In Give Me Liberty!, Eric Foner notes that the Cold War reshaped ideas of American freedom by contrasting it with totalitarianism and by focusing on human rights. Let's look at this in more detail.

The Cold War led to a strong reaction against totalitarianism, and in the early 1950s, the US government even barred totalitarians from entering the country in an effort to fight against the ideas of the Soviets and other communist nations. Whatever the Soviet Union promoted was, in essence, the opposite of freedom and had to be excluded from American life.

Furthermore, the abuses of communism placed an added emphasis on human rights, which came to be strongly associated with freedom. The UN General Assembly issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which emphasized freedoms like speech and religion as well as rights like education, housing, and medical care. This document also promoted the idea that how a nation treated its citizens was the business of the rest of the world and could be evaluated and corrected by outside authorities. Freedom was the domain of everyone.

However, there were ambiguities involved in human rights, especially with regard to segregation in the United States, and people debated the right of other countries or international organizations to interfere in any particular nation's business. Some people also claimed that "nonpolitical rights" could lead to socialism.