Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Yesterday, we did a show about a new book called The Shortest History of The United States from Revolutionary Roots to Global Superpower, the Remarkable Rise of the World's Oldest Democracy. It was an interesting conversation. The author of the book is actually Australian Don Watson. But in terms of the subtitle of the book, it always suggests, of course, something inevitable about history, that America would naturally go from its revolutionary roots to being this global superpower in the cold war, fighting supposedly for freedom against communism and all that narrative. But maybe it wasn't quite as inevitable or natural as some people assume. My guest today is an old friend of the show, an award winning podcaster and academic, Daniel Bessner. He's the author of an intriguing new collection of essays called Cold War Liberalism, very timely. And, Daniel is joining us from Seattle where he lives. He teaches at the University of Washington. Daniel, your book seems to suggest that, there was nothing inevitable, natural about America's shift from its nineteenth century isolationism, maybe more of a populist foreign policy, to the elitist, Eurocentric, internationalist nature of American Cold War foreign policy. Is that fair?

00:02:08 Daniel Bessner: It's a complicated question because you could view it in several different ways. It's legitimate to narrate the history of American politics — or American empire — as one of consistent expansion: from 13 colonies to continental empire to hemispheric power to overseas empire, in the form of the seizure of The Philippines and Guam and what would become American Samoa and Puerto Rico. But I do think that something did shift significantly in the middle of the twentieth century where The United States became an extra hemispheric power in a way that it just had never been before. With the seizure of The Philippines and elsewhere, the exception proved the rule. And so I think the idea that The United States was destined to be a global hegemon, is incorrect, but, actually, a bunch of contingent things needed to happen for The United States to do that and to build the institutional apparatus that made that project possible.

00:03:11 Andrew Keen: The term "cold war liberalism" seems a bit of a misnomer, in the sense that most people assume that cold warriors aren't necessarily liberals. You put the two together. In terms of American foreign policy, where's the break? Is it between — you mentioned The Philippines earlier — is it between somebody like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR?

00:03:36 Daniel Bessner: Well, it's interesting you brought that up about cold war liberalism because I think that people, cold warriors were profoundly liberal. And I think the cold war was ultimately a liberal project. Both the process of, becoming a global superpower, and even things like, McCarthyism. So what most people don't know, Andrew, you know because you read the piece, but it was actually the Democrats who started the expulsion of the left and communists from the government, and from other institutions years before McCarthy. McCarthy — the way I like to put it — finished the job. And the reason we know more about McCarthy than about what Truman and his attorney general did in the late nineteen forties is that the people who wrote that history were often liberal. Those liberal historians were often university professors — and that's where McCarthy focused, on the culture industry. But I would argue that in the more important segments of society — the government and labor unions — it was the Democrats who actually kicked out the communists and the left wing. But, yes, if you're looking at where the break occurred, I think the break occurred between the early twentieth century and the middle twentieth century, and the two big hinge points being Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who adopted an emergency politics when trying to enact, a genuinely liberal program. Liberal, of course, being a term not used in The United States until 1932 when FDR adopted it during his campaign because he didn't wanna use the term socialist to refer to the New Deal, and the term liberal didn't really have an American history. So that's just, you know, a fun fact. It's much more of a European term than an American term. It's really only in the thirties and forties that it becomes adopted here.

00:05:12 Andrew Keen: Your introductory essay to this collection — I was particularly intrigued. You begin with a quote from JFK, the quintessential, I guess, cold war liberal. But I've been reading recently about his father, Joe Kennedy, of course, was the American ambassador to, Britain before the war and was in some ways a very controversial isolationist. So this was in some ways, this shift from one kind of foreign policy to Cold War liberalism was a generational thing. It even happened within families, didn't it?

