There can be no further denial. Martin Peretz has become the crazy grandmother in the attic of The New Republic. For years now, because of his partial ownership in the magazine, he has been able to steer its editorial policy and writing selection toward an increasingly bizarre and idiosyncratic ideological agenda.
Peretz would like the Liberals who read his magazine to believe that what he has to offer is an honest critique of the Liberal perspective. There is little, however, in his writing that conceals the contempt he has for Liberalism in America. Not only does he parrot all the standard lines from the Neocon litany of complaints against Liberalism, but he either conspicuously ignores or unwarrantedly rejects the relies Liberals make to the Neocon critique--another Neocon tendency.
Two weeks ago, Peretz published a rather bitter and overly zealous critique of Liberalism suggesting it has no new ideas. It was a highly simplistic piece that left out a hell of a lot of context, the coupe de grace coming at the end with a pathetic summary of Liberal foreign policy thought. He writes,
This leaves us with the issue of U.S. power, the other leftover from the '60s. It is true: American liberals no longer believe in the axiomatic virtue of revolutions and revolutionaries. But let's face it: It's hard to get a candid conversation going about Cuba with one. The heavily documented evidence of Fidel Castro's tyranny notwithstanding, he still has a vestigial cachet among us. After all, he has survived Uncle Sam's hostility for more than 45 years. And, no, the Viet Cong didn't really exist. It was at once Ho Chi Minh's pickax and bludgeon in the south. Pose this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism ... because Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into the brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.
Peter Beinart has argued, also in these pages ("A Fighting Faith," December 13, 2004), the case for a vast national and international mobilization against Islamic fanaticism and Arab terrorism. It is typologically the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph--in postwar Italy and Greece, in mid-cold war France and late-cold war Portugal--who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. For months, liberals have been peddling one disaster scenario after another, one contradictory fact somehow reinforcing another, hoping now against hope that their gloomy visions will come true.
I happen to believe that they won't. This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength.
Before I unload, let me make my thesis explicit: this is the biggest load of one-sided horse shit I've read in quite a while--and I recently wrote a piece on Krauthammer.
What really annoys me about Neocon thinkers and writers is that they seem to believe that Liberals are completely oblivious to the fact that the U.N. is a restraint on American power. They speak of it as if an unrestrained America is a self-evident good--especially Krauthammer, who to my knowledge has never even bother to debate the point. Nor does Peretz, it seems.
At the end of the piece Peretz classes himself among Liberals. If he is, he does not appear to understand historic Liberal thought very well. One thing Liberals claim to have learned over time is that it is not a good thing to have unrestrained great powers in charge. Liberals have a inherent tendency to question the good intentions of any government, thus their natural inclination toward international institutions.
Liberals do believe strongly in the worth of the United Nations, specifically because of what Neocons like Krauthammer and Peretz criticize it for: that it allows smaller nations to restrain American application of power. Because Liberals naturally are distrustful of the intentions of those in power, they believe that actions taken by the powerful on a global level need to pass, as John Kerry once suggested, a kind of global litmus test.
The true worth of the UN is not the letters of international law it is based on, but the forum it provides for allowing this test to occur. Since the Iraq War, the Conservatives have become convinced that the UN is broken, that it serves no good purpose other than to needlessly US efforts. No so. What was so damaging to US diplomatic efforts before the Iraq War was not the rejection of the Iraq War by the Security Council, but the near unanimity of the rejection, not just among the council members, but around the world.
Peretz, comically goes on to list a series of failures on the part of the UN, failing to act to counter genocide and pointing out the corruption that exists in its bureaucracy. "It performs the magic of evil."
Please.
Is Peretz suggesting that the US government has no corruption? Probably more, most likely. Like any other organization, the UN and the US government present the possibility and likelihood of corruption. Whose being overly idealistic here?
Would a US unencumbered by the UN act to stop every genocidal act that exists in the world? Right. I can think of several places he should be urging action, in that case.
The heart of this debate centers on the fact that most Liberals believe in the worth and potential of international institutions. Increasingly, it seems The New Republic does not. And it is a sad time in the history of Liberalism because of it. One of the most imminent journals in Liberalism's history has been run into the ground by an owner that can only thinly veil his contempt for its historic ideology.
Speaking of lodestones...
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