At the dawning of the Cold War, a worried Arthur Schlesinger Jr. looked out on a bleak horizon. The Soviet Union was a threat, but Schlesinger concluded that the roots of the crisis ran much deeper. “Our lives are empty of belief,” he wrote in his 1949 book, The Vital Center. “They are lives of quiet desperation.” Figures he looked to for guidance—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus—would become staples in the rhetoric of student protesters a generation later. So too would the concerns he dwelled upon: loss of community, feelings of powerlessness, a sense that politics had been drained of meaning. Even the poem he selected for his book’s epigraph became a touchstone in the turbulent years to come: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

AUDACITY: HOW BARACK OBAMA DEFIED HIS CRITICS AND TRANSFORMED AMERICA by Jonathan Chait. Custom House, 373 pp., $27.00

The Vital Center was Schlesinger’s bid to hold on to this tenuous middle ground. Unlike the youthful radicals of the 1960s, Schlesinger thought the alienation he saw around him could only be alleviated by accepting the broad outlines of the status quo. Power was more than a necessary evil. When properly restrained, it was “the source of wisdom,” a check on the juvenile tendency to seek refuge from a harsh reality in fantasy. For the childish dreamers clinging to hopes for revolutionary change, Schlesinger had simple advice: “We must grow up now.”

Yet Schlesinger had more in common with the dreamers than he wanted to admit. The Vital Center culminates with a call to turn liberalism into “a fighting faith” with a moral grandeur of its own, a creed that could meet the challenges of totalitarianism by calming the psychological anxieties of the age. Schlesinger’s bluster was a thinly concealed disguise for his own idealistic yearnings. He was as hungry for meaning as any dewy-eyed radical; he just found it in an unlikely spot. Pragmatists have their own kind of romanticism, cynics their own kind of naïveté. The twentieth century had no better spokesman for sentimental realism than Schlesinger, who could portray a vote for Adlai Stevenson as an appropriate reaction to existential dread.

More than 60 years after The Vital Center’s publication, Schlesinger’s celebration of the rational Democrat caught between ideologues on both sides continues to resonate with a certain type of liberal. Jonathan Chait is most definitely one of those. A commentator for New York and, before that, a longtime editor at the New Republic, he is one of the most influential political journalists of our time, and he has used this standing to crusade for a belligerently responsible liberalism. In his latest book, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America, Chait has taken on a challenge that provides his distinctive method of argument with its greatest test. Audacity, his early history of the Obama administration, turns his lens inward. The subject under the microscope is now liberalism itself.

Chait does not owe his success to his politics, which are conventional enough. What distinguishes him from other commentators is his knack for distilling the complicated arguments of his opponents into a few essential premises, and then, with inexorable logic, taking these streamlined arguments to absurd conclusions. He does not aim for sympathetic reconstructions that capture the intricacies of rival positions. Instead, he wants to expose the rickety foundations that high-flown rhetoric can obscure. When done poorly, this is straw manning; when done well, it has the elegance of a geometric proof. In either case, the verve with which he pursues his quarries has made him one of our great polemicists.