00:05:48 Daniel Bessner: Absolutely. Even Joe Kennedy Sr. was something of an outlier within the Roosevelt administration. The administration's foreign policy group were what one might call internationalists — they believed The United States needed to take an active role in extra-hemispheric affairs, based on their experiences in the thirties and forties. Kennedy was really an outlier, and not especially influential by the nineteen forties. But yes, this was absolutely a generational shift. It was an epochal shift — something gigantic that appears to us inevitable, like the argument made in the book you talked about earlier, but was really quite a stark break in American tradition. If you go back to George Washington's 1796 farewell address, he warns against entanglements in European affairs, the political and military affairs. And that remained mostly true between the late eighteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. The United States was always involved economically in Europe, including in the nineteen twenties. That was very much not a decade of isolationism, which was more a slur than a political reality. But The United States really didn't become politically and militarily involved in Europe and elsewhere until the post-World War Two period. So this was a genuinely epochal transformation.

00:07:06 Andrew Keen: One of the reasons I like having you on the show, Daniel, is you're a bit of a bomb thrower. You're an academic, but you also have a radical take, I think, on classic liberalism. You're one of the leading young critics of it. I mean, pare this down. Make it a bit more populist. You're arguing that the mythology of America in the world — in the post-war Cold War world — was one of good people fighting evil communism. But your collection of essays and your essay and your broader analysis actually makes things a little bit more complicated, doesn't it?

00:07:49 Daniel Bessner: Yeah. I mean, that's just not true. I mean, not to say nothing whether they're good or bad people. As a historian, when I put on my historian's fedora, I don't like to think in terms of good or evil, but I think you could just say as an empirical matter, American imperial rule was incredibly violent. That it was pretty good if you're in the North Atlantic world, if you're in Western Europe, if you're in Central Europe, the American empire is good for you. And for many decades, the history of the Cold War was written from that vantage point. But if you go to Asia, for example, where not only the Korean and Vietnam wars were fought, but, countries were the target of American regime change operations. If you go to Latin America, if you go to Sub Saharan Africa, the Cold War wrought an enormous amount of violence on the world. The historian Paul Thomas Chamberlain estimates somewhere, I think, around twenty million people were killed in Cold War or conflicts. And to my mind, I think the cold war was beyond that. The cold war was an American choice, and I think we're learning this more and more as archival documents come out from the Soviet Union. And let me just explain very quickly what I mean. The historian, Sergei Radchenko, who you very well might have had on the podcast, just released a book called — I think it's "To Run the World" — and he's a wonderful historian. He is a Russian. He speaks, Chinese as well. And when he gets into the documents of what Stalin actually wanted, it's pretty clear that Stalin thought that he was going to be able to reach an agreement with The United States in the post World War two period. Stalin had gotten along very well with FDR during World War two. FDR basically envisioned a world defined by the four policemen. He did talk about the UN, but the major group that FDR envisioned was something called the four policemen consisting of The UK, The USSR, The United States, and China. And he essentially thought of dividing the world into spheres of influence, which, in fact, might be, I think, what we are actually returning to. And Stalin, I believe, would have been able to make a deal with FDR, and there would not have been a cold war. There would have been competition between The US and Soviet Union, but there wouldn't have been this existential struggle. It was only when FDR died and a relatively inexperienced Harry Truman — particularly when it came to foreign affairs — replaced him. Truman was much more anti-communist, and much more insecure when it came to his foreign policy bona fides. When he came into power, he really adopted a universalistic cold war liberal understanding of the Soviet Union, essentially viewing as an illegitimate power with which The United States could not make deals. So I think the cold war is best viewed as an American choice and an American conflict, and that choice did an enormous amount of damage to the world. I would argue did enormous amount of damage to The United States. It militarized our political culture. It created a world that allowed The United States to become unipolar, quote, unquote, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We spent enormous amounts on the military — all things that I think are essentially social pathologies. And I think you could trace a lot of that to choices made, for perhaps understandable reasons — I try to explain them in the introduction — by Cold War liberals in the mid-twentieth century.

