AMERICA IN OUR TIME

A large, slick chronicle of the extinction of post-WW II liberalism--specifically the ""conservative liberalism"" that began with the Truman Doctrine and remained dominant from JFK through Nixon. Hodgson, a British journalist, enumerates its discredited premises. Belief in US economic leadership and growth have been wrecked by inflation; the Vietnam War killed the idea that American military involvement should and would have no domestic effect; the existence of a ""middle-class majority"" has no Statistical basis. Disruptions of the liberal ""consensus"" led only to further failures in the case of the civil rights, black power, consumer, and counterculture movements. But we have now left ""the fool's paradise"" and learned the mottos ""Down to earth. Limited resources."" Taking a querulous tone, Hodgson cites the liberal foreign-policy establishment's definition of itself as ""the center,"" for example, yet soon agrees that ""the middle course"" was indeed chosen ""between appeasement and rollback."" However, his conventional critiques of conventional wisdom pack in a good deal of material on political figures, the media, and the subjective transformations of the Sixties and early Seventies, pulling together familiar blind and sore spots with descriptive, if not explanatory, perseverance.