Retired Army officer and Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich has a dual identity. Most obviously, he’s a semirenowned writer who commands bipartisan respect for speaking frank truths to an aloof political establishment. He critiques the military without slandering it, and he questions the wisdom of liberal culture without demeaning anyone. This generosity of spirit has given Bacevich access to media outlets across the ideological spectrum. He’s written for both the New Republic and the American Conservative. He’s also a small-c conservative Catholic whose name has been mentioned as a potential secretary of defense nominee in a Bernie Sanders administration, a suggestion Bacevich himself humbly brushed off with, “I doubt that. … I’m 72 and have other things on my plate.”
But there’s another aspect to Bacevich’s public persona: He is our most insightful commentator on the American character. Past books, such as The New American Militarism and America’s War for the Greater Middle East, are simultaneously policy critiques and dissections of the failures of American culture more broadly. In this sense, Bacevich has more in common with the historian and critic Christopher Lasch than with other military commentators; his ambitions are merely concealed behind the approachability of his subject matter. And his latest book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, is no exception.
“By the 1980s, the Cold War had become more than a mere situation or circumstance. It was a state of mind,” Bacevich writes toward the beginning of The Age of Illusions. He’s absolutely right. My own first, clear social memories are from right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even for a young child in the Midwest, the transition was so stark that the fall of the wall felt like coming out of a dream. The dissolution of the Soviet empire a few years later was even more pronounced, at the same time inevitable and unreal. The world was unstable yet full of possibility. Bacevich explains, “As the Soviet Union passed out of existence, Americans were left not just without that enemy but without even a framework for understanding the world and their place in it. However imperfectly, the Cold War had for several decades offered a semblance of order and coherence.”
The fall of this “semblance of order and coherence” was a watershed moment. Any number of paths were open, some more prudent than others. “At least in theory,” writes Bacevich, “the moment might have invited reflection on some first-order questions: What is the meaning of freedom? What does freedom allow? What obligations does it impose? Whom or what does it exclude?” But instead of taking the moment as an opportunity to look inward, a rather misguided elite class, Bacevich tells us, seized on four demands: the globalized financialization of everything, hegemonic global leadership to enforce it, a new definition of personal freedom that eschewed limits and rationality, and the supremacy of the executive branch over all others. Each of these goals, insofar as they were achieved, were tragedies for the country. Globalized financialization created wealth for a few while it shipped jobs overseas. American hegemony promoted fresh instability. Our new definitions of freedom became a kind of nihilistic licentiousness undermining the common good. And the imbalance of power between the branches of government helped prevent the creation of political solutions to each of these other issues. If we lost our identities with the ending of the Cold War, we’ve recovered a unifying theme in its wake: disappointment.
The language necessary for describing large cultural shifts can sometimes run toward abstraction, but Bacevich deftly winds his narrative around concrete cultural artifacts — music and film, novels by John Updike, and essays by James Baldwin — which he uses as tangible metaphors for the changes he describes. The plot of the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about three veterans returning home to fictional Boone City after World War II, illustrates for Bacevich, the public’s shift away from its humble desire for a freedom that doesn’t “bridle against received norms” but instead “imparts direction and confers purpose.” This desire vanished, Bacevich argues, as the postwar Washington establishment asked Americans to not only remain on a permanent war footing to quell the Soviet threat but also to partake in “an orgy of consumption,” effectively transforming people from down-to-earth citizens into shoppers with Utopian fantasies.
Bacevich concludes that the Cold War, despite conferring an identity on the nation, was a “tragedy” and that our failure in the post-Cold War years has been to repeat or amplify the very mistakes that the collapse of the Soviet Union should have given us an opportunity to reevaluate. If anything, he claims, we leaned into our mistakes, preserving a blind faith in the power of the executive, creating new justifications for military mobilization, and embracing a cultural hubris without limits. “Binding this consensus together and lending it some appearance of plausibility,” Bacevich writes, “was technopoly — a worship of technology, the deification of technique, and the conviction that problems in any sphere of human existence will ultimately yield to a technological solution.”
The Age of Illusions is a timely critique of liberalism gone off the rails. It belongs in the same conversation as Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and the work of the political philosopher Pierre Manent. And though Bacevich’s frequent hectoring of President Trump can be somewhat distracting, this book is about more than the age it describes. Some ages suffer more illusion than others, but, as Bacevich suggests, the difficulties of recognizing limits and cultivating democratic character have always been with us in some form. Being the permanent problems of liberalism, they are also the permanent problems of America.
