Over recent years, few writers have been quoted as incessantly as Hannah Arendt. Or rather misquoted — for though Donald Trump’s first presidential win catapulted Arendt’s 1951 book on totalitarianism back into the bestseller list, her fans have largely wallowed in anachronism. Avoiding her most arresting insights, they have instead reimagined Arendt as a kind of Resistance liberal, offering warnings of what happens when “politics as usual” is shamefully disrupted.

“Once again,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her new introduction to the re-publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2024, “we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize.” Which makes Arendt’s own response to America’s 200th anniversary so useful now, as Trump’s cage-filled 250th celebrations reach their climax. For the truth is that the philosopher’s own example actually proves she was far more thoughtful about her present than her contemporary followers are of theirs — even if her own hunt for usable versions of American patriotism ended up fomenting its own mistakes.

The most critical Arendt ever got of the United States was in a public lecture in Boston, 50 years ago, to mark the 200th birthday of her adopted land the year before it was celebrated. It wasn’t, she reflected, an anniversary that inspired much confidence in the future. Nor was the problem one disastrous politician, even one as nefarious as Richard Nixon. It was, rather, where capitalism and empire were taking the country, as Arendt looked out at “an increasing disarray in the very foundations of our political life”.

In Southeast Asia, America had gone down to ignominious defeat. The attempt to prop up South Vietnam after the “peace” in 1973 had only led to more war, and the emergency airlift of anyone who could make it out from the roof of the United States embassy in 1975. (Arendt gave special attention to the now almost forgotten “Operation Babylift”, which spirited thousands of orphans out of Saigon before the city fell.)

At home, Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came with soul-searching about how executive mendacity and secrecy undermined trust in government. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers publication had revealed — Arendt suggested — that the agonizing loss in Vietnam wasn’t half as bad as the fact that it took so long for Americans to register the truth about the war, since modern “public relations”, and not just age-old concealment and lying, had obscured their failures.

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Instead of celebrating anniversaries simplemindedly, Arendt concluded, it was time to confront how badly the American experiment had gone awry. The crimes, mistakes, and sins of the immediate past were like chickens coming home to roost, in the phrase made famous by Malcolm X and which Arendt chose as the title of her speech when it was published in the New York Review of Books.

Arendt claimed that returning to their beginnings could inspire Americans in crisis to overcome their blunders in the mid-20th century. The deeper past of the American founding, she suggested, offered a chance of transcending them. Let us, she admonished, not “forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings 200 years ago”. In this, she channeled the spirit of her earlier classic On Revolution, which had presented the American Founding as a modern reprise of austere Roman republicanism. She disdained what many people, then and now, take to the beating heart of the American project: whether law, liberalism, or rights. Rather, Arendt thought, America had once exemplified political action for the sake of collective freedom, a value she worried was dying in the modern world.

Amid the celebrants of her day, Arendt certainly refused to look away from the anxiety and depression that the following two centuries had produced. Yet she, too, was stumbling — not so much because of her misunderstandings of the 1770s, as because she confused the stakes of the Seventies. Five decades on from Arendt’s speech, America ended up in the age of Trump — as a direct consequence of the forces unleashed in her day. But she didn’t see them coming.

In her piece, for instance, Arendt mourned “the erosion of American power” following the Vietnam fiasco. But when she mounted the Boston lectern to celebrate the Founding, she didn’t imagine that the Democrats and Republicans alike would move to renew America’s global power over subsequent decades: including its military muscle. For the Democrats especially, the catastrophic defeat of peace candidate George McGovern in 1972 cast the die. From Mogadishu to Kabul, other failed wars, and countless casualties, invariably followed.

The militarism of an American hegemon rehabilitated in the 50 years since Vietnam, alongside the greater damage it wrought around the world, left too many disaffected voters, displeased by the ignominy of their country’s record. It also left an opening for Trump to run twice as a peace candidate — even if he finally and unceremoniously betrayed that promise. All this is a reminder that, as great a theorist of the imperial origins of totalitarianism as she was, Arendt never did glimpse the possibility that America itself had been, or could indeed become, an empire.