00:10:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I think it's a really important point. I mean, people take for granted America's always had a huge military. Of course, it hasn't. After the First World War it was famously the size of Portugal's or Sweden's. Now, of course, it's about, I don't know, 10 times more than all the other countries in the world put together. You list these Cold War liberals as a kind of unholy alliance — people like Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt, who you wouldn't always see listed together. What unites them, it seems to me, is obviously their conception of America in the world, their deep anti-communism. A lot of them experienced Stalin and Stalinism firsthand in Europe. But also — I'm not sure you'd call them elitists, but Cold War liberals were ambivalent about democracy. They believed in expertise and a foreign policy conducted by experts. So in that sense the quintessential Cold War liberal would be Robert McNamara, of course, who was

00:12:13 Daniel Bessner: Oh, very much. I mean, every president between Truman and LBJ was a Cold War liberal, and one could even place Richard Nixon as a Cold War liberal, particularly during his first few years in office. And liberalism has had a tortured relationship with democracy from its inception, in my opinion. I mean, I think that the first genuine liberals were, basically revolutionary or post revolutionary thinkers in France. People like Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël. You could point to proto-liberals like Montesquieu, and others. But I think that when liberalism first became a genuine political ideology, it was in the post revolutionary period in France. I think you could actually view Napoleon and his political movement as a liberal movement, at least in some regards. Essentially, what thinkers like Constant and de Staël — who in a sense codified liberalism — did was try to chart a middle path between revolutionary terror. And the terror in revolutionary France was really terrible. Almost 20,000 people were put to death. Tens of thousands of people were imprisoned. It really was a terrible thing that Robespierre and his coterie did. So Constant and de Staël were trying to chart a path between that and a counterrevolutionary, monarchical reaction. And part of that middle path as their fear of the terror and its consequences demonstrated was a genuine anxiety about the rise of the mob, and what would become the mass demos over the course of the nineteenth century. And so from the very beginning, liberals were skeptical of mass politics. They thought it was necessary for elites, to basically tame the masses and govern in their name, and do so in a more rationalist way. Now who that elite was or consisted of changed over time, initially, everyone could probably imagine it was white property elites. Today, it's people with Ivy League degrees. But the thing that remained remarkably consistent was a fetishization of the elites. And that is, to my mind, a core feature of liberalism as is the skepticism of mass democracy. So that list you talked about were people who came to these positions due to their own historical experiences. Many of them, if you'll notice, were Jews, skeptical, perhaps understandably of mass movements, which they attributed to the rise of Nazism. Many of them were also, severe anti communist. Many of them were European exiles, who experienced Nazism firsthand. Many of them were in The United States when they witnessed the bank runs and panic movements of the depression. So there are reasons that they are skeptical of the masses, but the skepticism of the masses itself is a core feature of liberalism. And most importantly, when it came to cold war liberals, they institutionalized that skepticism because it was the cold war liberals who created the modern American

00:15:08 Andrew Keen: state. Right. Not only did they institutionalize it, Daniel, but they normalized it — as if if you weren't a Cold War liberal, then either you were a fascist or a communist or some other expletive.

00:15:28 Daniel Bessner: Yeah. Andrew, I want to focus on that point, because interestingly enough, the political spectrum of right to left was not used in this country until the New Deal era. Essentially, what New Deal liberals did, New Deal liberals who became many of them most of them cold war liberals did, was define themselves as the center. They borrowed the European political spectrum in order to define define themselves as the center, fascism as the right wing, and then communism as the left wing. And you only get a genuine American conservative movement, I would argue, in the nineteen fifties, and it's essentially an anti New Deal movement primarily of of racists and anti new dealers organized around National Review and the John Birch Society and elsewhere. But your point about normalization is correct because the center only started to be used as a framework by these very people who define themselves as the rational. And maybe maybe they were right. I I mean, I think they had quite a few blind spots. But when it came to fascism, they were certainly superior and far superior. But they did normalize it and they institutionalized it, and they made it the common sense of, I would almost argue, a century. And I think one of the reasons everything feels so confused right now is that the ideas and the assumptions and the principles of the Cold War liberals no longer have legitimacy. In the twenty twenties, their ideas about what constitutes a good society no longer are legitimate to many people, but there's no other idea, ideology to turn to because there's no real right wing in this fascist sense, and that's a good thing. But they also destroyed the left. And so we're in this strange moment of the world of the cold war liberals coming apart, but no one knows where to turn because we're basically all capitalists now. So what do we do?

