Recent history has not been kind to the American Left, as historians like Leon Fink, in Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II, have noted. In this book, focused mostly on liberal Democrats, Fink studies the vision of progressive internationalists seeking to forge a world of democracy, abundance, and liberty after World War II. As Fink convincingly argues, they came up short, their idealism dashed by Cold War realism and market conservatism. His is a sobering account, illuminated by case studies that explain how the aspirations of progressives were blocked by politics and diplomatic realities. It is well-known history; Fink sprinkles archival material with largely secondary source research. Yet the book contributes to scholarship because Fink injects class (a category now often passed over for race and gender), labor, social activists, and, indeed, racial movements into the story.

Fink certainly understands, but rarely notes, that any success of liberalism after World War II arose because the dominant power, the United States, had shifted into a liberal era that endured into the 1970s. Today, we are shaped by the Reagan Revolution, although the cycle might be turning again after 40 years of neoconservatism that has been buffeted by nationalist populism and leftist critics of globalization. By the