HIST328

This course offers a history of political liberalism and conservatism, as they both developed from the 19305 through the present clay and got tethered to the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. The class ends tip with diametrically-opposed political parties on almost all issues, thus giving shape to the bitter partisanship of today’s politics in the era of Donald Trump. We will discuss how the New Deal augmented the size and scope of the federal government, shifted the boundaries of race, and created a powerful welfare state and labor movement, while, paradoxically, also catering to wealthy capitalists. We then watch liberalism shift rightward toward the center after World War ll with the onset of the Cold War—a move that made liberalism ripe for attack on both the left and the right of the political spectrum by the 1960s. In the final portion of the class, we trace how a rightward-leaning political culture came to replace the centrist Cold War liberalism of the immediate postwar decades. Studying these political developments on the left and right explains the severe partisanship of today, which gave rise to the Trump presidency and its critics.