00:17:16 Andrew Keen: It's a good moment to take a break. After the break, Daniel, I wanna come back and ask ask you whether or not you're a liberal because my sense is you're not. Maybe you are pioneering a new kind of thinking about some of these issues. But, anyway, we'll take a quick break, and then we'll be back with Daniel Bessner in one second. This is not a commercial break. That's because we don't have commercials on this show. I'm not gonna waste your time trying to sell you inane products. However, I do have pretty good deal for you. I'm writing a book about The United States. It's due out in 2028. And if you become a paid subscriber on my keen on America substack, You'll not only get very cool notes and photographs and videos from this project, but I'll also send you a personalized side copy of the book when it comes out in 2028. So go to keenon.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. That's keenon.substack.com. And now back to our conversation. We're speaking with Daniel Bessner who has, an intriguing new book out. He co-edited Cold War Liberalism, which I think is a is a very interesting and important critique of the liberals who drove the American Cold War. Daniel, you have an interesting piece in The Nation, in which you're very critical of George Packer's new novel. It's titled George Packer's Liberal Imagination. I don't think you think that highly of the imagination. Are you a liberal?

00:19:14 Daniel Bessner: I don't think Packer thinks that highly of it either, if you read the book. Interestingly enough, I mean, I'm a political liberal. I believe in democracy and free and fair elections. I don't think, dictatorship of the proletariat is going to be able to effectively govern society. But I think liberalism as instantiated in US history over the last century has, at this point, failed to deliver on its promise — to achieve its utopias. And I think we need to start thinking about new political ideologies — emerging from different moments — even though that's going to be very difficult in a world that is essentially capitalist. I mean, I'm personally a socialist. I think that is a more effective way to organize society that's less oligarchical. It contributes to less inequality and, in my mind, as actually practiced in the twenty-first century, would contribute less damage abroad. But I'm very critical of, American liberalism and the Democratic Party. I think the main reason Trump won twice has less to do with the power of the far right and more of the weakness of actually existing liberalism. And I think many elites have been unable to see that — until very recently, perhaps. But, yeah, that's how I would phrase my own political situation.

00:20:41 Andrew Keen: Tell me a little bit more about the book. It's a series of essays. You co-edited it with Michael Brenes from Yale. I'm intrigued by the afterword by Samuel Moyn. He has a new book out on the American gerontocracy. Is there a gerontocratic quality to Cold War liberalism now?

00:21:01 Daniel Bessner: Yeah. I mean, Cold War liberalism is essentially a zombie ideology. It does not have a mass constituency. I mean, I think cold war liberals sell a lot of books to wealthy people who consider themselves to be anti Trump. Timothy Snyder is basically a cold war liberal, as are Michael Ignatieff, Applebaum, Yascha Mounk. But I don't think these are people with mass political constituency even though they might have fans in the publishing industry because they're saying that Trump is Hitler 5,000 times, and it makes people feel like they're engaged in meaningful political conflict. They've even chosen

00:21:38 Andrew Keen: exile for some reason.

