A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century

by John Lukacs

In A New Republic, one of America’s most respected historians offers a major statement on the nature of our political system and a critical look at the underpinnings of our society. American democracy, says John Lukacs, has been transformed from an exercise in individual freedom and opportunity to a bureaucratic system created by and for the dominance of special groups. His book, first published in 1984 as Outgrowing Democracy, is now reissued with a new introduction, in which Lukacs explains his methodology, and a new final chapter, which sums up Lukacs’s thoughts on American democracy today.

Reviews of the earlier edition

“A rich, subtle, and often ingenious argument . . . an eloquent, provocative, but disturbing book.”—Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Washington Post Book World

“Mr. Lukacs is an original and subtle historian, and [this book] is an engaging intellectual surprise party. . . . I was continuously enchanted by the play of his ideas—by the sharpness of his distinctions and the acuteness of his descriptions.”—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“It has been a long time since Americans were offered such a provocative interpretation of their historical predicament. . . . We would be foolish not to examine it closely.”—Laurence Tool, Society

Genres: History, Nonfiction

469 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2004

About the author

Lukacs was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. His parents divorced before the Second World War. During the Second World War he was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews. During the German occupation of Hungary in 1944-45 he evaded deportation to the death camps, and survived the siege of Budapest. In 1946, as it became clear that Hungary was going to be a repressive Communist regime, he fled to the United States. In the early 1950s however, Lukacs wrote several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue.[1]

Lukacs sees populism as the greatest threat to civilization. By his own description, he considers himself to be a reactionary. He claims that populism is the essence of both National Socialism and Communism. He denies that there is such a thing as generic fascism, noting for example that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are greater than their similarities.[2]

A major theme in Lukacs's writing is his agreement with the assertion by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville that aristocratic elites have been replaced by democratic elites, which obtain power via an appeal to the masses. In his 2002 book, At the End of an Age, Lukacs argued that the modern/bourgeois age, which began around the time of the Renaissance, is coming to an end.[3] The rise of populism and the decline of elitism is the theme of his experimental work, A Thread of Years (1998), a series of vignettes set in each year of the 20th century from 1900 to 1998, tracing the abandonment of gentlemanly conduct and the rise of vulgarity in American culture. Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture.

By his own admission a dedicated Anglophile, Lukacs’s favorite historical figure is Winston Churchill, whom he considers to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, and the savior of not only Great Britain, but also of Western civilization. A recurring theme in his writing is the duel between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler for mastery of the world. The struggle between them, whom Lukacs sees as the archetypical reactionary and the archetypical revolutionary, is the major theme of The Last European War (1976), The Duel (1991), Five Days in London (1999) and 2008's Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, a book about Churchill’s first major speech as Prime Minister. Lukacs argues that Great Britain (and by extension the British Empire) could not defeat Germany by itself, winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union, but he contends that Churchill, by ensuring that Germany failed to win the war in 1940, laid the groundwork for an Allied victory.

Lukacs holds strong isolationist beliefs, and unusually for an anti-Communist émigré, "airs surprisingly critical views of the Cold War from a unique conservative perspective."[4] Lukacs claims that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse, and contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life. Likewise, Lukacs has also condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In his 1997 book, George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946, a collection of letters between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan exchanged in 1994-1995, Lukacs and Kennan criticized the New Left claim that the Cold War was caused by the United States. Lukacs argued however that although it was Joseph Stalin who was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, the administration of Dwight Eisenhower missed a chance for ending the Cold War in 1953 after Stalin's death, and as a consequence the Cold War went on for many more decades.

Reviews

[Jonathan Hedgpeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting.....Thought provoking, but not really to be taken as serious history....its more like an editorial essay of massive proportions. Lukacs has three main themes that he comes back to consistantly. One is the growth of Bureaucracy throughout the twentieth century both governmental and private. The second theme is the impact of publicicty and the dominance of pictoral imagery in the age of television. The third theme is concerned with what he considers the suspect nature of populist fueled Democracy.

