In The End of Reform, Alan Brinkley lays bare the foundations of the modern liberal era, tracing the origins of rights-based liberalism back to the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Specifically, Brinkley asserts that a fundamental identity crisis for the liberal ideology was encapsulated by the New Deal era. During the years of the early New Deal (pre-1937), one liberal agenda prevailed. By the time FDR's second term was underway, this earlier liberal agenda had yielded to its modern counterpart, a new liberal ideology that "focused less on the broad needs of the nation and modern economy than on increasing the rights and freedoms of individuals and social groups" (Brinkley, p. 10). The nature of this transformation within the liberal agenda forms the crux of Brinkley's text.
The basic beliefs of liberalism during the early New Deal were tailored to meet the challenges of the era; the policy prescriptions it advocated were selected from a catalogue of traditional "reform" liberal values. Among these, the "conviction that the government must play an active role in the economy" was the guiding principle (Brinkley, p. 10). Set against the devastating backdrop of the Great Depression, the American electorate was amenable to the idea that the government should assume a broader role in handling everyday affairs.
The expansion of the state and executive power base that characterized the early New Deal years attached a stigma to the liberal agenda that endures to this day. And yet, as Brinkley shows, in the aftermath of Roosevelt's overwhelming second-term victory in the 1936 presidential election, the basic concepts of liberalism were yet to experience some dramatic changes. These shifts had much to do with the deterioration of the New Deal in FDR's second term. By the end of 1937, a stunned liberal base was pondering how its seemingly indomitable post-election New Deal momentum had evaporated; the American people ...