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Concept
Cold War liberal
Summary
Cold War liberal is a term that was used in the United States during the Cold War, which began after the end of World War II. The term was used to describe liberal politicians and labor union leaders who supported democracy and equality. They supported the growth of labor unions, the civil rights movement, and the war on poverty and simultaneously opposing totalitarianism commonly seen under Communist rule at the time. Cold War liberals supported efforts of containment, such as diplomat George F. Kennan and U.S. president Harry S. Truman during the post-World War II era, towards Soviet Communism.
Modern American liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Sol Stern wrote that "Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War." The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941); of these, freedom of speech and freedom of religion were classic American liberal freedoms, as was freedom from fear (freedom from tyrannical government), but freedom from want was another matter. Roosevelt proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond government non-interference in private lives. Freedom from want could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a concept more associated with the concepts of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party, Henry Clay's Whig Party, and Alexander Hamilton's economic principles of government intervention and subsidy than the more radical socialism and social democracy of European thinkers, or with prior versions of classical radicalism and classical liberalism as represented by Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had two wings: Northern and Western liberals opposed the generally-conservative Southern whites.
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