The founding ideology of American empire
Daniel Bessner and Erik Baker on Cold War liberalism and its afterlives
At The Drift, we have a long-running interest in the national security apparatus, its history during the Cold War and the War on Terror, and its continued power over American politics and society. University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner is one of the most astute public commentators on this topic; his essay “First-Person Shooter Ideology: The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty” appeared in The Drift in 2021. He is the editor, with Michael Brenes, of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, a new collection of essays on the legacy of one of the most influential and widely debated ideologies of the twentieth century. Drift Senior Editor Erik Baker, a historian of science at Harvard, contributed a chapter on the relationship between Cold War liberalism and psychological theory. To celebrate the book’s publication in paperback today, Bessner and Baker conducted a wide-ranging conversation on the core themes of the volume and the future of liberalism in today’s fractured global order.
Erik Baker: I thought that we could start by defining our terms. Liberalism is one of the great contested categories of our political vocabulary. Everyone has their own idea of what it means. For the purpose of this book, what is liberalism? And what is Cold War liberalism specifically?
Daniel Bessner: You can find traces of any idea very far back in history. Larry Siedentop, in his book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, traces liberalism back to ancient Christian thinkers like St. Paul and St. Augustine, who emphasized the individual’s connection to God. I identify the origins of contemporary liberalism in the period after the French Revolution of 1789 — I think that liberalism emerged in reaction to the excesses of the Terror committed by Robespierre and others. But I do think that it gets very slippery when you focus only on ideas. You always need to ground political analysis in lived realities. You can believe whatever you want, but if it’s not connected to any social movement, it’s really just another form of living in your mind.
Our book responds to a recent resurgence of interest in Cold War liberalism in particular. Cold War liberals, I argue, are socialists, social democrats, and progressives who were transformed by the experience of the 1930s. During the Great Depression, apparently irrational bank runs and financial panics seemed to demonstrate that the masses could be illogical and make decisions that weren’t in their own interest. Even more important than that is what happened abroad — in particular, the rise of Nazism in Germany, a country which was really viewed, particularly among elites, as the center of intellectual culture. The rise of Nazism underlined to many Americans, as well as exiles who had fled Germany, that the masses couldn’t be trusted.
Cold War liberals argued, first with the rise of Nazism and later during the postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union, that the state of emergency made it legitimate for liberals to use illiberal actions to save liberalism. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, ordinary politics could return. But I think that time has proven that supposition incorrect. The founding of institutions like the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Security Agency (NSA), and other groups, gave us an executive branch that was designed to essentially be free from not only public interference but also congressional influence. Cold War liberalism is, to my mind, the founding ideology of the American empire.
Baker: It’s a commonplace notion that liberalism is dying or at least in crisis; we’re said to live in an increasingly post-liberal environment across the political spectrum. Why, then, does the history of liberalism (and Cold War liberalism) still matter in this moment?
Bessner: I do think the Trump era has signaled the end of something, and I don’t think we know what comes next. But Cold War liberals’ greatest triumph was to institutionalize their ideas in living organizations like the NSC and the CIA. In some respects, their world no longer exists, but we still have their institutional structures, which Trump has threatened to take down but hasn’t to any significant degree. You could even consider the recent kidnapping of Maduro to be a paradigmatically Cold-War-liberal operation. It was carried out by special forces at the behest of the President, and then it was over.
Baker: Why was it that the institutions proved durable where the ideology did not? Is that just the nature of institutions versus ideas?
Bessner: Institutions have inertia built into them. This is why it’s going to be very difficult to, for example, get rid of ICE. Ideas float; they’re much easier to transform. It turns out that you can have capitalism without liberalism, for example. China’s certainly not liberal; Russia is certainly not liberal, although I believe they are capitalist. In the United States, the government undertakes significant illiberal actions. But there doesn’t seem to be anything that’s supplanting liberalism. We might be moving into a post-ideological era. Obviously ideas still matter, but the large-scale, totally organizing ideologies that emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the rise of industrial capitalism are going to be less important going forward, because for the time being, we’re all capitalists. There’s less genuine struggle over how to organize a modern political economy that there has been since the nineteenth century.
