arguably the most important text of Cold War liberalism. This work helped serve as a guiding light for the newly founded Americans for Democratic Action, a political group that advocated liberal domestic legislation but also opposition to the Soviet Union.
Schlesinger wrote this book at the tail end of a harrowing epoch for liberalism. In the 1930s, liberal democracy was mired in the Great Depression and collapsing around the world in the face of the “crusading totalitarian alternatives” of fascism and communism. Having defeated the fascist challenge and now facing a new communist menace, Schlesinger believed that liberals should launch a “democratic counter-offensive” (10).
This publication, in calling itself “The Vital Center,” seeks to take heart from Schlesinger’s vision without removing it from historical context or obscuring its flaws. Like Schlesinger, we write at a time of global and domestic crisis for liberalism, facing aggressive great power competitors, a newly empowered far-right, and a modern progressivism tends toward illiberalism as well.
Schlesinger’s vision of a vital liberal core of American politics offers guidance, inspiration, and caution in equal measures to contemporary liberals. He advanced a powerful interpretation of liberalism as pluralistic, prudent, anti-totalitarian, and reform-minded, laying down a set of principles that could guide both domestic and foreign affairs. However, his vision paid little attention to women and racial minorities, and his consensus view of American political history fostered a complacency in postwar liberal circles that today’s liberals must not replicate. Shortcomings aside, Schlesinger remains a crucial thinker that modern liberals should engage with in order to understand their history and improve their thinking today.
The Vital Center’s Anti-Totalitarian Mission
The heart of Schlesinger’s Vital Center was liberalism as the antithesis of totalitarianism. To be a liberal was to oppose totalitarianism in all its forms, at home and abroad. Schlesinger recognized that many early 20th century liberals, especially in the Progressive Movement, sympathized with communism because of a shared belief in the perfectibility of human beings and societies through rational, disinterested government action. The Soviet Union, he jabbed, was “the opiate of the progressives” (49).
The harrowing experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, especially revelations of Soviet inhumanity and duplicity, cleansed many liberals of this affinity for communism and belief in inevitable progress. Communism was not simply a more radical version of liberalism; rather, Schlesinger wrote that these ideologies “have nothing in common, either as to means or as to ends.” Liberal societies embraced the equality of all people and the “liberties of conscience, expression, and political opposition” (8). Their core unit was the rights-bearing individual, not classes or races. They empowered the people to change governments through peaceful processes. They enforced the rule of law equitably and required leaders to serve the law, not themselves.
The core difference between a liberal and a totalitarian state was that “a liberal state acknowledged many limitations in its demands upon men; the total state acknowledges none.” Using secret police, propaganda, and concentration camps, totalitarian states ground societies into an “amorphous mass” that could be molded and controlled. Unlike liberal polities, totalitarian states treated the individual as a mere resource or a cog in the machinery of history to be sacrificed without hesitation for the greater good. Totalitarian ideologies were inherently utopian because they imagined an end point of history that could one day be achieved if a ruthless, absolute state drove humanity to that end, whether it was Marx’s classless society or Hitler’s racial empire.
And yet Schlesinger acknowledged that totalitarianism could be tempting, especially in times of crisis. Modern technological and capitalist society had many benefits, but it also tore at traditional social structures and norms, leaving many individuals feeling disoriented. Totalitarian systems offered ways to organize modern society as well as renewed status and meaning for the atomized individual. Totalitarianism gave the individual “the security and comradeship of a crusading unity” plus an enemy to hate and a leader to worship (54).
Resistance to totalitarianism put the vitality in the Vital Center, showing the confidence and moral vision of an ideology too often accused of being spiritually empty. The United States was the world’s most powerful democracy that now faced another totalitarian threat. Liberals should acknowledge that their ideals posed a bold challenge to totalitarianism’s fanatical dreams. By containing the Soviet Union and rebuilding a democratic, prosperous Europe, the United States would prove liberalism’s “radical nerve” and vindicate the superiority of a society based on the rights and dignity of the individual (150).