00:21:41 Daniel Bessner: Yeah. Very Yale — a very impressive place for the super elite — and they had to flee. But I don't think most people believe The United States is going to achieve Cold War liberal goals, at home or abroad. In fact, Cold War liberalism, I would argue, mostly died out in the late nineteen sixties and was replaced by neoliberalism on the one hand when it came to, domestic economics and neoconservatism when it came to foreign policy with neoconservatism, to my mind, being a very direct outgrowth of the Cold War liberal project, neoliberalism being actually quite different from the Cold War liberal project. But no, it hasn't really been alive since the late sixties, early seventies — only in some halls of academe.

00:22:34 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Moyn, Applebaum, Snyder — still preoccupied with Ukraine and Eastern Europe. But two questions on that. Firstly, are you suggesting that we shouldn't care about Ukraine? And secondly, perhaps more interestingly, hasn't mid-twentieth century Cold War liberalism morphed into twenty-first century Cold War liberalism against China. How would you distinguish between American hawkishness on China, which you find in both parties, Biden and Trump seem to agree on that, versus the cold warriors who are against the Soviet Union?

00:23:16 Daniel Bessner: Sure. With regards Ukraine, the way I view it is that, of course, one should care about it. I mean, I who am I to tell someone what they should or shouldn't care about? But the way that I think about it is you don't get Ukraine, that is you don't get the supporting of a just war, without Gaza, which to me is an unjust war. History has demonstrated that American power and military might is never just used for good. That is oftentimes used for evil. And I think one needs to take that seriously when determining whether The United States should have the capabilities and capacities to send arms abroad, whether we trust our leaders to make those wise decisions because who knows, Trump might drop a tactical nuclear weapon on Iran in the coming weeks and and should any one person ever have that power. So, of course, one cares about Ukraine, but I am against The United States having the power to support any war abroad for the very reasons that I just stated. In terms of China, I think it's a bit different. I'm writing a piece about this right now. I think we're entering a moment that is going to be profoundly less ideological than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think the major ideological questions have been historically answered. Fukuyama, to some degree, was right, when he said that liberalism was going to be the last ideology, but he was wrong because he thought that everywhere would become liberal. But it turns out when every country is capitalism, you just don't need the liberalism any longer. So when you read about what Biden and Trump actually say about China, interestingly, intriguingly, even though Biden started his term in office talking about democracy versus authoritarianism, that pretty much fell by the wayside very quickly. And when you hear them talking the language of realism in the sense of the language of interests and the language of security. And that's even true when you talk about how Biden administration officials and Trump administrations talk about, officials talk about Ukraine. When Blinken is talking about Ukraine during the Biden administration, he's not talking about spreading democracy because Ukraine whatever you think about this democracy, it's not, let's say, ideal. He's talking within the language of security and interests, which wasn't necessarily true for the cold war liberals who genuinely spoke an ideological language, in a way that I think would actually appear strange in the twenty twenties. And I think going forward, we might view the cold war and even the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as uniquely ideological moments. My pithy way of putting it is that if God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or people dying for liberal democracy? That actually happened. People did that. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that. So I think ideology is going to have increasingly less hold on our lives, and so the Cold War liberal idea is gonna be, even more of an atavism.

00:26:00 Andrew Keen: What about the idea of convergence between China and The US into some sort of authoritarian capitalism? You know, you're a socialist. Does that mean that you don't want capitalism? And I presume that authoritarian capitalism for you is even worse than free market capitalism.

00:26:22 Daniel Bessner: It's interesting. I think that we are existing in a moment where we are working for capitalism, and capitalism is not working for us. I know, Andrew, you talk a lot about AI. I think AI is basically the attempt of the capitalist class to deindustrialize white-collar workers, because real profits aren't anywhere to be found. The way that I see it is that capitalism has reached a moment when there are no real profits to be made, which is why it has become increasingly financialized in the past four decades. The way I put it to my students: if you build St. Louis in 1850, there are genuine profits to be extracted. Now we have to make money off of fake transactions. There's no connection to an organic economy. The problem, though, is that there's no political economic alternative. So I think we're going to be increasingly in an era where capitalism works less and less for humanity, and humanity works more and more for capitalism. That's not going to last forever because nothing lasts forever. But it seems to me like there is not going to be an internal overcoming of that, but it has to be some sort of exogenous shock. Maybe that's a war. Maybe that's climate. I don't know. But, I mean, Andrew, you're obviously a reader of the Communist Manifesto. On the first page of the manifesto, Marx says there's either a dialectical transcendence of the previous economic system or the mutual ruin of the contending classes. And I don't know about you, but it sure as hell feels to me that we're living through the era of mutual ruin more than anything else.

