Left vs. Left

A few weeks a ago, Yancy linked to Peter Beinart's piece, The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal. I linked to Michael Tomasky's Party In Search of a Notion. Both pieces scour the past for answers to the Democratic Party's current troubles with national security and a unifying vision.

Now, Tomasky has reviewed Beinart's new book. I thought I'd post this as a continuation of our look at where we are and where the Democrats can take us.

Not So Fast
Peter Beinart's The Good Fight is a pretty solid history, if you assume that history ends in the spring of 2003.

By Michael Tomasky

The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart (HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95)

Has the time come for liberals to put Iraq behind us? The answer depends to some extent on which Iraq we’re talking about. Iraq the Reality still rages, and we can be certain that we will be enmeshed in the region in one way or another for a long time. Iraq the Debate, however, is already in some sense a relic of the past. Three years ago, liberals for and against the war tore into one another, the arguments in some cases rupturing friendships between people who took opposing sides (and in one case I know, between two who were both hawks!). But isn’t it time now to look to the future, fashioning a set of principles about foreign policy, national security, and the fight against terrorism on which all liberals can more or less agree?

There is something to be said for this view. It’s one I advance in an essay I wrote for a collection, edited by the historians Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, that will be published soon by the University of California Press. But perhaps I was getting ahead of myself. Reading Peter Beinart reminds me that there are accounts still to be settled.

* * *

Beinart really wants the conversation to be about the future, and with good reason: As the editor of The New Republic (he resigned just recently), Beinart led that journal into a posture of perfervid support of the Iraq War. In dispute of that adjective, he might direct the reader to any number of hedges and qualifications in TNR’s pages in the run-up to the war, and to a general claim that the magazine’s reasons for wanting war were not the same (in every particular) as the Bush administration’s reasons. Perhaps so. But to go back and read through Beinart’s “TRB” columns, unsigned TNR editorials, and other articles the magazine published in 2002 and 2003 is to be reminded afresh that, while TNR disagrees with the right most of the time, its real enemy is the left. So, on Iraq, TNR was intellectually pro-war, but emotionally anti–anti-war. The paroxysmal contempt for the war’s opponents combined with the docile credulousness toward Bush administration pro-war assertions (especially about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capability) render “perfervid” an entirely fair modifier.

TNR fancies itself contrarian in this regard -- the “liberal” magazine that had the “guts” to be pro-war. A few months back, Martin Peretz, one of the magazine’s owners and its editor-in-chief, sent out a juvenile letter to potential subscribers disparaging the predictable views of The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The American Prospect, and urging upon these weary and unchallenged readers his blessedly unpredictable TNR. In truth, TNR has been thusly “unpredictable” for so long now, every “contrarian” stand it takes is so utterly unsurprising, that the whole business has become a standing joke in some Washington circles. The only unexpected thing would have been for TNR to oppose the Iraq War.

It did not; but boy, did it oppose the opposers. And so, after the 2004 presidential election, which the Democrats lost chiefly because of their perceived and (mostly) real weakness on national security, Beinart sat himself down and wrote “A Fighting Faith,” a long essay in which he vilified the pinkos and the softies -- the “doughfaces,” as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called them in The Vital Center -- who had brought the Democrats to their low station. Most of the piece’s 5,600 or so words were intelligent and unexceptionable ruminations on liberalism and foreign policy, with much of which I happen to agree. But just to drive the point home, Beinart argued that the real problem in the election had been “the party’s liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who” without equivocation saw the Iraq War as central to the war on terror (TNR had endorsed Joe Lieberman for president). And he named names, decrying his two chief exemplars of doughfacery -- Michael Moore and MoveOn. Drawing a historical parallel with the struggles that engulfed the Democratic Party of 1948 -- when the party’s “hard” liberals encouraged those who were naive about the Soviet Union (or worse, working for it) to take a hike and sign up with Henry Wallace -- Beinart, whether he meant to or not, all but advocated purging the liberal critics of the war from the Democratic Party.

* * *

Thus was born The Good Fight, based on that essay and signed after a ferocious bidding war jacked the price up to a reported $600,000 (another thing about left-bashing “contrarianism”: It pays).