The Vital Center at Home
For Schlesinger and other Cold War liberals, getting first principles right was crucial to building a vital but realistic liberalism. That meant reconstituting a tragic view of human nature as foundational to liberalism, in contrast to Progressive-era optimism. Reflecting a tradition that ran from Madison to Niebuhr, he argued that human beings were egotistic, power-hungry, emotionally-driven, and domineering. At the same time, they were “capable of reason and of purpose, of great loyalty and great virtue” (170). An excessively negative view of human nature would lead to conservative reaction, based on the idea that a corrupted humanity needs a web of tradition and authority to restrain its worst impulses. An excessively positive view, however, led to dangerous utopian fantasies. Rather, he argued that in the “historic philosophy of liberalism,” humanity is “precious, but not perfect” (156).
In political terms, this means that liberals must accept the grind of steady progress through the democratic system as well as the necessity of checks and balances on all centers of power in society. Echoing Federalist 10, Schlesinger argues that “I cannot imagine a free society which has eliminated conflict.” Competing class interests, conceptions of the good, policy preferences, and other dividing lines will always exist, so competition over them must be channeled into the law-bound democratic process.
Schlesinger’s domestic Vital Center started with the defense of the New Deal order. He praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to reform and restructure the U.S. economy, which restored hope to the population and staved off the appeal of totalitarianism. He called for an expansion of this order into areas of health and education, as would later happen in the Great Society. He also aimed to cultivate a “responsible conservatism” that did not treat all forms of social protest or labor activism as existential threats. He held that many modern conservatives, especially in the Republican Party, had gone astray by rejecting Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive platform. Republicans had become the party of the “plutocracy:” hostile to labor, beholden to big business, indifferent to the suffering of common people, and paranoid about left-wing subversion (22).
Nevertheless, Schlesinger acknowledged that innovative modern businesses had vastly increased the overall wealth of society, created technologies that improved everyday life, and formed an economic base for U.S. global power. Capitalism needed to be brought under “democratic control” to be sustainable and just (169). At the same time, a labor movement that rejected communism would assuage the anxieties of the business community.
The political Vital Center would feature a debate about how much to regulate the economy and to what extent to grow the state’s social role within the boundary view that capitalism was a net positive. The state would be Keynesian, creating a favorable business environment but also protecting the welfare of workers, thereby “defining the ground rules of the game” but not directing the economy (183). Politics, in Schlesinger’s vision, would be “within the 40-yard lines,” eschewing extremes of left and right, and united by a core of basic liberal values, constitutionalism, and anti-totalitarianism.
Schlesinger was also aware of the potential for anti-communism to become a threat to liberalism itself. While he treated communism as a hostile ideology and espionage as a real problem, he noted that communists were not numerous or powerful in the United States and that they were actually losing ground as economic recovery continued in the postwar era. Presaging McCarthyist mania, Schlesinger warned that “anti-Communist feeling will boil over into a vicious and unconstitutional attack on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our democratic strength” (210).
Echoing contemporary tensions between progressives and liberals or centrists, Schlesinger portrays his liberalism as one of the active, engaged, and pragmatic citizen. He praises the “politicians, the administrators, and the doers” and bemoans the “sentimentalists, the utopians, the wailers.” Far too many on the left see politics as a “mass expiatory ritual by which the individual relieves himself of responsibility for his government’s behavior.” Acknowledging the limits of what politics can achieve at any given moment, Schlesinger’s ideal citizen strives to bring about “actual results” and “to do what he can to save free society.”
