Strange Death of American Liberalism

"Everyone agrees that Americans are more skittish about government than Europeans. But their attitudes are more complex and ambivalent than Brands allows.
The book's real weakness, however, is its one-dimensional rendering of liberalism itself. For Brands, liberalism is all about bigness and power and centralized control. Equality, solidarity and rights-consciousness tag along like bit players in the drama. By seeing liberalism so totally through the prism of statism, Brands comes close to declaring what is simply a truism: that cold war liberalism was a product of the cold war and couldn't go on without it. But if liberalism is to have any meaning for understanding our past or our future, we should see it as one manifestation of a broader tradition of American reform, one that has often, but by no means always, been identified with the power of the state."Brands, H. W., Jr. is the author of 'Strange Death of American Liberalism', published 2003 under ISBN 9780300098242 and ISBN 0300098243.