To cut to the chase -- yes, he has toned down the bit about Michael Moore (about whom I have my own reservations) and MoveOn (now re-identified, after MoveOn took issue with some of his earlier claims, as an offshoot called MoveOn Peace). The original essay, in comparing MoveOn to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, had implicitly -- and very sloppily -- alleged that MoveOn contained actual al-Qaeda members among its ranks (that is, since the Progressive Party did have actual Communists, and since MoveOn was today’s analogue to it). In the penultimate chapter of The Good Fight, Beinart acknowledges that “there were no Salafists infiltrating MoveOn Peace,” although he is still critical of the organization, and of Moore. The book adds Howard Dean and his followers to this cahier des doleances, but the urge to purge is itself purged. What Beinart wants today is to persuade those to his left within the Democratic Party that they need to place the fight against terrorism at the center of the experience of being a liberal today.

Beinart’s central thesis -- as it were, the answer to the question raised in his subtitle -- is that today’s liberals can learn from the great era of Cold War liberalism the specific lesson that liberalism made America great precisely because it understood America’s potential to do harm. The narrative of that liberalism, Beinart writes:

begins not with America’s need to believe in itself, but with America’s need to make itself worthy of belief. Around the world, America does that by accepting international constraints on its power. For conservatives -- from John Foster Dulles to George W. Bush -- American exceptionalism means that we do not need such constraints. America’s heart is pure. But 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.

From that thesis, Beinart shows -- in telling the story of the creation of Americans for Democratic Action, of the Marshall Plan, of Kennedy’s vision that winning the Cold War abroad required getting closer to living up to our professed ideals at home -- how liberalism up through Vietnam adhered (enough of the time, anyway) to this Niebuhrian doctrine of self-restraint, and how fealty to that principle, combined with a clear-eyed recognition of the nature of the external threat, succeeded both in maintaining liberalism’s political pre-eminence and in keeping the totalitarian enemy at bay.

Beinart then chronicles the collapse of this “anti-totalitarian liberalism” in the 1960s. He is no apologist for the men who brought us Vietnam. But the upshot of the decade, for Beinart’s purposes, was that the liberalism that followed the Vietnam schism, while retaining “many of the same domestic principles” as the older liberalism, “no longer connected them to the struggle for freedom around the world.” Liberalism became isolationist, skeptical of American power, anti-imperialist; and this mindset, never really replaced by anything else in 40 years’ time, is at the core of what is preventing the Democratic Party from fashioning a credible response to the Republicans’ proposals regarding terrorism today.

I say never really replaced, but for Beinart -- as for other liberal backers of the Iraq War such as Paul Berman and George Packer -- the lineaments of something new were sketched out in the Balkans in the 1990s, as successful interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo signaled the possibility of a new foreign-policy liberalism, less like the Vietnam-era variant and more like its 1948 cousin. But how similar were Kosovo and Iraq? Air sorties in familiar Europe undertaken with the support of NATO allies are one thing, while a full-fledged ground war in an alien and hostile land undertaken with only token backing from a hodgepodge of favor-currying nations is quite another. And here we return to those unsettled accounts.

* * *

It takes Beinart just four pages to make his confession about Iraq: “I was wrong.” He deploys the three little words, which have miraculously eluded the grasp of just about every other liberal war supporter save Fred Kaplan of Slate (who came clean ages ago), without hesitation. For this, Beinart deserves some credit.

On the strength of this short passage, Beinart will be limned by some as having “recanted” his Iraq position, and to a certain extent he obviously has. But the point of this book is not simply to broach a reconsideration of Iraq. Beinart’s purpose here is to describe a future, rooted in a particular argument about the past, into which he wants the rest of us to follow him. So the question that liberals and Democrats must sort out before moving forward is whether the Iraq War can in any conceivable way be placed in the tradition of Cold War liberalism that Beinart and I admire. Beinart doesn’t address this directly. He gestures toward addressing it, noting the “grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most” and acknowledging that he has not always been liberalism’s “most faithful custodian.” But why only gesture? The answer to the above question about whether the Iraq War belongs to the tradition of Cold War liberalism is a reverberating, ear-splitting “no.” The ’48ers, according to Beinart’s own argument, were masters of restraint. They would never have endorsed a unilateral and “preventive” war like the current one. They fought conservatives advocating “rollback” then (precursors to today’s neoconservatives); and, as of early 2003, two of them, Schlesinger and George F. Kennan, were still around to tell us that they opposed an invasion of Iraq.

