SEE LIBERALISM SHRINK

...sectarians," but with the American civil religion of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, which "for two centuries has supported and elevated the nation...

...The Reagan Doctrine, while still hiding a bit, announces an end to inaction...

...Now as then, the problem is not with the single standard, of course, but with the nature of our standard bearers and the means by which they cling or come to power...

...How this differentiates comparable worth from such other assaults on the market's sovereignty as union contracts, the minimum wage, and the Davis-Bacon Act is not clear, except that these are all part of the established order, while comparable worth, being new and untried, smells suspiciously like a fad...

...Professions of intent matter greatly with Krauthammer: the contras and the United States stand for liberty—so it is liberty that our intervention brings to Nicaragua...

...The Catholic bishops' letter on the economy annoys him...

...On his other flank, Krauthammer combats the liberals and the left, who share his adherence to a single standard in judging governments, but who are picky to the point of paralysis about the manner of American intervention...

...Krauthammer has had his 522 victories, but they are not the ones he initially sought...

...These politics of "democratic militance" echo the right-wing social democrats' support for the Vietnam War and repeat their mistakes...

...The only victims of poverty to whom Krauthammer devotes an essay are the homeless, more particularly those who are homeless as a result of policies of deinstitutionalization, that is, through the misguided indulgence of liberals...

...His defense of other liberal values is decidedly more tepid...

...KRAUTHAMMER'S CHIEF DOMESTIC CONCERN IS the rise of political fringe groups, the Falwells and Freezeniks who bring into an imperfect world an absolutist politics...

...q 524...

...This has it backwards, of course: sex segregation doesn't keep men from flooding into low-paying jobs...

...Ultimately, liberal internationalism cannot sustain the kind of radical dissociation of ends and means that characteristically accompanies America's forays into the Third World...

...The president has justified the interventions with references to the charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States...

...Krauthammer is not an uncritical defender of the market...

...This leaves liberals, Krauthammer laments, supporting a de facto double standard: favoring those interventions that take the form of withholding support from our right-wing allies...

...A few more such defenses and liberalism may as well close up shop...

...So liberal internationalism may yet revive after all, though it requires the transformation not merely of contras into freedom fighters but of the Reagan administration into a nest of liberals...

...Sex segregation is obviously unfair," he writes, "but it is hard to see how it causes downward pressure on women's wages when, at the same time, through the socially enforced exclusion of men, it shelters `women's work' from a vast pool of competitors...

...The first of these has been his fight for a single global standard by which we judge governments, in contradistinction to the authoritarian/totalitarian distinction of the Jeane Kirkpatricks and in opposition to the neorealist heirs of Hans Morgenthau who would substitute for American values and ideology the even more nebulous criteria of national interest...

...He notes that it destroys old industries and sectors and hence requires a safety net for its casualties, but his appreciation of the dynamics of the dual labor market is shaky at best...

...In an unsigned editorial in this year's April 7 issue of the New Republic, which any reader of Cutting Edges will recognize as Krauthammer's, the New Republic proclaims the Philippine Corollary to the Reagan Doctrine...

...One man's shelter is another woman's prison...

...If the center cannot be reconstructed by returning liberals to interventionism, can it be brought back by converting—surely "returning" is not the right word—interventionists to liberalism...

...With the expressed intent, then, of mounting "a robust, self-confident defense of liberal values at home and abroad," Krauthammer instead has succeeded in bringing Ronald Reagan out of the closet...

...He proposes to mediate the fight between Governor Mario Cuomo and Archbishop John O'Connor through an appeal to civil peace that has a higher claim, he contends, on the allegiance of the Catholic faithful than even the Church's teachings on abortion—for the alternative to civil peace is revolutionary upheaval...

...On equality, he's blind as a bat...

...This was a mission on which Krauthammer quickly took the point, becoming the magazine's primary advocate for reviving the perspective of "liberal internationalism . . . whose pedigree," he laments, "stretches from Harry Truman through Henry Jackson and, alas, no further...

...Consider, for instance, Krauthammer's reaction to the president's 1985 State of the Union address, in which Reagan pledged to support the insurgents in both Afghanistan and Nicaragua...

...Though Democratic members of Congress flit back and forth on such questions as aid to the contras, the liberal and interventionist traditions remain more sundered than joined...