Arendt had other ideological blind spots too. Her political theory had always resonated with the ideal of participatory democracy in things like the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto propounded by student activists. Yet she always preferred to recognize the political action stemming from the deep past of the American Revolution, or Greece and Rome before it, and perhaps in some evanescent modern situations like the French resistance or the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

In her lecture, Arendt raised doubts about her American modernity and its consumerist economy, its mendacious ad-men and image-managers. They were, she said, exactly what made the American Founding indispensable, because it demonstrated public-mindedness beyond private gain or pleasure.

Unfortunately, though, Arendt’s failure to anticipate a renaissance for war was matched by a misrecognition of economic transformation. She did not anticipate that the economic instabilities of the Seventies were giving rise to the neoliberalism of the era since. She acknowledged the economic events, inflation most notably, that defined her decade when the 250th ceremonies were held across the country. Yet in her flawed belief that failed wars are fueled by inflation — a consequence, perhaps, of her German background — she missed the deeper geopolitical reasons for her age’s economic malaise. Both the first oil shock and Nixon’s decision to float the dollar transformed America’s long-term fortunes, even as the neoliberal response to Seventies-era inflation soon redefined the national economy.

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Even more than the return of American militarism, meanwhile, the economic choices beginning in the Seventies produced the most damaging aspects of our own time. It was the American carnage of neoliberalism, after all, that permitted Trump to run against his own party and then the Democrats for betraying the people in the name of “elites”. (Never mind that practically Trump’s only legislative accomplishment is a gargantuan tax cut he gifted to the rich in his first term and renewed in his second.) Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

“We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other,” Arendt wrote, in one striking moment of clarity. “The dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people have stumbled over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut up the past.” When she asserted that people can confusingly stumble into a future so starkly different from the past that it makes their own confusion unintelligible, she was right not least about herself.

Indeed, beyond prompting skepticism of the restoration of American “normalcy” that Resistance liberals today so confidently counsel, Arendt’s greatest value is less about the dangers of prophecy — even if it’s striking that she was hardly the Cassandra of her own age. Rather, she reminds us how easy it is to miss what’s happening under our noses, and pretending that our past, even when we celebrate it, is where the cure for the rot can be found.

How did these two movements succeed in tearing up the fabric of Western society? Neoliberalism envisioned governance for the sake of individual and corporate enterprise, rolling back redistributive and regulatory policy in the name of “freedom”. Neoconservatism, meanwhile, though later more famous as a foreign-policy doctrine, was initially rooted in a scepticism towards domestic class and racial justice. Under the auspices of both schools of thought, the state was reconceived and morality was “restored” to the private sphere of “family values”.

No intellectual better embodied this peculiar fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism than the late historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died in 2019. Indeed, she was one of the most important and forgotten ideological pioneers of our times: an intellectual who did as much as her better-known husband, Irving Kristol, to invent the neoliberal-neoconservative complex.

Himmelfarb’s origin story is revelatory for two reasons. First, thanks to the central role Christianity played in her analysis (despite her Jewish background), her work serves as a challenge to those Christians belatedly joining the Left in attacking neoliberalism, and who do not appreciate how Christianity helped to cement neoliberalism’s position in the Republican Party in the first place. Second, even more importantly, Himmelfarb’s emphasis on religion forces secular liberals to re-examine their own participation in the Reagan revolution and its aftermath — the “Age of Reagan” has been one that later Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been pleased to inhabit. For the unholy combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism goes much further back than the Sixties, and into the era of Cold War liberalism in the Forties — since that is when Himmelfarb got her start.

Born in New York 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents, Himmelfarb studied at Brooklyn College before enrolling at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, having met Irving in 1940 at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyist militant group they both frequented for a time in Brooklyn, where both hailed from. At Chicago, alone after her husband departed for service in Western Europe as an infantryman, Himmelfarb was drawn to the work of the 19th-century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — and ended up writing what became her first book on him, published in 1952. Her aim was to push back against the emergence of an optimistic and progressive liberalism that, she feared, shaded too easily into Leftism.