If we are to move forward along lines Beinart suggests, we need to know whether Beinart and other liberal hawks will recognize the difference between antitotalitarian liberalism and conservatism, neo- or otherwise, when they see it. Unfortunately, Beinart slips and slides around this question. His chapter on Iraq, which rehearses the administration’s various arguments for war, reads at first blush like a wise and disinterested account of a tragic march to folly. But he writes about this period as if he’d spent it on a mountaintop in Tibet instead of editing an influential magazine and cheering on the administration virtually every step of the way -- and accusing war critics, not all of whom (news flash: not even a majority of whom) are anti-imperialist Chomskyites, of “intellectual incoherence” and “abject pacifism,” as he so unforgettably put matters to The Washington Post in February 2003. I resented those comments at the time personally, I still do, and I know a lot of people who feel similarly.

I share many of Beinart’s goals for the Democratic Party. I’m not entirely sure how he proposes that today’s Democrats make this Niebuhrian case about recognizing America’s potential to do harm; it doesn’t seem like a vote-getter, but, intellectually at least, he’s on to something. And I found his prescriptive chapter a bit thin. His proposals for how liberals should fight the war on terrorism -- a Marshall Plan for the Arab world, greater cooperation with the United Nations (where possible), and NATO -- are rather general (and, for all his huffing and puffing about doughfacery, every one could be endorsed by the very people he reproves in the previous chapter). Even with these limitations, though, his argument that there is much wisdom to be found today in liberal foreign policy of the 1947-1963 period, and that fighting terrorism must occupy a central place in the liberal schema, is sound.

But to give this subject book-length treatment without acknowledging plainly that the war in Iraq stands against the Cold War liberal tradition rather than within it damages, almost fatally, the credibility of the argument. So we’re supposed to sign up with the author’s vision of a revived ’48-ism, even though we know from his own written record that it could lead to another Iraq? I’d love to talk with Beinart about the future and only the future. But not just yet.

Strange Days

To get a feel for the strange goings ons in Washington lately, the essential oddness of what is said and done, we need to look no further than the past ten days.

Within this short span of time (or is ten days now considered a lifetime in politics?) the administration went from pushing a liberal pro-immigrant policy to a 'send in the National Guard to the border'policy. My first reaction was, 'is there not a problem that Bush won't send the military to solve?' and 'what National Guard?'

It turns out the troops are being sent not to do any guarding, but to watch the shop so the border patrol can crack heads. Come again? So I guess we have enough border patrol as is, but they're all stuck in their cubicles until the Guard rescues them from office bondage.

Apparently this would be a short-term solution. How short term? I'd guess through about November of '06. Hell, if I were in the Guard I'd much rather go down to the border and make coffee and copies for a few months than dodge IED's in Iraq. Those may be the kind of duties Bush had in mind when he signed up for his strange interlude in the Guard.

And just in case the National Guard can't get the job done, Bush will turn to some old friends to help pitch in.

The Senate, which had been pursuing a more moderate bill than the draconian house, is now pushing the constructions of a giant wall on the Mexican border. Ooh, how Berlin! We'll turn to Matthew Yglesias for why this is lunacy.

McCain gave a good commencement speech this weekend at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. This speech, of course, is part of McCain's pre primary warmup where he sees just how right wing he can get. He's popular among the moderates and liberals, but he needs the right to get the nomination.

This is all well and good (and I would argue not that cynical as McCain is essentially a conservative and this maverick business has more to do with his personality) but liberals/moderates should take a sober look at the figure they've wrapped their arms around. Richard Cohen and Michael Kinsley get the ball rolling. Kinsley in particular captures the oddity of a candidate trying to win over voters who agree with him, and hold on to those who don't.

Sen. Pat Roberts kicked off the confirmation hearings of CIA nominee Michael Hayden with this doozy "I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead,’ Roberts said.” - Lawrence Journal World.

