Frank Rich's review in the New York Review of Books of four books offering
Ideas for Democrats is deservedly hard on Peter Beinart, ex-
TNR editor and author of
The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Although commending Beinart for admitting that he was wrong about Iraq ("refreshing as well as anomalous among former Iraq war enablers"), and noting that "for the most part Beinart's [current foreign policy] prescription is already conventional wisdom in much of the Democratic Party," Rich aptly criticizes Beinart for his book's"underlying animus--an animus that is all too much in keeping with the mindset that led Beinart and others like him to embrace the Iraq war with few questions and much self-righteous arrogance in 2002 and early 2003."
Here is where Daily Kos enters the argument.
continued
"[S]till hoping to prove that those who did not get it wrong were somehow wrong anyway--or at least more wrong than he was, and more frivolous,] Beinart
attempts to conflate the serious pre-invasion opponents of the Iraq war with a mindless, cut-and-run mob of peaceniks who don't understand the threats to national security posed by Islamic radicalism, who opposed war in Afghanistan and who now can't be trusted to protect America because they're too busy hating Bush to take on terrorists. He warns darkly that this crowd could yet hijack the Democratic Party with apocalyptic results[.]
Who is "this crowd"? That would be us, here at Daily Kos. Beinart's problem is that we supposedly care more about bashing Bush than about standing up for America: "Writing of liberal activists who blog at dailykos.com, [Beinart] frets that 'their idealism, and their outrage, is directed almost exclusively against the right.'"
But to the extent Beinart's comment has any truth, it misses the point. As Rich rightly says:
But that's the point of Daily Kos, which is a blog for letting off steam about partisan Democratic politics. At the equivalent Republican blogs, the outrage is directed almost exclusively against liberals. That the most volatile liberal bloggers rage at Bush more than at bin Laden and that their conservative counterparts rage at Nancy Pelosi more than at Zawahiri has nothing to do with the price of fish, except red herrings.
Well, this is all good fun. But Rich also makes an observation that should give us pause. The problem, Rich argues, is not that the Democratic Party lacks ideas, but that it lacks credible leaders.
Like Beinart, other Washington Democrats who endorsed the Iraq adventure on the way in are all too glad to talk about the long war against jihadists going forward, but all too cautious about confronting the endgame in Iraq. What the party transparently lacks is not ideas or pundits offering advice, but leaders. Those Democratic politicians who might lead have no intention of doing so until the night of November 7, after the voters have told them what to think.
One reason I like Al Gore -- like, I'm not wedded to his potential candidacy -- is that he seems to have grown beyond needing to be told what (strategists with losing track records believe) he should think.
But with all appropriate deference to Frank Rich, IMHO it's not solely a matter of leadership. It's activists and followers, too. And I don't just mean this in the obvious sense that campaigns need workers and donors. Considering the areas of agreement between Beinart and the other authors Rich reviews -- Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, Gary Hart, and Ted Kennedy -- we need to show the same clear-sightedness in the run up to 2008 as so many of us are showing in 2006.
That is, we do not let our conception of the political best blind us to the greater good that comes from replacing Republicans with Democrats. Nor do we, in fact, dispute the importance, in addition to progressive domestic policies, of democratic internationalism and defending against terrorists. The principles Beinart defends -- which are not too different, in Rich's telling, from those presented, for example, by Gary Hart -- are the right principles.
The tragedy is that when Bush betrayed the country's trust and hijacked a united citizenry for his own ends there were too many liberals who went MIA, whether in Congress or on opinion pages, at a time, as Beinart concedes, when such a principled opposition "was needed most." That opposition could have rallied around the same principles that are espoused in The Good Fight without succumbing to Bush propaganda about a war that has done more to harm the battle against terrorism than any blogging pacifist has. It would have been a far better thing for the country if liberal hawks had articulated those principles clearly then without compromising them. Their inability to do so was a systemic intellectual failure that Beinart's book only begins to address.
But nor should we mistake Beinart, and those simarly-misled "liberal hawks," for the enemy. We have had our political differences, but in the larger scheme of things we have been friends, and we must remain friends. This is not a time for settling scores, but for saving our country.