Acton, born in 1834, was a strange kind of liberal in his own lifetime, and only became a canonical figure in the middle of the 20th century. He was a Roman Catholic who resisted papal infallibility, his mind fixed on eternal moral certainties in an age that placed an emphasis on the evolving nature of liberal civilisation; he was suspicious of the nation state at a time when liberals treated it as their main instrument of progress; he even became sympathetic to socialism, at a time when liberalism so often took the form of economic libertarianism.

Amid the consolidation of the Cold War in the late Forties, as the world reckoned with a rising tide of totalitarianism, Acton’s adage about the corrupting power of absolute power assumed a new currency. No less than Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, suggested to Himmelfarb, on a research trip in 1946 to England, that he was starting an Actonian club to resist the “totalitarianism” of the new planning state  (which ultimately became the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society). For Himmelfarb, however, Acton’s revival initially served a very different purpose: to immunise liberals from dreaming big and instead recognise that politics is a scene of transgression rather than a forum of opportunity. By emphasising this, Himmelfarb helped define what later Cold War liberal Judith Shklar immortally dubbed “the liberalism of fear”, a replacement of the ambitious and optimistic liberalism of the 19th century with a more cautious, disabused and threat-oriented creed.

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Like many other Cold War liberals, Himmelfarb had a particular (and mistaken) diagnosis of how liberalism could easily self-destruct. If liberals called for too much emancipation and progress, she thought, they would connive with evil forces to bring them about. They would, in other words, easily fall for the communist promise to achieve good things through immoral means. And if they neglected Christianity’s insight into the endurance of original sin, liberals would treat the state as a workable device of liberation and progress, rather than regarding it as a malignant expression of eternal depravity. The consequences, she warned, would be devastating, giving people who are tarnished by original sin the capacity to use state power to kill millions.

Though a Jew concerned about the abuse of minorities, Himmelfarb laid extraordinary emphasis on this point, in turn making Christianity integral to Cold War liberalism. While liberals had spent the prior century often viewing religious forces as an enemy, she called for a new liberalism based on Acton’s Christian vision of sin. Acton, who had rejected “integralist” forms of Christian Right-wing politics that longed for a return to medieval theocracy, was principally important for reforming secular liberals who sought to secure freedom against secular totalitarianisms such as Nazi and Soviet tyranny. He recognised, Himmelfarb wrote, “the presence of eternal and absolute” morality, in contrast to liberals who “had no sense of the religious sanctity of those principles” and compromised away freedom.

Indeed, it was liberal Christianity, Himmelfarb wrote, that might turn out to be essential in a Cold War world that knew the threat of religious authoritarianism even as secular revolution could bring even worse oppression. “Clerics are not alone in carrying the banner of religion,” she wrote. “They have been joined by a multitude of those who, in Acton’s own time, would almost certainly have been in the camp of the opposition.” Liberals needed to get over their anticlericalism, was the message, and use religion to save themselves.

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It had to be the right kind of Christianity, of course. Acton was an Augustinian, and his vision of sin forbade excessive optimism. Humanity couldn’t save itself; man’s fallen nature made power a permanent threat. Instead, the Christianity useful for Cold War liberals saw God as the external judge on history, where the notion of secular progress supposedly leading to human emancipation was little more than an alibi for crime. For Acton, Himmelfarb explained, “history did not have a meaning or purpose in itself; it acquired meaning only by comparison with a fixed moral standard outside it, and purpose by fulfilling a moral end imposed upon it”.

This Augustinian core of Cold War liberalism is often conveniently forgotten. In an otherwise excellent recent book, for example, Louis Menand paints a portrait of Cold War liberalism as a utopia of innovative modernism, rather than one rooted in the religiosity that suffused the Forties and Fifties. One Cold War liberal icon, Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, divulged once in a letter to another such icon, American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that he “had never read a line” of Lord Acton’s. Yet that did not stop Irving Kristol from crediting Berlin for “assuming the role of Lord Acton” as “conscience and critic” of believers in secular progress. And in spite of his own private reservations about a faith-based liberalism, Berlin understood that it defined the age of Cold War liberalism, writing in 1952 that “one of the most notable characteristics of the literary and artistic scenes” was “the revival of religion”, whatever its “pulverisation of… all the older forms of liberalism [and] secularism”.

