Abstract :
This article argues that those termed ‘ liberals ’ in the United States had the opportunity in
the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along
more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider
world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging antitotalitarianism
of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity
drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United
States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour
Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and
conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically
driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.
