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This chapter examines the content and context of what is termed “postwar liberalism”, which coupled a new commitment to anti-discrimination with a rejection of the more class-conscious and social democratic orientation of the New Deal. Postwar liberalism represents a new understanding of American liberalism that centrally featured a strong, principled stand against racial discrimination. Although presenting itself as articulating a long-standing truth, this paradigm in fact represented an important reconfiguration of the meanings of both liberalism and race. While representing a historic advance against deeply embedded norms of white supremacy, postwar liberals failed to recognize the immense significance of growing patterns of racial inequality that did not fit into their ideological frame. By making a dramatic, controversial, and highly public commitment to resolving the American dilemma, postwar liberals promoted a vision of American democracy that would prove immensely more difficult to approximate than they realized at the time.

The early Civil Rights movement radicalized the postwar liberal agenda by infusing it with much more expansive conceptions of both racial equity and social justice. While postwar liberalism remained focused on the problem of Jim Crow segregation in the South, the movement also emphasized problems of racial discrimination and segregation in the rest of the nation. At the same time, it encouraged the development of a new form of racial consciousness, particularly a more positive and empowered sense of black identity. The movement also advocated an essentially social democratic agenda, whose primary goal was to increase social and economic equity among all Americans. By the early 1960s, these commitments had created a pronounced rift between “white liberals”, who favored the more moderate politics of postwar liberalism, and the Negro movement, who supported the new form of social liberalism developed by the Civil Rights movement.

This chapter explores how the postwar reality is complicated, and a major aspect of that complexity was the different balance, in different places and moments of time, between public and private power and resources. Although there was little escaping the necessity of involving private investment in urban redevelopment, the authority of the public realm over private sector activity varied and made a difference. The chapter follows the evolution of the liberal city-building project over the postwar period, with particular attention to the shifting balance of power between the public and private realms, its implications, and, through this case, the historical evolution of postwar liberalism.

This introductory chapter sheds light on the complicated history of Milwaukee's politics. At midcentury, cities like Milwaukee were crucial political battlegrounds in the postwar era. In these metropolitan milieus, the often inchoate yet passionately held postwar ideals of the public good promoted by New Deal liberals ran up against notions of individual rights expressed largely, though not exclusively, through unfettered free enterprise. Yet at times, the interplay between liberalism and conservatism was not clear-cut. Liberal assertions of what constituted the public good were complicated by personal ideology, political expediency, and a failure to grasp the challenges ahead. With such complex visions competing to define the city's future, Milwaukee illustrates both the limits of postwar liberalism and the resurgence of conservatism, a dynamic repeated in cities across the nation.

The Introduction lays out the subject matter of the book, identifies key assumptions and methodological choices, presents the core arguments, and identifies the intended audience for the book. It opens with the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s famous speech on black poverty at Howard University to introduce the subject matter. It then articulates the argument that liberalism is historically entwined with racism, and that American liberalism is much more intertwined with conservativism than is generally recognized, and that the concept of racial capitalism is particularly useful for understanding this. The Introduction makes clear that the book is an intellectual history of postwar liberal thinking on black poverty, particularly the idea of a culture of poverty.

Chapter 2 discusses how to classify populist parties and clearly distinguish them from other types of parties they are often confused with. It begins by contrasting modern populism specifically with the variant of liberalism that developed in postwar Europe and the Americas, and then goes on to offer a rationalization of the need to study populism as one of only three available alternatives for organizing polity—the other two being liberalism and autocracy. Deriving from the minimal definition of populism as democratic illiberalism, the last two sections offer comprehensive classifications of parties that are populist and those that are not—the latter promptly being relegated to the distinct categories of antidemocratic, nativist, or regionalist and secessionist parties.

The conclusion connects the historical significance of Great Society liberalism to contemporary politics. In particular, it highlights how the abandonment of the black poor and the rise of mass incarceration were assisted by the idea of a culture of poverty, which ended up justifying harsher and more punitive measures to deal with the social fallout of the intergenerational poverty racial capitalism produced. It concludes with an argument that in order for the left to work towards a truly transformative politics, it must abandon the idea that certain liberal tenets can be used to achieve radical ends.