THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Not long after September 11, Michael Walzer asked, "Can there be a decent Left?" Watching his fellow progressives greet ±e destruction of the World Trade Center with "barely...
...Still, Berman has written a smart and mostly honest book that should be read if only for the author's dry wit...
...Now, in Terror and Lib^^alism (W.W...
...Berman again looks to recent history for answers, resurrecting the anti-totalitarian liberal alliance of old that stood up to Hitler and Stalin, more or less...
...Berman raises two questions...
...Isn't it the liberal internationalists who shrink from opposing totalitarian-like movements with American might...
...Watching his fellow progressives greet ±e destruction of the World Trade Center with "barely concealed glee," he concluded, "the Left needs to begin again...
...Wasn't it the good humanitarians of Europe and America who sought to make excuses for the terrorists...
...In answer to the first question, Berman rejects Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations...
...Not then and not now...
...But surely on September 11, this liberalism was shown to be an illusion...
...The Islamic terrorists are the last heirs of Stalin and Hitler, and their intellectual roots are to be found less in the sands of Arabia than in the halls of the Sorbonne...
...He reminds us that most of America's recent military interventions were made on behalf of Muslims, for example in Somalia in 1993 and in Serbia in 1999...
...Indeed, herein lies the gravamen of Berman's argument...
...This raises the obvious question of how a liberal, anti-totalitarian movement can be reconstructed, and it is here that his argument goes astray...
...They simply could not accept the fact that there were evil men in the world...
...Adam WolfSon...
...Berman's efforts in this direction are strained...
...The book proves a damning indictment of bad leftism—but as a new beginning, it's something of a false start...
...Norton, 128 pp., $21), Paul Berman has taken up Walzer's challenge...
...Nazism and communism were in rebellion against religion, while Islamists claim to speak for religion...
...He concludes: "The new rhetoric could hardly be Lin-coln's—a rhetoric of popular will, of God, and of liberty: a language of nineteenth-century Christian America...
...He moves in the right direction by looking to Abraham Lincoln for a "warlike" liberalism...
...Lincoln grounded his liberalism in a theory of natural rights, to which he brought a profound religious sensibility...
...A holy war has been declared on America, and for all of Islamism's resemblance to totalitarianism, the religious dimension will eventually have to be grappled with...
...The concoction is more Bill Clinton than Lincoln...
...Himself an opponent of capital punishment, Berman notes that the French are indignant over capital punishment in America...
...The second is, Who are we, and what sort of political ideals should we stand for...
...Let the French look to places where the victims are buried by bulldozers," he quips...
...So, what political ideals should we ourselves stand for...
...He reduces Lincoln's philosophy to "solidarity with the oppressed" and "defense of democratic self-rule," mostly by equating Lincoln with the pragmatism of James and Dewey...
...It was Stephen Douglas, not Lincoln, who championed democratic self-rule: Let the locals, the senator said, vote slavery up or down as they please...
...What Berman ends up resurrecting is the old 1990s saw of a Third Way (he calls it "a Third Force"), a kind of liberal politics that supposedly avoids the cynicism of the Right and the anti-American rhetoric of the Left...
...And he points out that many of the terrorists were not dyed-in-the-wool Muslims but people who had lived in the West...
...The first is, Who are the terrorists, and what do they represent...
...A similar dynamic, Berman believes, is at work among progressives now...
...But his is a watered-down Lincoln...
...In fact, Berman argues, the Islamists closely resemble the totalitarian movements that first emerged on Western soil at the beginning of the last century...
...In his search for a "warlike" liberalism, Berman only feints toward Lincoln...
...It was their faith in reason that disarmed them before genocidal dreams...
...As Berman points out, forty years ago, well-intentioned liberals "gazed at the craziest and most violent of the anti-liberal movements, and blinked, and saw no reason for upset...
...A modern leftist cannot abide the elements that made Lincoln who he was...
...For the Left, in whatever guise, doesn't have a stalwart history of defense of liberal democracy...
...That's the kind of liberal we need more of...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 28