Ahh. This reminds me of the recent senate debate over the Patriot Act when John Cornyn spat the Roberts line only to be met with Russ Feingold's historical retort "give me liberty or give me death."

Here's another oddity: "Even baby Jesus accepted gifts and I don't believe it corrupted him." - Rep. Drew Saunders, D-Mecklenburg, in support of an amendment to the legislative ethics bill that lowers the monetary threshold on gifts lawmakers may receive from neighbors and state employees. (The Charlotte Observer)

Some more noise on the CIA leak case. Jason Leopold writes that Rove has been indicted already, but this seems unlikely. We do know that the grand jury has been busy and that Fitzgerald has spent a huge amount of time in Robert Luskin's (Rove's attorney) office. MSNBC reporter David Shuster goes out on a limb and predicts Rove will be indicted. All of this activity is about a week old and nothing concrete has emerged yet.

But in the rumor department, it looks like former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is either a target of the leak investigation, or a major witness against Rove.

Trivia question for foreign policy zealots out there. What major post was Bobby Ray Inman nominated for by Bill Clinton? Why did that nomination go down in flames?

And the wiretapping is just warming up.

Send in the national guard to protect us from the Mexicans! Send in the man in charge of executing warrantless domestic spying to head the CIA!

Send in the clowns.

Left-ward Ho?

Okay, DGL sent me this column by Niall Ferguson (about whom, I'll add a few minutes after the fact, I am generally suspicious though largely ignorant) the other day, and originally I was just going to email him with some off-the-cuff remarks and say I was too busy with grading, etc, to do a blog post, but instead I've decided to just do a hasty post; enjoy.

Now Ferguson 'cautions' readers of a 'left turn,' citing a few recent and/or upcoming events:
First he mentions the decision by newly elected Bolivian President Evo Morales — predicted in this column Feb. 13 — to nationalize his country's energy sector.

But the swing to the left is not a purely Latin American story. The left won last month's Italian elections. The French government recently caved in to street protests by trade unions and leftist students. And in the United States, the Democrats are poised to make gains in the November midterm elections.

The contributing factors he mentions include 1) wealth disparity--Income distribution in the U.S. has not been this unequal since before World War II — the last time that the top 1% of earners accounted for more than 14% of all income (excluding capital gains). The average pay for a chief executive in the U.S. increased 27% last year to more than $11 million. By contrast, the average wage earner took home less than $45,000 in 2004, up roughly 3% from the year before.

He also mentions 2) xenophobia: You might think rising immigration would lead to a backlash on the right, not the left, and you'd be right. But the net effect of xenophobia — which is most likely to be felt by blue-collar, indigenous voters — is often to benefit the left because it tends to split the right.

Sadly, Ferguson seems right about xenophobia, so I'll focus on the more interesting economic issue. Something should be done, and I'd like to see Democrats seize on this issue (though of course they probably won't, out of fear of engaging in 'class warfare'--I say engage!)

Now I personally find myself in a state of guarded enthusiasm about Morales--nationalization such as Bolivia has enacted, in which the state will own 51% of the energy sector (more or less), strikes me as an excellent way of ensuring that the country's wealth will benefit its citizens, and of that I approve.

In the past, I have been accused of having a naïve attachment to left-leaning populists. Morales seems like a good guy to me, but what do you, reader, think of him?

One last note: it seems very odd to me that Ferguson associates the Democrats of the US with folk like Morales. Surely it is misleading to suggest that the Democrats have much in common with true leftists like Morales or Italy's Romano Prodi. I am sure that if our Democrats ran for election in Italy or Bolivia, they would, alas, be seen as a right-wing party. . . .

Everything is Connected

That is the somewhat annoying tagline to the movie, SYRIANA. But it's true not only for SYRIANA'S portrait of the oil industry and foreign affairs, but it's a good place to begin when unpacking our current economic, political, and foreign policy woes.

It's also a good place to begin when promoting alternative solutions. Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect makes the case for Democrats to rally around the common good.

Courtesy of the washington monthly, we have a lovely vision of the Republican response to the gas price crisis.

On Scarbrough Country last night, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarbrough mocked the Republican plan to give Americans a $100 gas rebate. Matthews said it smacked of 'let them eat cake.'

