the Greater Nomadic Council

On Beinart’s “A Fighting Faith”

I don’t exactly have much free time these days, but I can’t resist a few comments Peter Beinart’s call for a more militant or “fighting” brand of liberalism. Specifically, Beinart seems to advocate an inner-left showdown that would conclude with the purging of Michael Moore and MoveOn and the adoption of militant anti-tolitarianism and anti-fundamentalism as a litmus test for decent Democratic politicians or organizations.

I appreciate the desire for a more militant Left and the call for more optimism about the emancipating power of enlightenment and democracy. But the historical parallel he tries to erect between the Democrats of postwar America and the Democrats today is flawed in a number of ways.

First of all, if TNR-favorite Al Gore had been president when 9/11 occurred, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Gore would have surely resorted to military action against Afghanistan and there would have been something similar to the Patriot Act. If the anti-war Left had been pissed enough about it, perhaps they would have mounted a 3rd party challenge strong enough to throw the election to the GOP (in fact I think the Greens would have likely done even better in 2004 had Gore won the election). But we certainly wouldn’t be worrying about the public perceiving the Democrats as weak-kneed on terror. We Democrats ought to face up to the fact that the GOP was simply favored by luck and now, unjustly, we are perceived as weak.

Conversely, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the Democrats were in power. They were favored by the muse of history enough to not only become the party of social justice, but also the party of national defense and patriotism (as opposed to the relatively isolationist GOP) for decades. At the time, Truman didn’t have to forcefully differentiate himself from Wallace in order to prove his patriotism. It was rather the other way around—Wallace disagreed with Truman’s cold war policies. Now I suppose Truman could have moved left to satisfy Wallace and there was probably a large portion of the intelligentsia that backed this course. Still, even if Truman had been sympathetic to this course (and he probably wasn’t) moving leftward would have weakened him with regard to his GOP opponent. Moreover, Truman had the advantage of a society that had coalesced around the pro-democracy messianic ideology of WWII. That is, the innate superiority of liberalism over “tolitarianism” was already widely acknowledged, and the unlucky GOP was suspected to be isolationist.

Not only is the comparison between 1948 and 2008 misleading, Beinart doesn’t give us adequate reason to believe that purging MoveOn (or MoveOn purging itself) will improve Democratic chances. He cites the example of the CIO expelling its anti-communist elements. But we don’t have an exact analogue in contemporary politics—the communists at that time were affiliated with the Soviet International, which was thought to be working to undermine American democracy. There are no pro Al Qaida or pro-Saddam groups with any influence on the Left today, and certainly not within MoveOn.

Further, MoveOn doesn’t represent any particular ideology but is rather a grassroots organization. For my part, I had no idea that MoveOn was involved in opposing the war in Afganistan. And I don’t particularly care, because that position doesn’t reflect the hegemonic ideology that constitutes MoveOn today. As for Moore, I agree that he shouldn't have been associated so closely with the Dems (he didn't deserve it after helping the Greens in 2000 anyway), but following Matt Taibbi's reasoning, open hostility towards him makes about as much sense as it would for the GOP to openly disavow Dobson.

So what is Beinart’s analogy getting at? It would seem that Beinart is recommending that a pre-condition for being a liberal ought to be a militant attitude, or at least a fundamental commitment, towards converting the world (particularly the Arab world) to liberal democracy. One ought to at least subscribe to the belief that places like Iran would be better off under liberal democracy and hence we ought to do something about it, if not attack them directly. To this I would say 2 things. First, this position already seems pretty widely adopted among Democrats. But second, there is a crucial historical difference here. Advocating liberal democracy is not so much a matter of self-defense as it was in the communist era, since the terrorist enemy is not really bent on world revolution, but rather on forcing the West to abandon the Arab world. And then there is the problem that many liberals have—that places like Iran seem to be better, freer, and more culturally diverse places to live than those Islamic dictatorships already under US hegemony or who have earned the favor of the US through economic cooperation (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc). Or in other words, the abject hypocrisy of application of US power until now makes liberals cynical about the potential of US power to do any good at all.

Finally, Beinart shows some sympathy for the notion that Iraq=Vietnam; that is, that Iraq was and probably remains a fundamentally mistaken and unproductive venture, but he doesn’t draw the logical consequence that opposing it doesn’t mean being anti-freedom. In this vein, those of us repulsed by the rhetoric of the likes of Lieberman are not weak liberals, but on the contrary are expressing our distaste for the unjust and unwise implications of Bush’s stupidity and the crude imperialism that motivated his war. By this reading it is people like Beinart (and the rest of the TNR/Slate/liberal hawk intelligentsia) who stand in the way of a just, morally consistent and electorally popular Democratic foreign policy agenda.

But let me get back to the larger question raised by Beinart’s essay—the question of liberal militancy. I support the notion that more Westerners ought to join organizations like the Peace Corps to help bring the message of civilization and Enlightenment to those who have no opportunity to pursue it within their own society, but I’m hard pressed to convince those people who believe we have no right to force our ideology on others—that the basic principle of a just world order ought to be self-determination. It seems to me that Beinart’s notion of “hard” liberalism specifically embraces the option of unprovoked military aggression to “free” oppressed peoples. One is faced with the paradoxical dilemma of whether or not people who don’t live in a democracy have the ability to self-determine at all, or whether self-determination can be understood as a collective will that might include old-fashioned (reactionary) political forms. Every potential intervention has to be judged separately, but on the principle of whether unprovoked military aggression in the name of freedom can be justified at all—there needs to be considerable debate.

There is one last thing to keep in mind though. The messianic attitude that Beinart proposes is part of the GOP’s success. Messianism is attractive—for pretty obvious reasons. For the masses in the contemporary world, messianism=optimimism. Look at the popularity of communism, fascism, fundamentalism….if one sees contemporary history through this lens, it is a wonder civilized liberal democracy has lasted so long at all. Even if we, as an honest and skeptical and ultimately unmilitant people, cannot ground a liberal messianism in the facts of reality or in some higher notion of truth, I think there is an argument to be made that liberal messianism at this point in history may be the only way to halt the ascension of other messianisms.