Chapter 23 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s representatives of what they considered the American “radical intelligentsia." To emphasize the radicals’ status as Americans, the writers scrubbed them of all complicating ethnic, national, or racial markers and elided their connections to the Soviet Union. Devoting a largely admiring passage to Alexander Kaun, a Berkeley professor, Ilf and Petrov neglected to mention that he was an immigrant. They also emphasized that the radical professor no less than the radical journalists Lincoln Steffens and Albert Rhys Williams, whom they met in Carmel, were surrounded by standard American vacuousness. Yet they still expressed hope in the power of the antifascist Popular Front in America.

Chapter 2 focuses on what Ilf and Petrov astutely identified as the American strategy of disparaging communism by associating it with ethnic and racial minorities. Focusing on the story of Alexander Gumberg, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian empire who helped to facilitate Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the chapter analyzes how in the wake of the post-World War I Red Scare, Jewish immigrants negotiated the popular and official tendency to conflate “alienism” and “radicalism.”

This chapter examines the ways in which Lyndon Johnson attempted to build on and expand the liberal tradition in twentieth-century American politics. As he did so from the perch of the Oval Office, Johnson ran directly into the structural limitations and debilitating political fears of liberalism that were at work right at this high point for Johnson’s career: the racial accord that Northern Democrats had entered into with Southerners in the 1930s, and the fears about appearing weak on national security. In the end, the political vulnerabilities and limitations of this tradition would overwhelm him, leaving him to announce that he would not run for reelection in October 1964 and defining his legacy over the failed war in Vietnam. While it is important to understand how Johnson’s own agency led to his downfall, it is equally relevant to understand how the nature of American liberalism trapped Johnson into these positions. The president was caught in the basic contradictions of the agenda that he inherited and championed. The same tradition that strengthened his resolve to grow the government to tackle new areas of domestic life also pushed him toward the decisions that drowned his legacy for decades to come. This is not just the story of Lyndon Johnson – it’s the story of American liberalism in the twentieth century.

David Galula’s (1964) Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice likely shaped current American counterinsurgency doctrine more than any other historical text. A French national of North African birth, he wrote his core works in English, for American military readers. While sharing many strategies and tactics with Anglophone theorists from the period, his manual adopted a strikingly unified process narrative for the step-by-step defeat of insurgency. His work was informed by decolonization in East Asia and North Africa as well as a deep anticommunism. More than anything else—and largely to the exclusion of past French doctrine—he was informed by reading Mao and by field observation of Maoist guerrillas in China. Galula’s strategy was to run Maoist guerrilla warfare backward. In adopting this process story, he tacitly internalized the logic of Mao’s politics as such. He produced an apparently hyper-coherent doctrine that was in practice divided against itself in multiple ways. This account acquired enormous influence, intermittently shaping Anglo-American counterinsurgency for decades.

This chapter explores the expressive possibilities of the early Cold War era by reconsidering C. Y. Lee’s pathbreaking 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song. Adapted into a Broadway musical in 1958, a Hollywood production in 1961, and then revived on stage in 2002, Lee’s breezy tale has been a source of fascination and vexation for Asian American audiences for decades. This chapter’s reading resituates Lee’s novel within postwar US–Asian relations and the position of Asian America in the early Cold War period in order to reconsider The Flower Drum Song as an exhibit of the narrowed political parameters of the Cold War consensus. In focusing on the political machinations featured in Lee’s novel – and not its afterlives – this chapter reads a critical opening for Asian American expression, but on straitened political terms. At the heart of The Flower Drum Song is a political education that reasons through the necessity of anticommunism; and though the astonishing success of The Flower Drum Song and its adaptations has been taken as evidence of successful domestic incorporation, the exigencies of the postwar political order are on full display in the novel, which both obeys and ironizes Cold War strictures of thought and feeling.

By mid-1966, about half a million adherents of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were dead, many more were arbitrarily imprisoned and even more lost civil rights. The biggest communist party outside the communist bloc disappeared almost overnight, as did its affiliated social organisations. It was the worst political violence since Indonesia´s 1945-1949 war of national liberation. How could this happen? The chapter first dismisses two once-popular analytical approaches. Neither behaviourist depictions of rampaging anti-communist crowds, nor statist images of a military conducting pogroms on its own are adequate to the known facts. It then develops a contentious politics approach with multiple collective actors. The cold war looms large; the economy is politicised; institutions are weak, factionalised, and deeply embedded in various social formations. Contention escalates from September 1963, as President Sukarno and the PKI pivot from the gradualist Soviet Union to a militant People´s Republic of China. An emerging legitimation crisis pits a social justice discourse popular among lower classes against a growing middle class religious, law-and-order discourse. When the PKI leadership makes a false move on 1 October 1965, the military mobilises its allies to strike back, with genocidal results.

The introduction begins with a critical biographical overview of Aron’s career as a whole. This overview, which opens with an account of Aron’s emergence in the 1970s as an anti-totalitarian icon, serves as a point of entry into the larger questions addressed throughout the book. Both the 'French liberal revival' and Aron’s specific contribution to it have, it is argued, previously been treated more in laudatory evaluative terms than critical analytical ones. While the liberal status of Aron’s political thought has been largely taken for granted, the French liberal renaissance has been analysed on its own terms such that its claims for the historical illiberality of French political culture in particular have often been taken at face value. These points lead into a brief historiographical review which links the literature on Aron and the liberal revival to recent debates around the history of French and European liberalism more broadly.