n interesting article appearing recently in the liberal opinion journal The American Prospect offers a remarkably clear window into the current state of American liberalism. It reveals a once energetic tradition that is now listless and, in some ways, delusional.

The piece is called “After Ideology” and is penned by American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. It’s worth noting that Kuttner’s probably the most important liberal public intellectual in America today. He’s done exemplary work turning The American Prospect into perhaps the best journal of Left-wing opinion in North America. He’s working very hard on television, on campuses and Capitol Hill to reinvigorate the intellectual and political Left in America.

But given the current political climate — especially in wake of the Cold War — this has proved a difficult task at times. “The ideological debate between left and right is certainly at its narrowest in more than a century,” he claims. But the narrowness of this debate isn’t what troubles Kuttner. He’s much more concerned with the apathy of American liberals.

“Why, then, does the right often seem to have the energy while many liberals seem reluctant champions of their own world view?” His answer to this question is where things get interesting.

“First, I think, while liberals were the architects of containment of the USSR, for conservatives the defeat of communism took on the character of a crusade. Many conservatives, preposterously, saw communism as just the logical conclusion of liberalism and social democracy. The collapse of the Soviet Union, fortuitously on the watch of Thatcher and Reagan, was immensely energizing to the right. It was seen as a victory not for the mixed economy and the complex liberalism of the Western democracies, but for laissez-faire.”

Now, it is true that in the first part of the 20th century, American liberalism was a robust force against totalitarianism’s trek across the globe (FDR, Harry Truman, and Dean Acheson for example).

But the liberal architects that Kuttner applauds, walked away from their drafting tables a long, long time before the Cold War ended. With a few notable exceptions — Jack Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, neoconservative intellectuals to name a few — liberals ceased espousing containment and instead became architects for appeasement.

The brightest liberal intellectual lights hid behind self-imposed blinders, denying the expansionist nature of international, Soviet-sponsored, communism as well as its threat to the values and well-being of the West. John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1984 that “The Soviet citizen — worker, peasant, and professional — has become accustomed in the Brezhnev period to an uninterrupted upward trend in his well-being.” Lester Thurow opined in 1989: “Can economic command significantly compress and accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can.… Today [the USSR] is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

Of course, it wasn’t just the economists. During the second half of the Cold War liberal elite culture grew to snicker at anti-Communists at home and nearly root for the other team abroad. From Jane Fonda’s trips to North Vietnam to the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s it became a reasonable assumption that liberals and the Left could not be trusted to take the Cold War seriously. Is it any wonder, then, that for some conservatives, anti-communism took on the character of a crusade? Containing Soviet expansionism was a difficult and serious enough task, one made all the more difficult by a liberal intellectual elite that at best seemed to no longer care.

Kuttner dismisses the achievements of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as “fortuitious,” as if they were standing on the shoulders of Jimmy Carter and James Callaghan . Now, is it true that conservatives overstate the degree to which Reagan and Thatcher brought about the end of the Cold War? Perhaps. No exact calculus exists to determine just how much credit Reagan or Thatcher (or Karol Wojtya, Solzhenitsn, Konrad Adenauer, Lech Walesa, or even Mikhail Gorbachev and the weakness of the Soviet economy and civil society) deserve. But to say that the fall of the Soviet Union occurred “fortuitously” on Reagan and Thatcher’s watch blithely ignores history.

When it comes to the accomplishments and legacy of Ronald Reagan, the Left has long since tossed reason and objectivity out the door and simply asserts that Reagan was blessed with foreign policy luck for eight years. The Left asserts this despite Afghanistan, SDI, Reykjavik, Granada, the Berlin Wall speech, the Moscow University speech, OPEC’s dropping the price of crude oil, the VOA and USIA, the U.S. military build up…. the list could go on and on but you get the idea.

But what is most surprising about Kuttner’s piece comes when he insults the intellectual sophistication of the Right while indulging — without the slightest irony — his own intellectual sophistication.

“Finally, conservative ideology boils down to a simple idea: Markets Work” he sniffs. “Liberal counter-ideology takes at least a paragraph: Markets work well for much of society, but many realms require political organization, economic regulation, and social investment. Besides, markets tend to intrude where they don't belong, and periodically they go haywire. None of these fits neatly on a bumper sticker, and it makes for a manifesto — I know, I wrote one — and a necessarily subtle politics. But the end of ideology, like the end of history, is rot. There is still a large debate over first principles and practical details within the broadly capitalist family, and liberals need the courage of their convictions.”

Conservative ideology is “bumper sticker” simplicity? Kuttner knows as well as anyone the history of classical liberal and conservative thought. To suggest that the ideas of Smith or Ricardo, Burke or Tocqueville, Mises or Hayek, Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, or Robert Nozick fit neatly on a bumper sticker is a bumper sticker slander.

There is an explanation for the listlessness of the Left that Kuttner ignores. It comes from the writer Russell Jacoby in his book "The End of Utopia." Jacoby points out that the Left has lost much of its energy because progressivism is inherently Utopian and with the collapse of Marxism, the Left has lost much of its Utopian zeal. Without an emotional or transcendent motivation such as Marxism, politics becomes humdrum and transactional rather than transformative. The Left has become simply the wandering, easily distracted donkey now that the carrot of utopianism has been removed from its head.

Kuttner argues that “many conservatives, preposterously, saw communism as just the logical conclusion of liberalism and social democracy.” Perhaps he is right. But if a communist utopian ideal isn’t the logical conclusion of liberalism — indeed if in the wake of the Cold War no concluding utopianism remains — then where does that leave the Left?