00:27:56 Andrew Keen: Speaking of mutual ruin, the war in Iran continues, slightly absurd. Marx, of course, famously talked about history first defined by tragedy and then by farce. How does the current situation in Iran fit into your narrative in cold war liberalism? I know you don't have the standard liberal critique of Trump, although you're no friend of his either. Is there a connection between the end of cold war liberalism and this interregnum we seem to be existing in, a Gramscian interregnum where we can't identify what's happening and what Trump is and isn't doing in Iran and The Middle East generally?

00:28:34 Daniel Bessner: No. For sure. Well, I mean, I don't think we're necessarily in in an interregnum. I'm not sure there's something coming next. That's the sort of Marx's point. A Gramscian interregnum assumes some transcendence into a new system. I'm not sure I assume that personally. But I think it's an era of pure power politics. Trump and Hegseth and Rubio and Vance, even if the New York Times claims they were against the war, of course, they're going to claim that now. But they're not talking the language of ideology here. They're not talking about transforming, Iran into a functioning democracy. They're saying that Iran essentially needs to bend the knee vis a vis the Strait of Hormuz. So that is a non ideological pure power political way of understanding, international relations. So, I mean, no — when the Cold War liberals overthrew Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala or and speaking of Iran — contributed to the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, that was partially justified through the language of interest. Sure. But it was also partially justified through anti communism, antisocialism, pro democracy, and pro-liberal capitalism. There's nothing of that here. This is simply about The United States being able to extract rents from Iran — which isn't happening — and now trying to prevent Iran from organizing a kind of toll road on the Strait of Hormuz. So a totally different logic of geopolitics, even if the violence looks quite similar to what came before in American history.

00:29:59 Andrew Keen: But is there a third way between Cold War liberalism and Trumpian realpolitik?

00:30:08 Daniel Bessner: In what sense? I'm sure there are other ways. I mean, we could —

00:30:11 Andrew Keen: Well, yeah. You've co-edited this book, Cold War Liberalism — you're obviously no great fan of it — and you're clearly no fan of Trump's pure power approach either. What other traditions exist? We began this talking about America. In your essay, you talk about other traditions in American history for engaging with the world. What alternatives exist? If Cold War liberalism has died and we don't like Trump, what are the options?

00:30:55 Daniel Bessner: The United States should not be governing the world. It should not be attempting to govern the world. Yankee go home. It needs to get rid of its global basing posture. It needs to spend very, very little on its military. It has a nuclear deterrent. It needs to focus on security as being what security meant before the New Deal, which was physical security from invasion, which has not threatened The United States since 1812. It needs to much reduce itself. The type of world that I would ultimately wanna see is a humanistic one in which every human life is recognized as equal. We are nowhere near that. So I think the best we could do in the short term is essentially divide ourselves into those spheres of influence, allow regions to develop as they would without an outside power like The United States intervening with them. And, hopefully, over time, that will create regional blocks that would allow for a genuine international law that isn't built on the backs of Western or really American hegemony to emerge. And over time, I'm talking centuries, may see a maybe a millennia, create some type of global governance in which there is genuine equality between the peoples, but we are nowhere near there. So the first thing that we have to do is basically get rid of this incredibly violent geopolitical system, this quote, unquote liberal international order, which doesn't exist and never existed by getting rid of American bases and reducing the American military budget and having The United States stop meddling in other people's affairs.

