Posted here Sunday, December 05, 2004 at 5:49:25 PM 
The most important reading today has been the difficult article in The New Republic
www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041213&s=beinart121304
AN ARGUMENT FOR A NEW LIBERALISM.
A Fighting Faith
by Peter Beinart
Post date: 12.02.04
Issue date: 12.13.04
Basically he argues that the democrats ("The Liberals") must embrace a new cold war mentality toward "Islamic Fundamentalism." He says it is the only way to win, and it requires confronting the soft side of the democratic party, and abandoning the social issues ( he does not name them but environment, economy, health...).
He does not see that the basic humanitarian side of the democrats is concerned that the it is the US fundamentalists that mirror the Islamic fundamentalists, and support the same kind of totalitarian government - in response to each other.
He seems to reduce the whole issue to winning. An alternative reading would be that he is trying to mobilize the democrats to be a war party. Why? protecting Israel might be one answer. It is not clear what other logic leads down this path, especially if the argument that it is the way to win fails. He wants to say that people Voted against Kerry because he was weak on Iraq, which equals weak on Terror. But the polls show that people are much more concerned about terror than the war in Iraq, and their concern about Iraq is that it is such a mess.
Therefore being concerned with terror is not the same as supporting the war. Kerry made attempts to separate the issues, but because he was ambivalent in his voting about Iraq, and talked at the end about More troops to fight harder to win, I think the evidence shows that many couldn't see a difference between Kerry and Bush, and that sometimes foolish consistency is smarter than flip-flopping. It may be that the popular perception of both candidates is close to the discernible truth.
But now to the article.
During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks.
Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, "[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere," America should support "democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over." That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology "hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great."
This is his set up. That being militant against Islamic fundamentalism is equivalent, and that he has no critique of the costs to US society of the way Bush has gong about it.
At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism.
The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism."
And he continues to equate anti totalitarian with being against Islamic fundamentalism and for the war in Iraq, not noting that Iraq was one of the most secular Arabic countries, itself opposed to fundamentalism (and conceivably holding it at bay more than the US or post Saddam government can do).
Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience.
And here the equation is complete, and the idea that American liberalism needs to act cold war toward Islamic fundamentalism as if it were Soviet communism. The shift in scale makes Beinart Quixotic, spending all on very weak opponents, while strengthening them
On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions;
He reduces the humanitarian justice side of the democratic party as completely as do the Bush folks.
When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions--most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn--that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.
Get rid of the softies is the message, make the democratic party the center of a new cold war.
The real change this year was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of voters cited "world affairs" as their paramount issue; this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those who cited moral values. And it was largely this new cohort--the same one that handed the GOP its Senate majority in 2002--that accounts for Bush's improvement over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in Slate, if you control for Bush's share of the vote four years ago, "a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect."
This does not do a good job of sorting out the difference between the Iraq voting and the Terrorism voting, nor does it include the possibility of a much more strategic "win the hearts and minds" strategy and what it could accomplish, which was crippled by the negatives f the war (its stupidity, lying, meanness, ill-planning and Prisons scandals, to name a few). Nor does he in the article deal with the loss of esteem in all the countries of the world (according to poling such as done by Pew on worldwide country by country attitudes toward the US.
You get the idea. Here are further excerpts and a closing comment.
On national security, Kerry's nomination was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11 world.
Like the other leading candidates in the race, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not only pleased Kerry's consultants, who hoped to inoculate him against charges that he was soft on terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy advisers as well.
For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that embraced U.S. power. And September 11 validated the transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally felt it didn't go far enough--urging a larger nato force capable of securing the entire country.
At the Democratic convention, Biden said that the "overwhelming obligation of the next president is clear"--to exercise "the full measure of our power" to defeat Islamist totalitarianism.
Three months before the Iowa caucuses, facing mass liberal defections to Dean, Kerry voted against Bush's $87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. With that vote, the Kerry compromise was born. To Kerry's foreign policy advisers, some of whom supported the supplemental funding, he remained a vehicle for an aggressive war on terrorism. And that may well have been Kerry's own intention. But, to the liberal voters who would choose the party's nominee, he became a more electable Dean.
That wasn't an accident. Had Kerry aggressively championed a national mobilization to win the war on terrorism, he wouldn't have been the Democratic nominee.
Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947.
In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.
Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either. [badly wrong minded]
By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with 9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman. One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to "[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the bombing," and to "[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of global unity and support for international law." Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for the CIA and the deployment of American troops to assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines. In October 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that the United States should have "utilize[d] international law and judicial procedures, including due process" against bin Laden and that "it's possible that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban."
Bush has not increased the size of the U.S. military since September 11--despite repeated calls from hawks in his own party--in part because, given his massive tax cuts, he simply cannot afford to. An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack those tax cuts not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless, but, above all, as long-term threats to America's ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today, however, there is no liberal constituency for such an argument in a Democratic Party in which only 2 percent of delegates called "terrorism" their paramount issue and another 1 percent mentioned "defense."
or liberals to make such arguments effectively, they must first take back their movement from the softs.
As Mary Sperling McAuliffe notes in her book Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954, while some of the expelled affiliates were openly communist, others were expelled merely for refusing to declare themselves anti-communist, a sharp contrast from the Popular Front mentality that governed MoveOn's opposition to the Iraq war.
In 1969, Ronald Radosh could remark in his book, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, on the "total absorption of American labor leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism."
That absorption mattered. It created a constituency, deep in the grassroots of the Democratic Party, for the marriage between social justice at home and aggressive anti-communism abroad. Today, however, the U.S. labor movement is largely disconnected from the war against totalitarian Islam, even though independent, liberal-minded unions are an important part of the battle against dictatorship and fanaticism in the Muslim world.
But, if elements within American labor threw themselves into the movement for reform in the Muslim world, they would create a base of support for Democrats who put winning the war on terrorism at the center of their campaigns.
Challenging the "doughface" feminists who opposed the Afghan war and those labor unionists with a knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power might produce bitter internal conflict. And doing so is harder today because liberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.
But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.
Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism.
Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most important is that national security can be a calling.
If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn. As it did for the men and women who convened at the Willard Hotel.
We don't need a calling for the ambitious, we need a calling for truth and justice that appeals to the majority of mankind. The choice is not between being against totalitaruanism or leaving it alone, it is between getting it here in a worst kind of war there, vs working for justice and a liveable world.
Beinart's forced logic seems to argue that to win the next election (or to have won the last several) the Democrats ("Liberals") need to act like its a new cold war. I think most of us find that logic flawed. Multilateral justice and targeted police action would be much better, and leave us some room to deal with larger issues like environment, energy, spread of nuclear weapons.If so, what is his motive for going down this new cold war path? Why do we need to force terrorism (world wide a still small number of people and casualties compared to Bhopal, auto accidents...) to be the single issue to define the party?
How much of it is to keep the US on a path that protects Israel. Is there any other explanation?
Friedman in the NYT
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/opinion/05friedman.html?oref=login&;hp>
Of all the irresponsible aspects of the 2005 budget bill that
the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more
irresponsible than the fact that funding for the National
Science Foundation was cut by nearly 2 percent, or $105
million.
On CBS news , there are other ways..
Millions of folded paper cranes fluttered down from warplanes in the skies over southern Thailand Sunday as the air force completed a mission of peace aimed at expressing the nation's hope for an end to separatist violence in the Muslim-dominated ...
********
|
|
Advertisement
