Since there is more than a little interest in where the two political parties will place themselves in terms of issues in the near future, I thought the following opening to a conversation on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo website would be interesting.
Among the several things Marshall has on his website are conversations about books. They always include the author and almost always a set, as many as five or six, noted authorities in the field.
The author this time is Peter Beinart of the New Republic and the post I've copied consists of his opening comments for a discussion of his new book, The Good Fight.
Beinart argues that present notions of liberalism have lost its historical meaning.
Whatever else one ways about the Democratic Party at this juncture of its history, this debate, multifaceted, is a sign of health.
------
Writing The Good Fight
By pbeinart on The Good Fight
The Good Fight begins with a meta-argument: that reviving liberalism requires better understanding our intellectual history. Put another way, we have trouble defining what we believe because we don’t know enough about what we once believed. Liberal activists these days want to banish the political consultants, and elect “conviction politicians” who say what they really think. Which sounds good to me, except that I’m not sure most liberals really know what they think—not clearly enough to put it on an index card—especially about foreign policy. The Good Fight is an effort to rummage through our heritage, and suggest some answers.
For the purposes of inaugurating this discussion, let me suggest two. The first is a belief in interdependence. Historically, conservatives have oscillated between isolationism and neo-imperialism, in both cases believing America can protect itself largely alone. The liberal tradition, as I see it, insists on America’s inability to secure its prosperity and security without international cooperation. And that cooperation requires strong international institutions. At the dawn of the cold war, America represented fifty percent of the world’s GDP and Western Europe was on its knees. But through NATO, the Truman administration gave weaker countries some influence over American power, and partly as a result, many Western Europeans decided that American power benefited them. George Kennan recognized that if America did not become an empire—if the Western alliance was based on persuasion, not command—it would outlast the Soviet bloc, which held itself together through brute force. And he was right. For George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, power creates legitimacy—if America acts alone, others will have no choice but to follow. But in the liberal tradition, the truth is closer to the opposite: legitimacy creates power.
This lesson is especially relevant today because globalization leaves America more threatened by pathologies incubated in other countries (jihadism, pandemics, financial instability, environmental degradation, loose nuclear weapons). It gives America a greater interest in how other countries are governed. For our own security, we need standards for how other governments act at home. But if we unilaterally define those standards—if America announces rules for democratic governance, anti-terrorism and non-proliferation on our own, as George W. Bush has, they will seem illegitimate. And if we try to enforce them largely alone, as in Iraq, we will fall into exactly the trap that Kennan tried to avoid: we will look like an empire. A central liberal project in the years to come must be the construction, and reconstruction, of international institutions, in the model of what the Roosevelt and Truman administrations did 60 years ago. Ironically, the more aggressively we want to act against the threats we face, the stronger the international institutions through which we act must become.
This belief in interdependence, I argue in the book, rests on a particular vision of American exceptionalism. Conservatives tend to stress America’s inherent virtue, out of a long-standing fear that democracies are prone to debilitating self-doubt. America, this view, represents good fighting evil, and any suggestion that we can also do harm constitutes a sinister attack on our will.
Liberals, I argue, should see America as capable of greatness precisely because we do not take our virtue as self-evident. Because we know we are fallible, we do not seek unrestrained international power, and the imperial temptations it brings. And because we know we are fallible, we don’t succumb to moral complacency at home. Unlike George W. Bush, we don’t hold out American democracy as a fixed model for a benighted world. Instead, we show the world what a democracy can do if it bravely faces its own deficiencies, and struggles to overcome them. Instead of suggesting that things like Haditha don’t really matter because we are so morally superior to our enemies, we prove our moral superiority by acknowledging our crimes, and taking steps to ensure we don’t repeat them.
A second key liberal principle is that fighting totalitarianism requires fostering economic opportunity. This was the premise of the Marshall Plan, which assumed that if Western European democracies could not provide for their battered people, they would fall. Cold war conservatives like Barry Goldwater vehemently rejected the suggestion that communism had roots in poverty and economic despair. And today, many conservatives say the same about jihadism. But it is the economic stagnation of much of Islamic world, combined with vast population growth, which has left governments unable to provide basic services for their people—leaving a void that Islamist groups have filled. Describing their region’s plight, the Middle Eastern Scholars who wrote the UN’s Arab Human Development Reports adopted Amartya Sen’s concept of “development as freedom.” This is entirely consistent with the liberal tradition—from the Marshall Plan to John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress to Tony Blair’s calls for debt relief. And it has to be part of any liberal vision of the anti-jihadist struggle.
Finally, the relationship between economic opportunity and the war on terror is just as important at home. During the cold war, America sustained massive international expenditures over many decades—including very large foreign aid programs—because the period from World War II to the 1970s was an extraordinary period of economic progress, especially for working class Americans. Since then, however, the breakdown of the American social compact—the refusal of employers to provide the health care, pensions and other benefits they once did, and the refusal of government to effectively respond—has made life for middle and working class Americans much riskier. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult to sustain enlightened international policies. It is hard to be generous abroad when America is not generous at home.
In his first debate with Richard Nixon, which was on domestic policy, John F. Kennedy got the first question, and began his answer by saying that everything he was about to discuss bore directly on America’s ability to win the struggle for freedom around the world. Then he talked about American industrial capacity, poverty in West Virginia, and black children who didn’t graduate high school. George W. Bush has said little about the domestic requirements of a “long war” against jihadism. But liberals must. And those requirements do not simply involve national fiscal strength—because we cannot fight an expensive “long war” while conservatives defund the government just in time for a baby boom retirement that sends government expenditures through the roof. They also involve the economic strength of average Americans.
Of all the ideas that our heritage bequeaths, perhaps the most audacious is that America defeats its enemies not by becoming more like them, but by becoming a better version of itself. With the Bush era mercifully coming to a close, that will be our challenge in the years to come. |