00:32:13 Andrew Keen: And where are we seeing that argument made within you're a man of the left, so you're not interested in the kind of MAGA populism. But where are we seeing it on the left in the Democratic Party? Bernie Sanders seems to be saying something similar or had been saying something similar, I guess, AOC. Are you seeing the emergence of a post-Cold War liberalism within the Democratic Party?

00:32:43 Daniel Bessner: I think there's a lot of confusion. When AOC gets asked about foreign policy, it's not a major issue for her, so she winds up resorting to a lot of liberal internationalist elements. Obviously what she needs to do is hire me, and I could start writing her foreign policy speeches. But —

00:32:57 Andrew Keen: I don't charge Would you do it for free?

00:33:02 Daniel Bessner: For her, I'd probably charge. But no — there's no institutional base. I don't want to go to DC. [cross-talk]

00:33:16 Andrew Keen: the Internet these days, Daniel, so you could do it.

00:33:19 Daniel Bessner: I mean, not not even physically. Like, I wouldn't wanna work for anyone in the Democratic Party just to be told no over and over again. I don't think the party is near there. If the Biden administration had invited me in, I would have said no. But, because I don't think there's a base. The party is, like, incredibly elitist. The party has been professionalized — it's the managerial class. They all come from a small set of colleges. I'm not interested in what they think about the world. I think they're blinkered. I think they're wrong. And I think the only way they're gonna win elections is because Trump is even more horrible. But if they were open to genuine new thinking, I would work for them, but I don't think that there's a strong base. I think the Democrats often resort to a type of liberal internationalism that not only failed, but was in practice incredibly violent and destructive. So, yeah, I'm not particularly optimistic about the future. I don't know if you can tell.

00:34:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But you're optimistic enough to write about it. I mean, you haven't completely given up on it. So if Wilson and FDR are the pioneers of Cold War liberalism on the left, what nineteenth-century American figure should we look back to? Jefferson? Who would be a model? Where do you go to start rethinking this tradition?

00:34:39 Daniel Bessner: The people that restrainers generally point to is John Quincy Adams, secretary of state and president — who had the famous quote that The United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." So Quincy Adams wasn't perfect, but that's a good start — you don't go searching for monsters abroad. And I think one of the defining elements of Cold War liberalism — and liberalism in general — is that they are very good at identifying existential enemies. Although, I would argue that since the Nazis, The United States has not had an existential enemy. So that would be a good start. Go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

00:35:16 Andrew Keen: And finally, I know you gotta run to pick your daughter up, but, should we go back to the sixties to the resistance against Vietnam? Is that another way of thinking about this when Cold War liberalism had its most self evident catastrophe?

00:35:36 Daniel Bessner: I don't think protests really work. I think since then, the elites have insulated themselves from popular politics. The Cold War liberals were crucial to that project. So I'm skeptical about mass politics to work in the twenty twenties. I think that's institutionally very difficult. But I also don't have, like, a great solution about how to change things. But that's just the reality of the situation as I see it. You know, maybe the long march through the institutions, but, again, I'm very skeptical of the Democratic Party. I think it's incredibly corrupt. So, no. You know, you ask me. We're living in the era of mutual ruin.

00:36:10 Andrew Keen: Well, on that cheerful note, Daniel, I'm gonna let you go and pick your daughter. There's not much of a future. Maybe you should just leave her.

00:36:18 Daniel Bessner: Yeah. Just let it go. Well, Andrew, always a pleasure. Thank you very much. Everyone, check out American Prestige. Actually, Andrew, that's what you could do — you could subscribe to my

00:36:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, we can do we can we can go both ways. You can just subscribe to mine. I'll subscribe to yours. Daniel Bessner, as always, very interesting, provocative take on our current situation. Thank you so much.

00:36:41 Daniel Bessner: Thank you, Andrew.