Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals-and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again

...When he claims it is the key to the Democrats regaining the confidence of American voters, well, it's one of many keys, and not necessarily the most important...

...They were also at each others' throats...

...With mainstream Democratic economist Alan Blinder estimating (in Foreign Affairs, no less) that the number of American jobs subject to offshoring is between forty-two million and fifty-six million, it might be nice if American liberals figured out what to do about globalization...

...I say "predictable" because a number of liberal internationalists predicted it...

...They were drenched in corruption...

...Of late, editors of publications that identify themselves as liberal, more or less, have been making that point...

...Beinart is a figure in transition, and that transition isn't uniquely his...

...As the Vietnam War became a bloody quagmire, this New Left began to believe that America was as morally flawed (if not more so), than the totalitarian movements and states it opposed...

...What they lack, the current generation of Democratic pundits agree, is a vision, a big picture, a philosophy...

...rediscovered the virtues of coalition and containment and the other strategies that animated anticommunist liberals from the forties through the sixties...

...True enough...

...As TNR's editor, he avidly supported the war in Iraq...

...There's more than one international threat that liberals need to meet head-on if they're to reclaim their title as the genuine champions of the American people, more to heaven and earth—and hell—than is dreamed of in Beinart's philosophy...

...he has learned from Reinhold Niebuhr that if the United States plunges into war convinced of its rectitude, heedless of allies, of constraints, of other options, it will likely wage that war in a way that diminishes its prestige and power...

...There, the founders of ADA—among them, Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—differentiated themselves from Henry Wallace and his acolytes by declaring Stalinism a menace to be resisted and refusing to join in any alliances with domestic communists as well...

...It is an answer— not the answer—to Democrats' woes and the world's...

...he has learned from Niebuhr that necessary liberal ends can require messy, violent means...

...He was there when George Meany, for whom he wrote speeches, derided 118 DISSENT / Summer 2006 the supporters of Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Morris Udall, and other liberal presidential aspirants whose candidacy the AFL-CIO opposed, because these crazy lefties included in their ranks women, feminists, and gays—never mind that Kahn himself was gay...

...In contradistinction to that left, Beinart tracks the careers of five liberal internationalists through that parlous time—historian Arthur Schlesinger, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Senator Henry Jackson, liberal superactivist Allard Lowenstein, and labor movement speechwriter and strategist Tom Kahn...

...But as with Vietnam, the question of how to end the war doesn't just divide liberals...

...Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, respectively, have proven themselves better at herding cats than any party leaders in recent memory...

...Wherever anti-communist liberals fought the New Left," Beinart writes, "Tom Kahn was there...

...Bustin subordinated his pacifism and objections to the war to the need to maintain what remained of the liberal coalition —a decision that caused him to break with such longtime comrades as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Michael Harrington...

...Over the next fifteen years, with a little help from such less partisan figures as George Kennan and George Marshall, they fleshed out a doctrine that defined its enemies as totalitarians of both right and left...

...The big drop came between Clinton and Gore, before the attacks of September 11, 2001, before the party's softness on security became an issue...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large for the American Prospect, columnist at large for the L.A...

...They continued to wage their war of choice, past the point where anybody could envision even a remotely happy ending...

...now, he confesses the error of his ways...

...We agree, my liberal warhawk friends and I, on the importance of liberal internationalism...

...BEINART'S HISTORY begins at Washington's Willard Hotel in January of 1947, at the founding convention of Americans for Democratic Action...

...He now concedes that he and his fellow liberal hawks forgot the lessons of Niebuhr and the early ADAniks—the virtues of containment, of coalition, the limitations of preventive war and unilateral intervention...

...a coherent, sustaining worldview that benefits both the world at large and the Democrats in particular...

...Through all this, the Democrats have not stood idly by...

...Beginning in the early sixties, however, a new generation of left activists arose for whom Stalin was a distant memory at best...

...I have liberal internationalist comrades of long standing at both this magazine and at the New Republic who, swept along by the moral claims of Kanan Makiya or the moral repulsiveness of Saddam Hussein, abandoned their political judgment to back a war that has led to predictable catastrophe...

...Beinart notes that although Bill Clinton carried the white working-class vote by 1 percent in both 1992 and 1996, Al Gore lost it by 19 points in 2000 and John Kerry by 24 points in 2004...

...Actually, there's a more immediate question dividing liberals today: What the hell should we do about Iraq...

...Weekly, and a columnist for the Washington Post...

...On this, Beinart has nothing to say—not even a single subordinate clause...

...But holding that perspective does not provide the magical solution that Beinart thinks it does...

...They were all model liberal internationalists...

...Democrats stayed united in their opposition to Bush's Social Security lunacy and to most other Republican panaceas as well...

...All, in Beinart's telling, opposed the excesses of the New Left...

...See, they really do have ideas, and they're pretty good ones at that...

...He was also there to furiously fight Lowenstein, Schlesinger, and those like them who sought to find an antiwar candidate in 1968, who had the temerity to back Robert Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson and then Hubert Humphrey...

...But Jackson and Kahn backed the war in Vietnam until its bloody end and viewed Schlesinger and Lowenstein as objective commie-symps—which they were not—for opposing it...