Here, I should give credit to Matthews for being tenacious about the Bush Administration's policies while often fawning over the president personally. Matthews definitely gets wound up in the political cult of personality, but he was constantly challenging the intel on Iraq, and the lack of real debate on the issue in the lead up to the war - not just afterward. Hardball has lately been ahead of the pack in highlighting new details on the CIA leak case and in the Duke Cunningham/Watergate/Hooker scandal. Between Hardball, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's prime time is the place to go if you're sick of Fox and the ineffectual CNN.

Recently on Hardball, Howard Dean connected the high gas prices with the Iraq debacle.

Chris Matthews also had a terrific interview with Tyler Drumheller and Gary Bernstein, two former CIA officials with troubling accounts of working with the administration.

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note explores the our current Iran strategy here and here.

Never rule out the possibility that Bush will escalate the tensions with Iran to put the Democrats on the defensive in the midterm elections. This happened in 2002. This doesn't require Bush to actually attack Iran, it just means he has to push the issue, and make Democrats pick a side. The problem with all this is, if Bush goes that route, it will have implications our standoff with Iran. Even if you have little or no intention of invading, there is a momentum of events in foreign affairs that can have dire consequences.

Democrats need to come out unified and opposed to any escalation in hostilities with Iran. It's not the non-issue that Social Security Reform was, but with Iran being unable to procure nukes until at least 5 or 10 years, and the fact that our military is stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dems need to rally against this like they did last year against Bush's Social Security scheme.

Dems have to get their house in order as they ask voters to connect the dots on the Republican "culture of corruption." They need to not cover for Rep. William Jefferson who's been accused of accepting a $400,000 bribe from a telecommunications firm. Today, Nancy Pelosi called on the House ethics committee to investigate Jefferson, but yesterday she left a different impression.

This probably won't help either, but it should be easy enough to isolate a story about drunk driving and special treatment when the congressman in question is a Kennedy.

A post from me would be incomplete without some mention of the CIA leak case. Newsweek has a great piece on how Fitzgerald zeroed in on Rove.

And finally, a former CIA analyst gives Rumsfeld the business. Notice how Rumsfeld is still hiding behind Colin Powell's credibility. More on the CIA analyst here.

The lies begat the mess in Iraq, which begat the gas prices, which are further aggravated by our saber rattling toward Iran, which is clouded by the mess in Iraq, which begat the leaks to cover for the lies about Iraq, which hampered our ability to track the progress of Iran's nuclear
program.

I haven't yet connected all this to Patrick Kennedy's car crash or Duke Cunningham's hooker parties in Watergate, but maybe Stephen Gaghan can explain it all in SYRIANA II.



Whoa - breaking news - CIA director Porter Goss has resigned. There have been rumors about his possible involvement in the Duke Cunningham/Hookergate scandal. Could this be the final connection I was looking for?

Oh Snap

Originally I intended to discuss Peter Beinart's excellent piece in the Times Magazine on the virtues of old-school liberalism, but it'll have to wait, since I thought I'd take things easy for the day and put up these videos of Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other day. Funny stuff.

[update, 5 May] Okay, I guess YouTube had to take the video down. It's still available through C-SPAN, here. If the link gives you trouble, you can just open RealPlayer and ask it to open this address: rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/60days/wh042906_colbert.rm?mode=compact.

Part One:

Some highlights: Wow. Wow, what an honor. The White House correspondents' dinner. To actually sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I'm a pretty sound sleeper -- that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Dammit. The one guy who could have helped.

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Part Two:

A highlight: See who we've got here tonight. General Moseley, Air Force Chief of Staff. General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They still support Rumsfeld. Right, you guys aren't retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld.

And a couple for DGL: John McCain is here. John McCain, John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you it wasn't a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There's no predicting him. By the way, Senator McCain, it's so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican fold. I have a summer house in South Carolina; look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University. So glad you've seen the light, sir.

Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city! Yeah, give it up. Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington, D.C., the chocolate city with a marshmallow center. And a graham cracker crust of corruption. It's a Mallomar, I guess is what I'm describing, a seasonal cookie.

Part Three:

. . . and with Bush right there. Beautiful.

Quotes courtesy of DailyKos (full transcript).