Just out. Glancing through Leo Ribuffo essay on William A. Williams, Niebuhr and John Lewis Gaddis, I see that Todd and Charles on the thread on violence and marxism will find comments worth chewing over in Ribuffo's acct. of Niebuhr's, "Moral Man and Immoral Society, " and the Bruce Cumings piece, among other topics, deals w/ the "democratic peace, " (Bruce Russett) theorists, mini-thread Justin continued last week. Synopsis "Liberals lie about Reagan's victory because when Reagan won the Cold War, he proved them wrong on everything they had done and said throughout the Cold War. It is their last defense to fifty years of treason." —Ann Coulter
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, conservatives have seized on the collapse of Communist states to argue more generally for the shortcomings of the Left.
Having declared victory in the Cold War, the ideologues of the Right have turned to rewriting the history of that struggle, seeking to undo a generation of critical scholarship on America’s rise to global dominance after World War II. In its stead, they have tried to install an unabashedly triumphalist account of the course of American history and foreign policy, which culminates in the unqualified defeat of alternatives to a capitalist, free-market, and U.S.-dominated world.
Cold War Triumphalism assembles some of the nation’s leading historians of U.S. foreign policy, American history, and the Cold War period, to counter and dissect this new virulent strain of right-wing dogma, exposing its historical and ideological roots in the political struggles of the Cold War period.
At a time when the issue of America’s role in the world is at the forefront — and when the Right has renewed its assault on progressive values — Cold War Triumphalism will be essential for an understanding of American political ideas in the twenty-first century.
Ellen Schrecker is a professor of history at Yeshiva University. One of the nation’s leading historians of the Cold War period, she is the author of Many Are the Crimes.
Contributors include:
• Ellen Schrecker and Maurice Isserman on the VENONA Files • Leo P. Ribuffo on morality and the Cold War • Bruce Cumings on post-Cold War visions of the world • Nelson Lichtenstein on triumphalism and wishful liberals • Michael A. Bernstein on the American economy • Jessica Wang on the Internationalism and Unilateralism • Carolyn Eisenberg on the Berlin blockade and the early Cold War • Chalmers Johnson on the three Cold Wars • Corey Robin on 9/11 and the End of the Cold War • Marilyn Young on the legacy of Vietnam
-- Michael Pugliese