Editor's Note: This post consists of a reply from Peter Beinart to my post reviewing his book The Good Fight. In extended, I respond to Peter's reply and then provide him the last word.
By PETER BEINART
A few weeks ago, Armando did something I appreciate: He read my book. And to make matters stranger, I agree with a good part of his response, since it reiterates a point I make on the book's fifth page: I was wrong to support the Iraq war. Armando goes on to note that others, including Wesley Clark, were wiser than me in foreseeing some of the problems that would arise. Agreed. They were.
More of Peter Beinart's response in extended.
Peter Beinart's Response cont'd:
Where we part company is in our analysis of where liberals are more generally in the struggle against jihadism. After quoting me as writing that John Kerry lacked "a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had for a very long time," Armando retorts "Sez who Mr. Beinart? Karl Rove?"
I don't know if Karl Rove is saying that, and I don't particularly care. One of the most self-defeating tendencies among liberals today, in my view, is this idea that if conservatives are attacking liberals for something, we have to deny we have any problem, so as not to play into our opponents hands. That's a great recipe for intellectual paralysis. In the late 1980s, conservatives said the country didn't trust liberals to fight crime. Bill Clinton didn't deny the problem. He acknowledged and solved it--not only defusing an issue that helped sink Michael Dukakis, but creating a "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" synthesis that helped create safer cities.
At the presidential level, the assertion that liberals have not had "a vision of national greatness in a threatening world...[in] a very long time" is almost self-evident. Since Vietnam, Democrats have not won a presidential election in which national security played a paramount role. Carter won in 1976 when the country turned inward after Vietnam and during détente (polls showed that 1976 was the first election since the beginning of the cold war in which Americans did not cite foreign policy as their number one issue). Clinton won in 1992 and 1996 when Americans turned inward after the cold war. But as for the national security-saturated elections--McGovern in 1972, Carter in 1980, Mondale in 1984, Dukakis in 1988, Kerry in 2004--I challenge Armando to tell me what national security vision the Democrat articulated in any of these. (Perhaps McGovern articulated one, but it was that America should stop fighting the Cold War, which was more like an anti-national security vision).
And the failure of our candidates speaks to something bigger, which is really the topic of my book: that conservatives have a national security story that they know by heart and we don't. We had one from the 1940s through the 1960s--and it is tremendously relevant today--but we've forgotten a lot of it over time, and that is reflected in the presidential campaigns our candidates run.
The conservative story starts with the intellectuals who created the modern conservative movement in the 1950s around the magazine National Review. It came to power with Reagan and reached fruition with Bush. It is basically that democracies don't believe strongly enough in themselves; they lack faith in their own goodness and this makes them weaker than their fanatically self-confident totalitarian foes. So government must constantly tell Americans that we can do no wrong. Any suggestion that we are violating democratic principles--that we are not living up to our ideals--is a sinister plot to weaken our will. So when Amnesty International tells Bush that America is violating human rights in our prison camps, he says the charge is absurd. We're America, he says, we only do good.
The liberal story--which really starts with Reinhold Niebuhr, the key liberal intellectual of the early cold war, but someone many contemporary liberals barely remember--says the opposite. It says it is precisely because we recognize that America is fallible, because we recognize our capacity for injustice and struggle to overcome it, that we defeat our enemies. Because we know greatness must be earned, not just asserted, we avoid moral complacency. We don't build prison camps like Guantanamo Bay. And it is our ability to fight our enemies without becoming like them that inspires the world. The liberals I write about in my book didn't just gloat that America was better than the Soviet Union; they said to defeat the Soviet Union America had to become a better country. It had to overcome segregation and McCarthyism, and inspire the world not by talking about our love of democracy and human rights, but by proving it. In the liberal tradition, America fights for freedom from the inside out. If Armando thinks we have that national security story down, he's a more perceptive listener than me. When I read the congressional Democrats' recent national security document, I see the same thing I saw with Kerry: good policy ideas with no larger vision connecting them.
Armando also says, "Beinart wants those liberals and Democrats who disagree with" him "to be wild eyed useful idiots who `coddle terrorists.'" No, I really don't. That's certainly not my view about liberals who opposed the Iraq war--they were right. My book does critique specific people and groups--including Michael Moore, George Lakoff, MoveOn and The Nation--for suggesting in the aftermath of 9/11 that if America retaliated military we would become no better than the jihadists, that America created Osama bin Laden, and that if America fought the war on Afghanistan at all, we couldn't take any civilian lives--which in the real world was a recipe for not fighting it all. (I cite chapter and verse in the book).