Here is where Himmelfarb becomes representative of broader trends. Of all the Cold War liberals of this era — including Lionel Trilling, the Columbia English professor whom she and her husband lionised — Himmelfarb knew most about Judaism, though that was not saying much. For these Jews, ancestral preservation was hardly a powerful driving force — though there was a little more in Himmelfarb’s case because of her family’s observance of custom and ritual, and she took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while an undergraduate. For the most part, however, the identity politics of staying true to Judaism was not a significant motivation, compared to their very explicit appeal to Christian values to serve political goals. For Himmelfarb, Augustinian Christianity was a kind of ideological training ground for the intellectualism she conceived.

During the same period, Irving Kristol, schooled by his wife, also pursued a new religious orthodoxy, including a kind of neo-Actonian Judaism that rejected the optimism towards progress so prevalent among earlier liberals. Indeed, Kristol’s engagements with Christianity, with its emphasis on the permanence of sin, fed his epic denunciation, in January 1948, of modernising accounts of Judaism that presented it as a progressive social ethics rather than an acceptance of the strict limits that evil places on human possibility. This wasn’t because either Himmelfarb or her husband ever embraced observant Judaism, let alone converted to the Christian faith. It was because they believed Acton’s neo-orthodoxy was politically useful.

Both, in other words, fit well with Hannah Arendt’s quip that Orthodox Judaism was the Judaism that she didn’t practice. We can broaden her serious joke to the observation that, for a striking number of Cold War liberals like Himmelfarb and Kristol, Augustinian neo-orthodoxy was the Christianity they wanted everyone else to adopt. It would save them from the enthusiasm and naiveté of trust in the state.

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Himmelfarb’s dalliance with Acton, and her Christianisation of liberalism, was fateful in the long run. It morphed, after all, into the successor views Himmelfarb soon adopted, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, with an emphasis on “family values” as the crucible of morality and the state as dangerous or fickle. Yet this wasn’t an immediate journey.

That Himmelfarb wasn’t immediately a neoconservative or neoliberal prepared to indict the welfare state in the name of Hayek’s market fundamentalism is made clear by two facts. First, in her early studies, she saw Acton as the great alternative to Edmund Burke, whereas Hayek saw them as equally inspirational. “When Liberals finally came to admit that Conservatism might be a store-house of political wisdom,” Himmelfarb complained as late as 1953, “they settled upon Burke as the arbiter of politics and morality. But the insights of Conservatism might have been more readily found in… an Acton, who set absolute morality against history.” Second, she registered that Acton’s liberalism could support social reform. Acton had come to insist that property was not absolutely sacrosanct even in a liberal state, and even repudiated — at his “most radical”, Himmelfarb said — the affection for laissez-faire economics of his youth. For a time, she outright rejected Hayek’s competing appropriation of their common sage.

Clearly, then, it would require a step beyond Cold War liberalism in a Christian key for Himmelfarb to reach her mature neoconservatism. While continuing to appeal to morality, she gave up her insistence on Acton’s liberal Christianity, even as she emphasised Christianity as a cultural force (and a source of many evangelical voters). By the Eighties, she was a crucial contributor to the intellectual destruction of the welfare ideals that were actually triumphing after the Second World War, while she was rifling through Acton’s writings. An activist state, she insisted, “consigns” the poor “to a culture of dependency and degrades those it professes to help”.

But everything — including the political movements Himmelfarb helped to rationalise, and which continue to warp the world — has to start somewhere. Easily the most consequential move in Himmelfarb’s evolution was her redefinition of liberalism in a Christian key, because it was only a short step from there to her mature views. If the trial of neoconservatism and neoliberalism continues in future years, Himmelfarb’s case suggests that the inquest will have to reach Cold War liberalism too.