Baker: No one expects the phenomenal unpopularity of so much of what Trump is doing in the second term to matter. I think that that belief in the impotence of public opinion is a really essential feature of what it means to be a political subject right now. And it’s one that can be understood, at least in part, as one of the more malign legacies of Cold War liberalism.
Bessner: An ironic thing happened in the second half of the twentieth century. The formal franchise expanded, particularly with the end of Jim Crow, and new identity-based movements like the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the Chicano movement brought marginalized groups more centrally into politics, but in the long run, the influence that ordinary people can have on policy has actually been reduced. One should appreciate that Cold War liberalists were crucial in advocating for the civil rights acts of the 1960s, in getting the Democratic Party to adopt a civil rights platform, and in lobbying the Supreme Court. But you have this liberal pluralism existing alongside a profoundly elitist and anti-democratic politics, one which supported profoundly violent imperialist policies that destroyed the lives of millions upon millions of people.
Baker: In my essay in the new volume, I describe Cold War liberalism as a contradictory synthesis of a variety of competing ideological elements, and I say that in the long run, the more reactionary pole triumphs.
Bessner: So why do you think it’s always the reactionary elements that succeed?
Baker: I think it has to do with one of liberalism’s fatal flaws as descriptive social theory, which is its neglect of informal structures of power. It wrongly imagines itself to have created a level playing field. If the classic critique of nineteenth century liberalism is that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, then you could say that Cold War liberalism, in its majestic equality, forbade both right-wing and left-wing populists from seizing power and making history. But there’s a false equivalency there. In reality, the attempt to constrain mass politics does not lead to benign technocratic management of society, but rather gives open reign to various powerful interests to maneuver without sustained opposition, because the emancipatory social movements necessary to resist them have been short-circuited.
Bessner: Which then raises the question: what do you do? What happens in an almost totally capitalist era in which people have no say over what their government does?
Baker: I guess one answer is, essentially, resignation. Which reminds me of your essay for The Drift about the video game Call of Duty and what you called “imperialist realism.” I thought of you when I saw this report that one of these jackboot guys in Minneapolis could be heard saying, “it’s like Call of Duty.”
Bessner: In Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the American protagonists are essentially psychotic. They’re deranged CIA agents who will do whatever they’re asked. And even the avatar you’re playing as turns out to have been brainwashed, and his trigger phrase is, “we’ve got a job to do.” There’s no pretending in this game that the United States is an actor for good in the world. I think you actually see this a lot throughout pop culture. In Captain America: Civil War, Captain America wants to go rogue and squares off against Iron Man, who thinks that there should be legal restrictions on the actions of the Avengers. And ultimately says, essentially, “Yeah, it’s not good if we go rogue, but what are you going to do? You need these extralegal powers.”
This is imperialist realism, which I say has three elements. First, it is defined by cynicism. After the failures of the global War on Terror, Americans no longer believe, really, that the United States is a positive force for good in the world, but they also don’t believe that anything could really change. (Obviously, the influence of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is key here.) That dichotomy engenders a cynicism that shapes Americans’ relationship to their empire. Second, imperialist realism is nevertheless defined by what I call missionism, which is the idea that because the United States empire is here to stay, it needs to act in the world in a meaningful way; the existence of the empire makes Americans believe that they can’t not act. And the tension between cynicism and missionism leads to a third defining feature, which is a sense of tragic guilt. The American empire has produced genuinely terrible outcomes, but because the world is brutal, America still needs to direct global politics. I think this structure of feeling emerges from the failure of Cold War liberalism to produce the utopia that its advocates insisted that it would. Imperialist realism is what happens when people don’t believe in that world any longer.
It is too simple to say that Trump's unpopularity won't matter. It will help to elect Democrats. But it will not help us to get to the next thing after cold war liberalism at all because even Democrats don't know what that is.