Give Peter Beinart credit for originality. The Editor-at-Large of the New Republic has invented, in a column in Sunday's Washington Post, a whole new reason for liberals to admit that liberals are wrong about something: doing so will teach young liberals humility.
Now, you might wonder, why is Beinart suddenly so concerned about the endangered virtue of young Democrats? The problem, he informs us, is that the left has made the correct call on just about every single issue since 1991 (when Bush senior routed Hussein in Round One). And that means the kids on the left have gotten the crazy idea that progressive ideas are consistently better than conservative ideas. For this reason, older Democrats could provide younger Democrats with an object lesson by admitting that Republicans are correct . . . about, well, something.
Yet they should -- not for his sake but for their own. Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported -- and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen.
Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.
Like I say, give him full points for originality.
By laying out Beinart's column in the Washington Post in this way, I am doing him a service, too . . . just as he wants older progressives to do a service for younger progressives. The logic of his argument, though not the rhetoric, begins with the point just quoted. So that is where his column should rhetorically begin. Given Beinart's argument, it should be a secondary matter exactly what topic we choose to pick as the one progressives have gotten all screwy. The point is just to find something . . . for the moral education, you see, of the children.
Won't someone think of the children?
Keeping that in mind, where-oh-where would Beinart look for an issue that Democrats could humbly admit that their ideology led them to get all wrong? Torture? The financial crisis? Rising unemployment? Hmmmmm.
In fact, the title of Beinart's piece is "Admit It: The Surge Worked," and that is the sum total of his actual point. That tiresome bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc is the one he is hanging his hat on; the one that he thinks will open the backdoor for him to renewed relevancy. He doesn't give a crap about young progressives. He just wants to remind the punditocracy that he's a reliable hawk.
That's why it's important to admit that Bush was right about the surge. Doing so would remind Democrats that no one political party, or ideological perspective, has a monopoly on wisdom. That recognition can be the difference between ambition -- which the Obama presidency must exhibit -- and hubris, which it can ill afford.
Being proven right too many times is dangerous. It breeds intellectual arrogance and complacency. As the Democrats prepare to take over Washington, they should publicly acknowledge that on the surge, they were wrong. That acknowledgment may not do much for Bush's legacy, but it could do wonders for their own.
It could to do wonders for the Democrats' legacy, and It could do even more wonders for Beinart's. Well, what the hell. Can't blame him for trying.