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Brinkley's scholarship suggests that while the convictions of liberals have changed, those of ordinary Americans have remained consistently contradictory. In 1936, he writes, "much of the American electorate welcomed (even expected) assistance from government in solving their problems but nonetheless remained skeptical of state power." As evidenced by the 1994 elections, that skepticism has apparently intensified; millions of voters benefit from Social Security and Medicare and simultaneously complain that government is evil and inept.
William O. Douglas once remarked that liberalism is the spirit that is not too sure it's right. Brinkley suggests that liberals were certain they were right but were never exactly sure what they stood for. Brinkley illuminates the rather arcane arguments in which some liberals urged "managed competition" (a phrase the Clinton Administration considered and abandoned for its health plan), while others advocated economic decentralization, and still others promulgated an expanded welfare state.
Even so, by 1942 a coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats was attempting to dismantle the mechanisms of the New Deal, such as the National Resources Planning Board. The House Un-American Activities Committee began a campaign to link liberalism with communism, suggesting that liberals were not simply lukewarm about capitalism but were actively plotting to upend it. Brinkley, a professor of American history at Columbia University, suggests that the compromises made by New Dealers in the early '40s--backing down on their antimonopolism and support of industrial "planning"--explain in part why "modern American liberalism has proved to be a so much weaker and more vulnerable force than almost anyone would have imagined a generation ago." Brinkley seems to take what is a deeply unpopular line these days: it is not that the New Dealers went too far, but that they did not go far enough.
The book suggests that the question for liberals today is no different from the one they faced before and during World War II: What is the role of the state in remedying economic inequities without eroding individual liberties? Or, as the question might be phrased for Gingrich: When does decreasing the role of the state unfairly increase the hardship on those whom the nation needs to help?