They supported the growth of labor unions, the civil rights movement, and the war on poverty and simultaneously opposing totalitarianism commonly seen under Communist rule at the time.
Some historians have divided the Republican Party into the liberal Wall Street and the conservative Main Street factions; others have said that the party's conservatives came from landlocked states (Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Barry Goldwater of Arizona) and the liberals tended to come from California (Earl Warren and Pete McCloskey), New York (Nelson Rockefeller), and other coastal states.
Although they never endorsed state socialism, they called for spending on education, science, and infrastructure, notably the expansion of NASA and the construction of the Interstate Highway System.
Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War liberalism were support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power between labor (in the form of organized trade unions) and management (with a tendency to be more interested in large corporations than in small business); a foreign policy focused on containing the Eastern Bloc, which according to some was one factor leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991; the continuation and expansion of New Deal social welfare programs (in the broad sense of welfare, including programs like Social Security); and an embrace of Keynesian economics.
[7] Truman would call Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has" by "torpedo[ing] the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.
"[8][9] The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy with the primary goal of containing Soviet expansion during the Cold War.
[13] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, was a liberal Democrat and a committed anti-communist, favoring social justice while seeing world events in substantially Cold War terms.
[16] Kennedy wanted to expand Social Security to benefit more Americans, help the elderly pay their medical costs, fund educational endeavors, raise the national minimum wage, and reduce income inequality.
He also responded to national fears and pressures regarding the Space Race against the Soviet Union by challenging Americans to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
[17] To improve relations with Latin America and guard against pro-Soviet regimes, Kennedy supported the Alliance for Progress, which over ten years provided billions of dollars in foreign aid to Latin American countries, encouraging economic cooperation, and aiming to reduce economic inequality in those countries through land reform.
[18][19] In the 1970s, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter pursued a relative reduction of Cold War tensions through linkage policy and triangular diplomacy, while continuing to pressure the Soviet Union in key areas.