For the first year after 9/11, those were marginal views on the left. But since 2004, poll after poll shows that liberals and Democrats increasingly don't see the anti-jihadist struggle as our fight. We rate it remarkably low on our list of foreign policy priorities. We are considerably more likely than Republicans to say America should mind its own business and retreat from the world. Less than 60 percent of us, according to a recent MIT survey, would re-fight the war in Afghanistan or use military force to destroy a terrorist camp. (Again, I have the details on this in the book)
Is this because liberals are furious about Iraq? Of course. But it was fury at Vietnam that led Democrats, disastrously, to overwhelmingly oppose the Gulf War in 1991. Just because Bush (and to some extent, pro-war liberals like me) got us into this mess doesn't mean that liberals can't hurt ourselves badly if we react to it the wrong way. And there is some evidence that we are.
I highlight this problem because I believe it is only when liberals see fighting jihadist totalitarianism--an ideology that enslaves women and non-Sunni Muslims, and murders gays and lesbians--as our cause--not Bush's, ours--that this struggle will be won. It is our values, more than his, which are at stake. It is our tradition--not his--that recognizes that America wins when it leads by persuasion, not command. That recognizes that in foreign policy, legitimacy is power. That recognizes that it is only when we act democratically--when we struggle for freedom at home--that we can truly champion democracy around the world.
That's our heritage and our mission, I think. But we can't fulfill it if we decide the anti-jihadist struggle is a Bush concoction in which we have little stake. And that tendency is growing, according to the polls. Which is partly why I wrote my book.
My reply to Peter
Reply by Armando
My reply:
I thank Peter Beinart for his response to my post on his book, "The Good Fight."
While other commentators have chosen to focus on the need for Beinart to wear his hairshirt for a longer period of time, I said my piece on that in my post and focus now on the substance of Peter's remarks here.
Peter writes:
Where we part company is in our analysis of where liberals are more generally in the struggle against jihadism. After quoting me as writing that John Kerry lacked "a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had for a very long time," Armando retorts "Sez who Mr. Beinart? Karl Rove?"
I don't know if Karl Rove is saying that, and I don't particularly care. One of the most self-defeating tendencies among liberals today, in my view, is this idea that if conservatives are attacking liberals for something, we have to deny we have any problem, so as not to play into our opponents hands. That's a great recipe for intellectual paralysis. In the late 1980s, conservatives said the country didn't trust liberals to fight crime. Bill Clinton didn't deny the problem. He acknowledged and solved it--not only defusing an issue that helped sink Michael Dukakis, but creating a "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" synthesis that helped create safer cities.
Beinart makes a fundamental mistake in not caring about the politics (my Rove metaphor is about the politics) of national security. For it is the politics of national security which has hamstringed reasoned debate on national security not only among Democrats, but in the country as a whole. Why were the voices of principled Truman-like reason crowded off the stage in 2002, including by a large number of Democrats? Why was General Wesley Clark not heard? It is because of the politics of national security.
Last year Ezra Klein and Jesse Taylor wrote something very smart:
. . . Before the message and positioning come into play, voters have to understand that the issue is important to you, or else anything further looks like more pick-a-stance political positioning. But Kerry's insistence on talking about health care and schools wasn't natural for him. The guy barely gives two shits on domestic policy if it doesn't relate to trees and lakes, his lifelong passion -- and I choose the word passion carefully -- is foreign policy. And yet he couldn't shut up about teachers and doctors -- why?
The Democratic party, as I said earlier today, is trusted on one thing and one thing only: domestic issues. And the combination of consultants who basically don't care about foreign policy (Shrum, Cahill) and Clintonistas whose electoral success was based off economic empathy have combined to create a party constantly attempting to reframe the debate to their strength. Losing on culture? Talk more populism. Foreign policy exploding? Release health care commercials (I wanted to kill the Kerry campaign when they kept releasing those straight-into-the-camera commercials on health care while the candidate got beat up on national security). That it all looks like a dodge hasn't seemed to occur to them...
Jesse's right, our party needs to talk about national security as if it is of paramount importance to us, and not just one more problem in a world filled with them. But that needs to be part of the larger effort, which is accepting our weaknesses on culture and foreign policy and orienting our party towards strengthening them. If we're talking about things we don't believe in, or talking about them in ways we don't believe, the message will be a mish-mash of polled positions and our inauthenticity will be clear and easily exploitable (see Kerry, John). And until we accept that our party's failings are way deeper than a dearth of economic populism, we're in trouble. We have to be able to fight the GOP on their turf, because it's turf the voters care about too. No more changing the subject, no more reliance on the legendary power of populism. It's time to find claim ground across the board.
In order to gain an authentic voice for a Democratic liberal foreign policy, Democrats must master the politics of national security. Peter would focus solely on policy as if there really is a wide divide between his vision of a liberal foreign policy and that articulated by Democrats. I simply don't think there is. Peter's book and the policy he outlines reflects, in my opinion, the thinking of the Democratic Party today on national security.
