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NancyB's avatar

For a lot of Cold War liberals (don't know about Peretz), the solution to the tension between universalism and particularism was a certain Americanism––the US as the exceptional nation with a distinctly liberal civilization that was still able to transcend the destructive nationalism of the European right and the destructive utopianism of the global left. American exceptionalism as the "right" kind of universalism for the planet. That's why sponsoring horrors in Latin America or invading Iraq could look like liberation.

That so many of the Cold War intellectuals were Jews brings out the interesting possibility that the liberal ideology of that era, broadly speaking, was a secularized eschatology expansive enough to win acceptance by much of America––Jews, Christians, urbanites, rural people, Black Americans, European emigres, etc.

Seems to me that both the MAGA right and contemporary US progressives have a lot less confidence in the American exceptionalism as that "good" kind of universalism. The foreign policy most fueled by American exceptionalism (peaking in Iraq) might have done the most to kill off American exceptionalism, the one set of ideas/beliefs that provided some cohesion for postwar America.

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John Murphy's avatar

In my view, Peretz was correct that man cannot live on liberalism alone. We need liberalism animated by something else. For a long time in America, that something else was Anglo-Protestant Christianity. As Liberal Protestantism has lost much of its culture-shaping power, we have shifted to a form of expressive individualism backed by demands for an ever-growing menu of "rights." In some ways, this has made our society more just, but it has often acted like acid on our social solidarity and it has also sometimes given the privileged cover to abandon their obligations to the less fortunate. (learn to code!) We need to remember that a political community must be composed on an "us" and not just a lot of "me's."

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