MB Civic

ONCE upon a time — 60 years ago, to be precise — liberals were the moderates in American politics. They were flanked on the left by so-called progressives who were either unconcerned about the threat posed by the international spread of Communism or covertly sympathetic to it, and on the right by conservatives who wanted to use anti-Communism as a rationale for domestic demagogy and unilateral military crusades. The liberal “vital center” — to use Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase — was not, however, a force for milquetoast moderation or take-half compromise. It was a tough-minded, aggressively creative political movement. It was led by courageous politicians like Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey, who received policy support from a remarkable generation of public servants that included George Marshall, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson. Intellectual ballast was provided by Schlesinger, Kennan and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, among others. Their immediate achievement was the containment of Communism. But Peter Beinart argues that cold war liberalism has enduring value as well: he believes it is the most plausible philosophical framework for an enlightened American foreign (and domestic) policy in the 21st century. However, he writes, “before today’s progressives can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.”

This is a brave and crucial book that should inspire a much needed policy donnybrook in the Democratic Party. Beinart is a former editor (now editor at large) of that grand, fusty liberal bastion The New Republic. (Caveat lector: I’ve written for The New Republic in the past, but never for Beinart. And he reviewed my latest book in The Washington Post on April 30, long after I wrote this review.) He writes clearly and concisely, with a pellucid intelligence. His most important attribute as a writer and thinker, though, is what he is not: at the age of 35, he is not a member of the baby boom generation. His political sensibility was not molded by Vietnam, the civil rights movement or hallucinogens. He is not afflicted by the excesses, delusions, indulgences or grandiosity of the current leaders of the Democratic Party. He is attempting some heavy lifting here, nothing less than the resuscitation of liberalism as a “fighting faith,” in Schlesinger’s term. He comes to the task fresh and defiant, unwilling to accept the prevailing Fox News definition of “liberalism” as an epithet denoting weakness or moral relativism.

This is not to say Beinart has always been right. He supported the war in Iraq — for two reasons, he writes. He wanted to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, which was reasonable. He also hoped the American-led invasion might produce an admirable democratic government in Iraq, which was not. “On both counts, I was wrong,” he writes. “It is a grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most.”

Beinart’s humility is charming, but unfair to himself. The argument at the heart of “The Good Fight” is a product of intellectual growth. It evolved as Beinart watched the disaster unfold in Iraq; it is the result of a rigorous search for principles that might guide the United States as it confronts the challenge of Islamist totalitarianism and the other viral threats of the Information Age. The real irony here — and it’s a fecund Oedipal harvest — is that Beinart finds such supple answers in the liberalism created by his grandparents’ generation and rejected by his parents’. Indeed, Truman laid out the essentials in his 1949 Inaugural Address, offering a foreign policy with three pillars: a willingness to use military force to contain Soviet expansion, an aggressive effort to promote economic development abroad — especially in Western Europe’s tottering democracies — and the resolve to remain humble in the process. “We all have to recognize — no matter how great our strength,” Truman said, “that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” A fourth pillar was implicit in the third: that in order to be respected in the world, the United States would have to work assiduously to perfect its democracy at home. Hence, Truman’s insistence on programs like civil rights legislation and universal health insurance.

All the pillars were essential, and each was controversial. The left predictably opposed military action in all but the most extreme cases — the fascist threat in World War II, for example — because it believed the use of violence, especially actions not condoned by the United Nations, was immoral and would damage America’s reputation in the world (the far left simply assumed that the United States was immoral and “imperialistic”). Beinart quotes Niebuhr’s response to the left’s argument: “We must take . . . morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.”

The right predictably opposed prodigious overseas development projects because they cost so much: “During the Marshall Plan, the United States spent 15 percent of its budget on foreign aid,” Beinart writes; “today it spends far less than 1 percent.” But conservatives also opposed the Marshall Plan because it gave the money away without strings, often to governments that included socialists: “Marshall and Truman required the Europeans to draw up the program themselves so it would not bear the taint of U.S. imperialism. And they resisted efforts to use it as a lever to force European countries to remake their economies in America’s image.”

The need for American restraint and humility was at the heart of Truman’s liberalism. It was the most significant difference between cold war liberalism and conservatism — and it is the most difficult part of Beinart’s agenda to sell to the American public today. Conservatives passionately assume American exceptionalism, the uninflected righteousness of American power. But “in the liberal vision,” Beinart writes, “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.”