Schlesinger’s Blind Spots
Works of political commentary reflect the context in which it was written, and this is true of Schlesinger’s Vital Center. As compelling as this text may be, today’s liberals must not overlook its blind spots, which embody many of the biases and inequities of postwar America. First, Schlesinger paid little attention to the racial and gender-based injustices of his time. Women appear not at all in this book, and the black freedom struggle receives two pages. Schlesinger lamented that “the sin of racial pride” is still the “most basic challenge to the American conscience.” He called for an “unrelenting attack on all forms of racial discrimination.” Furthermore, like many postwar liberals, he noted that America’s “racial cruelties” distinctly disadvantaged the United States vis-à-vis the Soviets in the competition for influence in the decolonizing world. Yet he evinced a naïve view of the Jim Crow South, arguing that “the South on the whole accepts the objectives of the civil rights program as legitimate, even though it may have serious and intelligible reservations about timing and method” (190-1). There was little evidence for this claim in 1949, and subsequent massive resistance to Civil Rights would further undercut this argument.
The New Deal did little to target the unique injustices faced by minorities and women, and in some ways it deepened these inequalities. Schlesinger was sympathetic to the plight of these groups, but he seemed to believe that reason and the normal political process would win equality for them in time. This speaks to a key blind spot of the Vital Center: it was heavily white and male, and its major figures too often accepted slow change on issues of essential justice. Liberals today face similar and frequently justified criticism from their left flank, and they must understand that “gradualism” will not satisfy those suffering from daily want and injustice.
Second, Schlesinger’s notion of a Vital Center engaged in some wishful thinking regarding the American political tradition. Like other consensus historians, he speculated that U.S. political history was uniquely moderate and non-ideological, consisting of pragmatic debate within a “a common climate” of liberal and constitutional values, in historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrasing. This ignores radical movements, experiments, and ideas in U.S. history, such as the racial empire of the slave-holding South, anarchism and socialism in the Gilded Age, and fascist undercurrents throughout modern American history. Moreover, the exclusion of radical ideas from mainstream party politics was largely a result of institutional guardrails and
Many liberal intellectuals believed that the American political tradition was exclusively liberal and that conservatism was merely an “irritable mental gesture.” Schlesinger sometimes mistook the ideal of a Vital Center for a historical reality, which left him and other liberals baffled by the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s. Liberals stunned by the triumph of Donald Trump in the 2016 election may have shown a similar complacency in believing that an unqualified, mendacious, and prejudiced huckster could win the support of so many Americans.
Conclusion
Where does Schlesinger’s liberalism fit in the history of liberal ideas? Like all versions of liberalism, it was a product of its times. It was rooted in classical liberalism’s defense of human equality and individual rights. However, it combined that classical view with the need to regulate the economic realm and provide social security in response to disruptions of modern life. It was chastened toward a more cautious view of humanity by the totalitarian disasters of the mid-20th century. Nonetheless, it never despaired of the possibility of progress and the importance of U.S. global leadership against the remaining totalitarian menace.
Why, then, name a new publication after this 74-year old book? For all the variation in our views, the editors here believe that liberalism has a better track record than any other political ideology in terms of fostering human liberty, prosperity, and dignity. Liberalism works best when liberals revisit, critique, and adapt their own ideas, bring in previously excluded people and perspectives, and balance the imperative to improve the lot of humanity with humility about how much society, and human beings themselves, can be transformed. The Vital Center of 2023 aims to continue that project for a new generation and a new set of challenges.
Possibly the most important legacy of Schlesinger’s work is this idea of liberalism as a project. A project, after all, is neither a tradition nor a revolution. Unlike traditions, which conservatives venerate, a project implies a willingness to critique, reform, and sometimes replace the world one has inherited and to expect future generations to do the same. Unlike revolutions, which the left romanticizes, a project implies respect for the progenitors who made the sacrifices and built the platforms from which we today envision further progress.
Following the lead of thinkers like Schlesinger, today’s liberal project must be a constantly renewed, consistently rethought, but always prudent project of human liberation and opposition to tyranny and cruelty at home and abroad. It must be globally minded, on the understanding that a liberal order at home will not long survive a world dominated by authoritarians. It must be, above all, a moral project that believes that human beings, in individual and collective capacities, can preserve freedoms, expand opportunities, ameliorate suffering, see beyond their own vantage points, dispel ignorance, and make a better world if not a perfect one.
