All in all, Cold War liberalism is not so much a “betrayal” as perhaps an extreme and reductive emphasis on parts of the liberal tradition that took shape in the wake of the French revolution. But if it is extreme or brutal in some of its reductions, it is because the times were extreme and brutal. The monstrous tyrannies of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR and the Second World War were really that bad—they were far worse than the Terror and the Napoleonic wars. It makes sense that the body of thought they produced would be a bit traumatized. So it feels just uncharitable when Moyn says, “Cold War liberalism isn’t justified or even explained by its totalitarian foe—not because it oriented itself to the Soviet Union but because it overreacted to the threat the Soviets posed, with grievous consequences for local and global politics.”
As Moyn points out, many of the figures he talks about are Jews—or, as he puts it, they “performed their Jewish identities”—but he can barely bring himself to mention the Holocaust as a serious context. He speaks of the contradiction between Cold War liberals’ Zionism and their distrust of nationalism and state-building in other contexts, but doesn’t just point out the obvious reason: they were attracted to the idea of safety above all. That emphasis on safety above all else may indicate some serious intellectual limitations in their thought and suggest that it was an emotional reaction more than a coherent set of ideas, but taking that context into full account is the work of an intellectual historian, who should look at thought as an understandable body of responses to a particular historical situation, rather than polemicizing it as an “overreaction” or a “betrayal.” In the face of the horrors of the 20th century, rethinking the idea of inevitable historical progress seems like a sane rather than a neurotic response. Just a moment’s reflection reminds us that Cold War liberals came by their trepidations honestly, even if Moyn’s entire project is try to convince us they did not. Nor were they the only thinkers who came out of the era with similar reactions. There is, of course, Theodor Adorno’s famous update to Kant’s categorical imperative, that humanity should “arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” That remark certainly resonates today.