...For Krauthammer, the sin of the bishops is their belief that the elimination of poverty is a question of political will, a notion he contends was discredited by the failed experiments of the Great Society...

...it keeps women from obtaining higher paying ones...

...In these essays, in his fear of 523 experimentation and zeal, in his embrace of the institutional legacies of the past and his disdain for the claims of movements present, Krauthammer emerges as the nearest thing we have to a Burkean neoconservative...

...American liberals were and remain too resolutely undialectical to appreciate that remark without irony...

...In the battles over prayer in public schools and Christmas cliches in the park, he sides not with the "ignorant armies of secularists and...

...And the modern Democratic party is its home...

...Left isolationism is the isolationism of means," Krauthammer writes...

...No scraps of paper for Krauthammer: "To be constrained from supporting freedom by an excessive concern for sovereignty . is neither especially moral nor prudent...

...But enough of the Reagan Doctrine...

...opposing those interventions that take the form of sending weapons to anticommunists in the field...

...But then, concern over the economic polarization that is the hallmark of Ronald Reagan's America is strikingly absent from Krauthammer's Reaganera essays...

...It is a defense of liberalism that is conservative at home, fearful of popular movements, opposed to the expansion of the public sphere in economics, and profoundly self-subverting in its defense of liberalism abroad...

...Krauthammer has fought this battle on at least two fronts...

...Krauthammer's chief concern is that Reagan has missed the point...

...In domestic matters, Krauthammer has only one absolute, and that is the stability of national institutions...

...This misunderstands the moral grandeur of the Reagan Doctrine, which derives its legitimacy (Krauthammer is compelled to remind the White House) neither from self-defense nor from international law but rather from the moral imperative of opposing communism...

...THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM arises first from the dearth of liberals who stand by us in the developing world—so that the Krauthammers must convert Somocistas and Jonas Savimbis into something other than what they are—and from the destructive effect that prolonged civil war has on the prospects for a liberal resolution...

...Krauthammer does not believe the ends justify the means we employ to wage Third-World counterrevolution, but neither does he subject those means to a particularly penetrating examination...

...As to the legacy of past United States interventions in Nicaragua and the difficulties that would place before any genuinely nationalistic third force allied with us, Krauthammer is singularly silent...

...you should be in Managua as well...

...If Krauthammer's arguments and those of the New Republic have not yet made liberals more interventionist, nor interventionists more liberal (though Krauthammer contends this is in the works), they have at least helped make interventionists— well, more interventionist...

...What of the Krauthammer Doctrine...

...The doctrine died in Vietnam the day the American officer remarked over television that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it...

...You were there in Manila, says Krauthammer...

...To have rediscovered liberalism and rediscovered the poor is perhaps an achievement for any ecclesiastical hierarchy," he notes...

...Krauthammer's contras assume a more popular democratic character than either the composition of their leadership, their conduct in the field, or their level of popular support would lead one to conclude...

...But Krauthammer's battle to reestablish the center hinges less on his defense of the status quo in both domestic affairs and superpower relations (he supports deterrence) and more on his support for liberal internationalism and Third-World counterrevolution...

...Of those who are homeless as a consequence of deindustrialization, we hear little: that is simply how the economy works...

...Krauthammer's Reagan is now pledged to oppose tyrannies both left and right, to counter authoritarians with a "third force strategy" wherever possible...

...At bottom, Krauthammer's defense of liberal economics is barely distinguishable from the neoconservatives' attack upon it...

...As Charles Krauthammer recounts in this collection of his essays, he came to the New Republic in the late 1970s because, "uniquely among intellectual organs, the New Republic was trying to rescue liberalism from its drift toward defeatist isolationism, and from its growing confusion as to American purpose...

...That he is somewhat wide of the mark can be explained at least in part by his selectivity in defending liberal values...

...Indeed, Cutting Edges reads like nothing so much as a journal of rectification for the Reagan administration...

...Krauthammer has been at it for more than half a decade now, and the results are mixed...

...Krauthammer is at his most robust defending liberty—insightfully on such questions as church-state relations, more problematically on a range of Third-World questions where "liberty" can become a banner beneath which a range of other values actually parade...

...The West, of late, has taken to hiding behind parchment barriers as an excuse for inaction when oppressed democrats beg for help...

...Krauthammer opposes, for instance, comparable worth as a bureaucratic intrusion on the workings of the market...

...But it is no great contribution to American political discourse...