...Beinart, in a rather offhanded way, treats free-trade agreements as if they functioned as a great equalizer...

...That pesky white working class must have some other issues on which it doesn't entirely trust the Democrats...

...But the main problem that the Democrats must now confront in the wake of that failed intervention, he argues, is the rise of the Howard Deaniacs, the writers and readers of the Nation, the Michael Moore acolytes, and all those blogging lefties...

...that considered containment a sound strategy and that where communism sought to expand, as in Korea, it should be forcibly resisted...

...Liberal internationalism encompasses a range of virtues, and allows for a multitude of sins...

...They sought to privatize Social Security, but their numbers didn't add up and nobody supported their plan...

...Democratic thinkers, pollsters and analysts have been making this point since the mid-seventies, at least, and rightly so...

...He has found DISSENT / Summer 2006 117 the flaw in preventive, unilateral war...

...It is just as much a question that divides them...

...My American Prospect colleague Michael Tomasky has sought to restate liberalism's principles in what he calls a doctrine of the common good, which has engendered a good deal of interest in liberal circles over the past couple of months...

...As both history and prescription, however, Beinart's opus comes up short...

...Here again, my fellow liberal internationalist and I disagree...

...The Good Fight is a history of the post– World War II Democratic Party that seeks to demonstrate that the Democrats devastated themselves whenever they deviated from liberal internationalism, and that reclaiming liberal internationalism today is the sine qua non of a liberal resurgence...

...Beginning with that fateful election, when the white South and much of the white working class abandoned and thereby ended the New Deal coalition, liberals and Democrats have wandered for nearly forty years through a desert of ideological conflict and confusion, of fragmentation and lack of definition, of brief bursts of power and long stretches in opposition...

...Apparently, we don't always agree on what it means, or even, at times, what it is...

...That liberals need to affirm a common intellectual, economic, cultural, policing, political, moral, and in certain instances military strategy to combat Islamic fundamentalism— on this, Beinart is surely correct...

...To be sure, all of Beinart's exemplars shared a common commitment to New Deal economics and civil rights, to foreign aid and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and against the balkanization of the Democratic base into racial and other subgroups...

...If one has to take a stand—and one does—I agree with Beinart that it's the best perspective to inform one's choice...

...On the other hand, Beinart understands that moral self-doubt cannot be paralyzing...

...that viewed the provision of economic assistance and the example of cultural freedom to be potent weapons in the fight against totalitarianism, and knew in its bones that America gained prestige in the eyes of the world by seeking to combat injustice (as the civil rights movement was doing) here at home...

...To be sure, there are no remotely good options—indeed, the options are a good deal worse than they ever were in Vietnam...

...These were the folks who didn't back our interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and their ranks have now swelled due to the disaster in Iraq...

...A bunch of Jacks who dressed like Jills and had the odor of johns about them" was how Meany—a real charmer—described the McGovernites...

...As an opponent of our intervention in Vietnam, a supporter of our interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and an opponent of our intervention in Iraq, I think I've occupied that ground more steadily, and steadfastly, than Beinart himself...

...For once, they had enough power to really act on their ideas: That was their undoing...

...that believed that international institutions conferred legitimacy to actions that would be viewed with suspicion if undertaken by the United States alone...

...Beinart omits virtually all of this, and it's a revealing elision, for he does another version of it when he turns to the next Vietnam: the war in Iraq...

...They are even evolving a straightforward, modest program to campaign on this fall: raise the minimum wage, rewrite the drug benefit legislation so that government can negotiate costs with pharmaceutical companies, implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and so on...

...They let a great American city drown...

...He cites polling that shows that by the end of 2005, only 59 percent of Democrats thought we were right to invade Afghanistan, and states that "the central question dividing liberals today is whether they believe liberal valDISSENT / Summer 2006 119 ues are as imperiled by the new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world as they are by the American right...

...Here again, he sees the New Left—make that the New New Left—as the main problem...

...It divides liberal internationalists, because liberal internationalism doesn't guarantee a common set of responses, because liberal internationalism is an incomplete guide at best to how the United States should conduct itself in the world...

...that sought economic justice both at home and abroad...

...He understands the moral necessity of moral self-doubt...

...Things have indeed grown worse in the courts, but in the other branches of government, the Republicans have undone themselves beyond anyone's expectation...

...120 DISSENT / Summer 2006...

...Now, I'm quite comfortable with Beinart's middle ground...

...Republicans (and not just any Republicans, but the most right-wing Republicans anyone had ever seen) controlled everything —the White House, the Congress, and the courts, where things were only going to get worse with each new Bush appointee...

...that believed that communism was best resisted by an alliance with other democratic (even social democratic) nations...

...He has found the happy medium (or, in a more Niebuhrian vein, the less sad medium) that has sustained liberals in good times and which they abandon in darker moments at their own, and their nation's, peril...

...And now Peter Beinart, who edited The New Republic through much of the Bush years and is currently that journal's editor-at-large, has come forth with his own volume, intended chiefly to rescue liberalism from a neoMcGovernistic isolationism and anti-Americanism he sees emerging in reaction to the Iraq War...

...Never did they seem more marginal than early last year...