ABSTRACT
Winners are seldom in the mood to reflect on the contingencies of history. Rather, they equate their own good fortune, no matter how fleeting or fragile, with the advance of humanity, reason, the revolution, or the nation. History, winners believe, advances. Despite the postmodernist themes that have surfaced in American universities in recent years, this progressive faith, and equation of one's own success with the progress of the Good, if not always the True, continues in the universities. Conservative intellectuals found a foothold in some Washington think tanks and in the federal bureaucracy, but these jobs are miniscule in number compared to those in the universities. Liberalism ceased to be color- and gender-blind, and supported affirmative action requiring discrimination taking race and gender into account. Liberalism also ceased to be anticommunist, and supportive of an active American role in the Cold War.
