The Good Fight: Why Liberals-And Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror And Make America Great Again is a new book by Peter Beinart and about to be released by HarperCollins. Beinart synthesized his basic argument into an article for the New York Times Magazine. There is much I like about the article and after reading Atlantic Monthly’s review, I think I will also read the book, as I found much in the review with which I disagreed. In the Times piece, Beinart does an excellent job defining the problem that liberals face in making a convincing foreign policy argument, and therefore a convincing bid for control of the congress and the presidency. The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal is a very astute and concise analysis of the failure of modern liberal leaders to understand, package, and sell the core beliefs of their intellectual ancestors. Beinart identifies this disconnect, between liberals and their ancestory, as the central roadblock to the formation of a coherent foreign policy message. He sees the problem as acerbated by the fact that the conservatives have been able to embrace and articulate their own ancestory quite effectively, starting with Ronald Reagan. In order to find appropriate role models, Beinart argues that liberals must go back to the early Cold War era and the thinking of individuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan. This is because today’s progressive leaders have no post-Vietnam giant, as Reagan was to the conservatives. Those role models urged an active, but morally restrained America to give aid without strings attached. They encouraged, but did not lecture, and in the end allowed for self-determination in the world whether it was convenient or not. In a nutshell, Beinhart rightly suggests that putting a group’s actions where their collective consciences are, in addition to a little humility, will go a long way.
Perhaps due to the space constraints of a magazine article, Beinhart passes on addressing a few points that beg questions of his argument. The first is Vietnam. Beinhart identifies Vietnam as a milepost. He says, liberals don’t have a script because they don’t have a Reagan. He goes on to say that before Vietnam, and the disappointment and confusion it spawned, liberals did have a clear story of their own. As his subtitle states, maybe what the Democrats need post-9/11 is exactly what they rejected after Vietnam.
I would suggest that liberal decision makers lost their way long before Vietnam. In fact, Vietnam is a direct result of placing politics over principal, not the cause of it. Let us remember both the country of Vietnam and the American ideal of self-determination were sacrificed to allow the French back into Indochina as colonists. That decision was made by the Roosevelt administration and carried out by Harry Truman. Beinhart identifies American support of European democracies in spite of their socialist tendencies as evidence of the liberal ideal at work. I would suggest that the ignoring of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist pleas begs the opposite conclusion. American liberalism was corrupted long before the Atomic Bomb. American liberal policy, as Beinhart saw it in the Marshall Plan, in fact did care about socialist tendencies, but it preferred those tendencies to wholesale Soviet Communism. France was allowed back into her colonies, not because liberal ideas restrained America from meddling abroad, but because the liberal ideal was subverted to keep Western Europe out of the Eastern Bloc.
The conservative position might argue here that by meddling with intent and abandoning the liberal position, the Cold War was won. Not so. In fact, had we supported Ho, and other democratic movements after World War II, rather than play the Cold War game as it was played, the Soviets may have felt less pressured by American might and may have softened beginning with Khrushchev. Not everyone believed in Soviet might. Beinhart himself points out Neibuhr’s understanding of Communism’s fragility. Much of American perception of the Communist international plot was created by conservatives running for office. We can lay as much blame at the feet of McCarthy and Nixon as we can Stalin and Mao.
A second issue I’d like to discuss is that of economic ideology. This is where President Clinton fell short. American politicians very often are accused (justly in many cases) of abandoning economic principle for political expedience. Both Nixon and the younger Bush have been criticized by their own base of retreating from conservative economic beliefs in exchange for short term political gain. Beinhart rightly ties economic prosperity to a healthy democracy in the view of the progressive liberal. However, modern liberals seem to have bought into the conservative idea that prosperity equals excess. Clinton’s support of a flawed NAFTA is the most obvious example. A decade later we have seen little economic progress in Mexico due to that treaty. The competing ideas that Keynes leads to dictators and that von Hayek leads to robber barons are rubbish. Both men were more astute than that and so are at least some Americans. It appears that the liberal position is currently the one which is most likely to understand where the two will meet because it is the one that needs find its way back into power. You know, compassionate conservative style. Strong oversight and regulation in the progressive mold needs to be married to the conservative position of laissez-faire. I believe that the liberal and progressive position is more likely to lead one to a balanced understanding of the two points of view.
Finally, I think a story from Daniel Yergin’s book Commanding Heights is relevant. He describes a conference of free-market thinkers sponsored by von Hayek in Switzerland. At one point someone was speaking harshly of Keynes and von Hayek stopped him, saying that the group had a great lesson to learn from the socialists. That lesson was having an ideal, then organizing and working through democratic means to achieving that ideal, is honorable. That aura of honor gave them a moral authority to which people responded. The liberal leadership today needs to heed von Hayek’s praise of Keynes and the command economists. They need to worry less about beating the Republicans and worry more about standing for a principal tempered by humility.