Beinart spends the first part of the book tracing the rise and fall of cold war liberalism. The fall is a more familiar story than the rise: liberal anti-Communism turned intellectually sclerotic in the 60’s. Any local Communist movement — even a fairly independent, nationalist, peripheral one like Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese guerrillas — had to be forcibly confronted, even if the rest of the world disagreed. There was a myopic ugliness and arrogance to the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon mission in Vietnam, an unwitting abandonment of Truman’s humility. And a new generation of liberals — actually, the baby boom left hated being called liberals; they saw themselves as “radicals” at first, and later as “progressives” — responded to the stubbornness of their anti-Communist parents with ballistic self-righteousness. The New Left’s anti-anti-Communism was a classic double negative: it played, for most of the public, as simple anti-Americanism — and the “progressive” reluctance to acknowledge the possibility of the judicious use of American power, even when the world supports it (as the United Nations did during the first gulf war), has crippled the Democratic Party’s credibility on matters of national security in perpetuity. Meanwhile, the party’s white, working-class base — especially the Roman Catholics — fled when it became apparent that liberalism now meant racial preferences instead of racial equality. Some of the idealistic, intellectual supporters of cold war liberalism began to call themselves neoconservatives and took their crusading anti-totalitarian faith to the Republican Party as well.

In the second part of the book, Beinart makes a powerful argument that the conservative comic-book alternative — the notion that America has the moral authority to impose its vision on the world — has been a disaster. “George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project,” Beinart writes. “He has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak. He has denied America’s capacity for evil, in an effort to bolster America’s faith in itself. And in the process, America has committed terrible misdeeds, which have sapped the world’s faith in us — and ultimately, our faith in ourselves.”

This is obviously a difficult argument to make, politically. But if Americans are congenitally unwilling to listen to arguments about America’s capacity for evil, they are also growing quite tired, thank you, of President Bush’s percussive insistence on America’s capacity for good — the idea that America is doing the Lord’s work of spreading freedom throughout the world . . . and that things are going just hunky-dory in, for example, Iraq. But Bush and Beinart do have more than a few things in common. Both are idealists, and they share an assumption that seems to be rapidly losing traction with the American people: that Islamic totalitarianism poses as great a threat to the United States as international Communism did. Bush and Beinart may have another common enemy as well: the growing public desire to make the world go away — the prevailing skepticism about utopian adventures abroad, which is now accompanied by anger over “unfair” foreign economic competition and the rush of illegal immigrants pouring across the Southern border. The neo-populist tendency toward nativism, protectionism and isolationism may well render both the Bush and the Beinart forms of internationalism untenable.

But the world won’t go away. The global viruses — terrorism, plagues, transnational criminality, economic exploitation and environmental depredation — seem likely to intensify, rather than diminish, especially if the American response remains as feckless as it has been under the current administration. Even if radical Islamic power turns out to be a low-grade fever in a world challenged by more deadly viruses, Beinart’s argument for a return to a more judicious American idealism seems essential. The world’s problems will not be solved by authoritarians or, in most cases, by a superpower acting alone. If President Bush is right when he says democracy is the truest path toward global stability, he is wrong when he calls freedom a “gift from the Almighty.” Beinart knows that freedom is a struggle, not a gift, and that democracy is an achievement, and not always attainable. It requires economic nurture and sometimes military support, and the humility of action taken only within an international context. It requires a fervent attention to detail and, above all, patience.

At the end of World War II, America’s leaders realized it was no longer possible to retreat behind our oceans after a period of international conflict. We were indispensable to global stability, and there were difficult choices to be made about how to exercise our power and moral authority. Remarkably, on their very first try, Harry Truman’s liberal anti-Communists developed a global leadership strategy that was strong, sophisticated, optimistic and humane. Happily, Peter Beinart reminds us that the values and methods Truman deployed were not just a momentary response to the crisis of Communism, but an enduring legacy that can guide us now in a world far more complicated than the one Truman faced — and every bit as dangerous.

Joe Klein, the political columnist for Time magazine, is the author of “Primary Colors” and, most recently, “Politics Lost.”