The Shame of U.S. Liberalism

Journal of the Quarter

. . . Never before had the fact of being an American brought one so close to humiliation. The sight of Washington in August was enough to make one cringe, so enormous was the upsurge of elemental stupidity and reasonless passion; the spectacle of Congress venting an impotent legislative fury upon the Enemy seemed a nightmare, an insanity of force. Never before had he felt that the remaining decencies and verities, which had trickled down from an almost legendary American past, seemed so perilously close to extinction.

He had seldom been an admirer of the American political species. He had seldom felt anything but a slight shudder, trained into invisibility, before the average Congressman—and, as he sometimes asked himself with a wry impatience, what other kind of Congressman was there? But the behavior of the Senate during those last lunatic weeks of August, when all petty factions melted into one insensate mass of fear and ignorance, struck him as beyond belief. Even he, who had resigned himself to being an observer, which meant a little to the stance of being a skeptic, found himself rubbing his eyes at this Congressional stampede to prove that each party was as ready as the other to trample the concept of liberty in the name of destroying its Enemy.

As he circled through the streets of Washington during the hot summer days, his mind haunted by voices—for him they were ancestral voices— that had once rung with the hope of a greater freedom and a finer polity, Adams sensed that at least he had lived long enough to witness the end of an epoch. He knew that to “outlaw” the American arm of the Enemy, in itself so withered and wretched, signified nothing but a hidden conviction among the men in power that the Enemy was beyond their reach and perhaps beyond anyone’s. Unable to mobilize itself against the true danger, which was abroad, the government in all its branches had turned with a reckless ferocity to the shadow of that danger, which was at home. And from long bitter experience Adams knew how pleased a Congressman felt at uniting his baser political passions with the certain prospect of self-advancement. None would have to fear that a vote which tore so deep a rift into the fabric of traditional American liberties would bring him into disfavor at home.

To declare a political party “outlaw”—Adams, ransacking his small store of history, could recall no precedent in Congress—was clearly a danger. Yet American democracy might survive the blow. In one of those surges of unreasonable hope from which his training in stoicism had not quite freed him, Adams felt that, finally, it would survive. Liberalism, however, would not; at least not the liberalism of the moment. For while democracy had suffered a blow, liberalism had struck it. As the creed to which so many of his friends had turned in their gradual loss of belief, liberalism could...