Lukasc has been described as an anglophile and an elitist. He is quite critical of Democratic Populism(equating it in a more recent book to National Socialism). His more recent publication entitled Democracy and Populism makes much of Tocqueville's predictions for the USA and how Populism has undermined the rational system of governance devised by the founders. I consider Democracy and Populism a pithy volume which continues the examination of the streams more critically explored in this text.

For a book written in 1984 it has been proven quite the prescient analysis. His reflections on American power in the world and his concerns regarding immigration are quite contemporary. This can only mean that the streams that Lukacs observed in 1984 have only become more evident....or they have simply been constant considerations of Americans in the twentieth century, which I think is also possible. The two major problems with this text, in terms of it making a serious contribution to scholarship are that 1. He does not site sources really at all 2. His opinionated and moralizing tone.

[Robert Morris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was quite a slog. I feel a bit bad, Lukacs apparently held a number of views I agree with, but this was neither a particularly educating, nor a particularly fun experience. Lukacs has an engaging, at times amusingly critical voice, but at the end of the day he's not saying much. It's a much more elevated version of course, but it's the Jordan Peterson school of argument. Make a crotchety reactionary statement, follow it up with a reference or two that may or may not apply, and change the subject often enough that nobody who values their time will bother to do the necessary work to show that you are full of it. I think my reading comprehension is better than average, but there were multiple pages or even paragraphs in this book where I couldn't follow the argument, or even discern the relevance of one sentence's following after another.

The work of debunking this text has been done by time. There's an afterword written ca. 2003, but the bulk of the book is a snapshot of what a well-read, military industrial complex skeptical conservative would think in 1983 or thereabouts. There are snatches of brilliance here and there. Lukacs's claims that the Soviet Union was not a serious rival were vindicated entirely. But the vast majority of the work seems quite silly. It would have historical interest if it wasn't so long, and so clearly taking me away from things that were more worth reading.

In 1983 Lukacs was convinced that the US was in irreversible decline. Crime, inflation and other social ills were surely on the way to overtaking the body politic. He's a solid enough observer that he could see that the Americanization of the world was accelerating, but because his ideology and sense of the nations's lack of virtue's just deserts required it, he had to insist that US empire was on its way out. Despite his brave (and staggeringly clear-eyed for a conservative) disgust for US military adventuring, he engages in some of the "we're too wimpy now" hand-wringing inspired by 1979's Iran revolution. Unsurprising for the early 1980s, he's obsessed with the concept of Inflation, and attempts to broaden the concept from financial discussions to other aspects of society. He claims a couple times that inflation was here to stay, and was going to accelerate, because of our souls or the failures of education or something. His 2003 afterword understandably makes no mention of all this, as the intervening 20 years (and the 17 following) witnessed quite stunning price stability. As with most of the occasionally intriguing ideas in this book, Lukacs's inflation musings are never really fleshed out, they are just sort of declared before he moves on.

Lukacs is pretty great on foreign policy, quite prescient even. He diagnoses the obvious problems of the Reagan presidency from just a year or two into it, and, in his afterword, accurately forecasts the complete failure of the George W. Bush presidency five years before its calamitous close. His sense of domestic policy is deeply wrong, and honestly kind of offensive. He doesn't come right out and say that Mexicans are vermin, but his language around immigration is pretty disturbing. I do kind of admire his consistency though. In 1983 he wasn't just angry about the new wave of immigrants, he was still pretty negative about the fact that the US had let in all those Italians, Slavs and Jews a century earlier. 40 years on, it seems hilarious to think that anybody would be concerned about immigration from Europe, and it's now clear that Mexican immigration is over, and Latin Americans assimilate into the United States at much faster rates than those European "huddled masses" did in the early 20th century.

All in all, kind of a silly mess of a book, and I'm not sure why it was recommended to me.