To: Road Walker who wrote (293798 ) 7/12/2006 7:13:18 PM From: tejek Respond to This is a book about American liberalism, a political tradition so reviled that its adherents dare not speak its name. Sometime in the 1960s, conservatives began using "liberal" as an epithet, and after a while, liberals gave up trying to defend its honor. When pressed for a self- description today, many prominent liberals choose "progressive." And then they explain that they don't like labels. There's no shame in ideological change. In its modern American context, liberalism--the belief that government should intervene in society to solve problems that individuals cannot solve alone--began with Franklin Roosevelt. The argument of this book is that there is such a liberal vision, and today's progressives can find it in the heritage they have tried to escape. Its roots lie in an antique landscape, at the dawn of America's struggle against a totalitarian foe. And it begins not with America's need to believe in its own virtue, but with its need to make itself worthy of such belief. Around the world, the United States does that by accepting international constraints on its power. For conservatives--from John Foster Dulles to Dick Cheney--American exceptionalism means that we do not need such constraints. Our heart is pure. In the liberal vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional. Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power, we accept the restraints that empires refuse. That is why the Truman administration self-consciously shared power with America's democratic allies, although we comprised one-half of the world's GDP and they were on their knees. This vision has sometimes divided liberals themselves. Recognizing American fallibility means recognizing that the United States cannot wield power while remaining pure. From Henry Wallace in the late 1940s to Michael Moore after September 11, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world. If the cold war liberal tradition parts company with the right in insisting that American power cannot be good unless we recognize that it can also be evil, it parts company with the purist left in insisting that if we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good.
