A lot has been written about the so-called rise and fall of the liberal establishment, but these two books led me to consider just what it means to be a liberal today, and how the meaning of that word has changed since the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Blood of the Liberals, George Packer looks at the evolution of the L word through the experiences of his maternal grandfather and his own father. Packer’s grandfather, George Huddleston, was elected to Congress from Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914 as a Jeffersonian Democrat, and was finally defeated in 1936, having broken with FDR over the president’s consolidation of power in the central government. Packer’s father, Herb, believed that being a liberal meant that rational discourse and thought, rather than emotion, guided one’s decisions. As an administrator at Stanford during the Vietnam War, Herb Packer was seen as the enemy by left-wing students, who wanted him to take immediate action against the war. Both Huddleston and Packer called themselves liberals, and both were destroyed by their beliefs. So what is liberalism? The third-generation Packer doesn’t come to any real definition, but he raises some interesting and difficult questions about how we define ourselves in political terms.

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The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice uses the life of the president of Yale University during the turbulent decade from 1960 to 1970 to illuminate a circle of influential men (Republicans all) who came from privileged families, had inherited wealth, belonged to the toniest, most exclusive clubs, and yet worked to make important societal changes in civil rights, university admissions, and the problems of the inner cities. These liberal Republicans—Cyrus Vance, McGeorge Bundy, and Elliot Richardson among them—were the scourge of the conservative wing of the party, and were frequently scorned as well by those who felt they didn’t go far enough in their reforms (just as George Packer’s father was). Definitely not just for Yalies, this book is relevant to anyone interested in this era.