ABSTRACT
The project of creating a viable modern capitalism and, with it, a reasonably democratic political order proceeded extremely well for two decades after the onset of the Cold War. The new system approximated in many of its particulars the social and political order imagined and advocated by anticommunist liberals in the early Cold War era. Political debate during the early postwar years was never as sterile as is sometimes depicted, but it operated within certain limits. The behavior of the Soviet Union during the beginnings of the Cold War did much to discredit currents of thought critical of capitalism. Antagonism between liberal politicians and the New Left was sharpest and most visible, and in the United States. The New Left had been inspired by, and emerged from, social movements that largely owed their existence to encouragement by liberal politicians and to timely assistance from the Democrats’ institutional supporters in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the party itself.