Kevin Drum remarked:
I read The Good Fight a couple of weeks ago, and Beinart is pretty clear that he now believes he was wrong about a whole host of things back in 2003. He was wrong about WMD, wrong about containment, wrong about the need for international legitimacy, etc. etc. If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't have supported the war.
What's more, his prescription for how liberals should approach foreign policy going forward is distinctly non-martial. He believes we need a sort of modern-day Marshall plan for the Middle East; a willingness to work with international institutions even if that sometimes restrains our actions; an acceptance that we should abide by the same restrictions that we demand of others; greater patience in foreign affairs; and a rededication to social justice both at home and abroad.
In other words, I think he could give the keynote address at YearlyKos and not really say much of anything the audience would disagree with. If Beinart really is the standard bearer for a new incarnation of liberal hawkishness, then we're almost all liberal hawks now.
I think Kevin gets it exactly right. I believe the disconnect remains in the area of the politics of national security.
Beinart writes:
I highlight this problem because I believe it is only when liberals see fighting jihadist totalitarianism--an ideology that enslaves women and non-Sunni Muslims, and murders gays and lesbians--as our cause--not Bush's, ours--that this struggle will be won. It is our values, more than his, which are at stake. It is our tradition--not his--that recognizes that America wins when it leads by persuasion, not command. That recognizes that in foreign policy, legitimacy is power. That recognizes that it is only when we act democratically--when we struggle for freedom at home--that we can truly champion democracy around the world.
That's our heritage and our mission, I think. But we can't fulfill it if we decide the anti-jihadist struggle is a Bush concoction in which we have little stake. And that tendency is growing, according to the polls. Which is partly why I wrote my book.
I think most do see it as our cause. I think what Peter is missing is that what most liberals object to is the view that we must "stand with Bush" in order to fight for a liberal foreign policy against Islamic jihadism. Many of us believe the opposite. Many of us believe that Bush has been a disaster in the struggle against Islamic jihadism. Many of us believe that the Iraq Debacle was one of our biggest setbacks in the struggle against Islamic jihadism.
Indeed, many of us believe that those who most protest that we must take the struggle against Islamic jihadism seriously are the people doing the most damage in that struggle because they make it difficult to critique the disastrous Bush policy. Why is this the case?
Because of the politics of national security. You can't take the politics out of politics, as Ed Kilgore wrote. And you can't take the politics out of national security. Peter forgets this.
PETER BEINART responds:
First, on politics. My argument is not that politics doesn't matter when it comes to national security, of course it does. It is that you first have to understand what you believe--then you can figure out how to make it sell politically. The sequence is essential. Armando talks more about Democrats; I talk more about liberals--which bespeaks a difference. For me, the vision of society is primary; parties are merely institutions to incarnate that. The vision has to come first, or else you lose sight of the larger goal.
This is particularly true if you want--as I gather Armando does--to take the long view. The conservative movement did not begin with Goldwater. It began with a group of intellectuals in the 1950s who were wildly out of the mainstream, but worked diligently to develop a fusion of libertarianism, extreme anti-communism and cultural traditionalism that became the conservatism we now know. Once they had done so, people from Richard Nixon to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove figured out how to sell it. But the intellectual work had to come first--and it had to be liberated from political constraint. Politicians will always focus on winning elections. But non-politicians need to think about principles, so they gradually shape the environment in which politicians exist. And if you say you're not going to write something because Karl Rove says it, then you are intellectually inhibiting yourself. And it is intellectual weakness--the sense that people don't know what liberals believe at the level of principle, because liberals aren't quite sure themselves--that is the greatest hurdle we face.
Second, on jihadism. Armando writes that "most liberals object to the view that we must `stand with Bush' in order to fight for a liberal foreign policy against Islamic jihadism. Many of us believe the opposite." But it can't be completely either-or. Yes, much of the time the best way to fight jihadism is to oppose bad Bush administration policies. But you can't conflate the struggle against jihadism with the struggle against Bush; the former is not a subset of the latter. There is sometimes--not all the time, not even most of the time, but sometimes--a tension between the two. And that tension has to be faced; this is what the great democratic socialist Irving Howe called "two-sided politics." It's what my book is really about (mercenary plug) -- the need to fight totalitarianism and conservatism at the same time, while recognizing that neither is reducible to the other. It was the same during the Cold War.
Take the Dubai Ports deal. Bush may have been secretive, incompetent etc, but on the big issue--should an Arab company be allowed to run a US port if the homeland security experts say it is safe (and they virtually all did)--he was right. By seeing the issue only as a chance to kick Bush in the teeth, only through the prism of what helps the Democratic Party at the polls, liberals sold out their own principles, and participated in a nativist surge that solidified the widespread Middle Eastern view that America really is hostile to Muslims. That happened, I think, because liberals weren't clear enough about what we really believe. There was a void, and Bush hatred and political opportunism filled it. Answering that void with an intellectually coherent liberal vision is our great project. And Armando forgets this.
