LEFT IN THE NEW WORLD
PUDDINGTON, ARCH
LEFT IN THE NEW WORLD Eric Alterman on America's Foreign Policy By Arch Puddington The American Left has never quite recovered from the Cold War triumph of democratic capitalism and the demise of...
...The conclusion of Who Speaks for America...
...LEFT IN THE NEW WORLD Eric Alterman on America's Foreign Policy By Arch Puddington The American Left has never quite recovered from the Cold War triumph of democratic capitalism and the demise of socialism...
...consists of what Alterman labels an "immodest proposal" for refashioning the foreign-policy A warm conversation between two loving brothers suddenly turns cold and angry and then, just as quickly, turns warm again...
...In fact, at several crucial junctures, the American people strongly influenced the conduct of the Cold War...
...To be sure, some liberals—Anthony Lewis, for example—have made the transition from decrying American military intervention to demanding it all over the globe...
...Alterman's real problem, of course, is that his accommo-dationist, leftist side proved wrong about the Cold War and consequently has little influence on current policy...
...Alterman does not look kindly on the special-interest groups that lobby for foreign-policy goals...
...if anything, Washington's international embarrassment over segregation accelerated civil rights...
...In his new book, Who Speaks for America?, Eric Alterman ostensibly takes up the undemocratic nature of the process by which American foreign policy gets made...
...His thesis is unconvincing, his arguments tendentious, and his prescription bizarre...
...For decades, the Left has beseeched the United States to abandon its adventurism, remove its soldiers from Europe, abolish the CIA, jettison its weapons of mass destruction, and welcome revolutionary experiments in the Third World...
...But it is also more democratic and open to the participation of ordinary citizens...
...now, nearly ten years after the Cold War, the Left continues to regard America as a bloated imperial monster that uses its military might not to set men free, but to make the world safe for the global economy...
...The ardent fan of a little-known jazz singer goes to see her idol at an intimate club, and when the singer comes to the bar for a drink, A contributing editor and movie critic for The Weekly Standard,_/ohn Podhoretz is associate editor of the New York Post...
...But those groups proved less effective than other constituency organizations whose objectives Alterman regards with dismay...
...It is not a noble tradition, and it is certainly not enriched by Alterman's preaching about America's global conduct or his master plan for the transformation of our democratic system...
...It would hear the testimony of government officials, and it would eventually take over policy-making...
...In fact, during the Cold War and since, special-interest lobbying has often served the national interest and added an important moral dimension to American policies...
...Alterman scoffs at elections as having no impact on policy...
...Alterman's dreary, unoriginal, and overdrawn account of Red hunts and thought control leaves inexplicable America's twentieth-century advances in race relations, voting rights, and cultural expression...
...It proves to be nothing less than a scheme for removing foreign relations from control by Congress and the president...
...This is hardly surprising: Alterman is a columnist at the Nation, which has devoted article after article since the fall of the Berlin Wall to globalism's destructive effects on American workers, families, and cities...
...For a book with pretensions to original thinking, Who Speaks for America...
...This preposterous idea is advanced in the name of saving American democracy...
...And even Arch Puddington is vice president for research at Freedom House...
...American foreign policy, he contends, "is hostage to an ad hoc process dominated by special interests that are able to exploit the American people's ignorance to bend the nation's policies to their own benefit...
...In 1980 and 1984, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale offered clear alternatives to Ronald Reagan, and in both instances the voters expressed an overwhelming preference for Reagan's hawkishness...
...To be sure, the process by which foreign-policy decisions are made today is more chaotic than in the past...
...Even today, organized labor's efforts nearly derailed NAFTA and were largely responsible for the defeat of "fast-track" presidential trade authority...
...In 1972, George McGovern ran on a forthright anti-Cold War platform and was rejected by a landslide...
...In domestic affairs, the radical imagination offers nothing more inspiring than identity politics and a vague alignment with organized labor...
...The jury would presumably contain the correct racial, ethnic, and gender proportions...
...There is a long tradition of losers blaming the corrupt system—or the deluded people—for their defeats in the war of ideas...
...And in foreign affairs, the Left's problems are even more pronounced...
...But for most of those who still regard themselves as of the Left, the notion of supporting the international deployment of American troops smacks of betrayal...
...But his real subject is the global-ism that has become the last remaining bogeyman of the Left...
...The Cold War did not slow racial change in America...
...Unfortunately, Alterman has written a book that argues instead for drastic changes in the process of American foreign policy...
...process...
...Alterman's rendering of the Cold War is a hodgepodge of revisionist accusations of American repression, censorship, and fear...
...But it is also true of the successful effort of the tiny Baltic-American community to prevent America from recognizing the incorporation of their nations into the Soviet Union, the efforts of Cuban immigrants to encourage an anti-Castro policy, and, more recently, the pressure exerted by evangelical Christians to focus attention on religious persecution in Asia and the Middle East...
...Instead, power would be invested in a "foreign-policy jury" consisting of some four hundred to five hundred "ordinary citizens" who would be elected on the basis of their biographies and short statements about America's role in the world...
...This is especially true of the pressure Jewish groups brought to bear on behalf of Israel and Jews behind the Iron Curtain, something Alterman describes as powerful evidence of the American system's openness to "manipulation...
...A forthright critique of the international economy might have contributed to the debate over America's role in the world...
...This is somewhat surprising, since the Left once produced an impressive roster of peace organizations and "Hands Off Central America" coalitions...
...is remarkable for stale analysis and intellectual laziness...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
