The words are cited in George Packer's review of Beinart's new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. The review appears in The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2006. It can be read here and accessed in printable form here.
oldstyleliberal hasn't read Beinart's book or his original article, but he obtains a great deal of insight and satisfaction from reading Packer's book review. oldstyleliberal will now try to explain himself in this regard.
First of all, "America’s new totalitarian foe" is, of course, radical Islamism, which Packer speaks of as jihadism. The thrust of Beinart's (and Packer's) argument is that Democrats ought to react to this new threat much as their predecessors, in the persons of Presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and of thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., did to the totalitarians of that earlier age, the Communists.
Democrats like Truman, Kennedy, Schlesinger, et al. were considered anti-Communist liberals in their time. They were liberals in many ways, but they were hard-liners against Communism. Today's Democratic liberals tend to be "soft" on jihadism, Packer notes, in suggesting that "defeating the new Islamist threat,"
... [as Beinart] wrote [in his 2004 article], “must be [today's] 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.”
It is extremely curious that today's liberals are typically "softs" with respect to foreign threats, oldstyleliberal feels. It is true that in the mid-20th century there were scads of leftists who were "fellow-travellers" of Communism, or worse. But "liberal Democrats of Schlesinger’s era fought and ultimately purged the fellow-travellers in their ranks," Packer reminds us. And that's the very sort of thing Beinart and Packer would like to do again today: marginalize Democratic "softs."
True, Beinart seems to have softened his rhetoric in his book, compared with his original article: "Beinart no longer wants to provoke a battle for the soul of the Party." Instead, writes Packer,
In the course of two hundred fluently argued pages, [Beinart] reviews postwar history and shows how the Democrats gained (with Truman and Kennedy), and then lost (after Vietnam), and then began to recover (with Clinton), and then lost again (after September 11th) the ability to offer the public “their own narrative of American greatness.”
That's key, oldstyleliberal thinks. Kerry lost in 2004 because he couldn't put forth a "narrative of American greatness" to match Bush's.
Even if, like oldstyleliberal, you're anti-Bush, you have to admit the President stood foursquare for American greatness in his rhetoric and posturing in 2004. His execution of post-9/11 military and foreign policy before and since leaves much to be desired, but the "narrative of American greatness" that lies behind the Bush policy is right on.
Kerry, on the other hand, got tangled up in trying to explain why he had voted for military outlays in Iraq after he had initially voted against them — things like that. Not much narrative force there.
So how come today's Democrats can't tell a convincing story of how America's greatness could be harnessed to defeat the new totalitarian enemy, radical Islamism or jihadism?
One big reason is the lingering effect of Vietnam. Packer writes:
The policymakers of the Kennedy era overlooked the essentially nationalist nature of Vietnamese Communism because they were swept up in the binary thinking of Kennedy’s call to “pay any price, bear any burden.”
It's crucial that a revived Democratic "liberal internationalism" such as Beinart seeks and Packer seconds be smarter than that. Democrats ought to get over Vietnam, becoming as firm in their resolve as Kennedy was against the Communist threat of his own time ... but learn from the mistakes Kennedy's brain trust made in oversimplifying that threat.
Here is where Packer feels he needs to correct Beinart:
How much less [Packer writes] do today’s policymakers know about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the factions vying within the Arab Gulf states, the Muslim minorities in Europe, the configuration of power in Iran, the causes of the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, the Islamist takeover in Mogadishu, or the rising terrorist threat in Bangladesh? The grand, overarching “narrative” of antitotalitarianism that Beinart offers can’t explain the different kinds of trouble that America faces in a chaotic world. It substitutes will for understanding, which is just as dangerous as the reverse—if the Iraq war has taught us anything, it should be that.
We need the "grand, overarching narrative" of America's exceptional greatness to be tempered with shrewd understandings of the various subtly different ways in which the jihadist threat manifests itself in different parts of this "chaotic world" of ours.
In 1960s terms, we Democrats need to split the difference between the hard-headed realism of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington and the equally hard-headed idealism of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, murdered in 1968 as he was running as an antiwar candidate for President.
Jackson was a Democratic hawk on Vietnam. RFK, for his part, by 1968 wanted an end to the ill-conceived Vietnam War which his brother, JFK, had admittedly fostered, but which he, JFK, may have already been changing his mind about, not long before his assassinnation in 1963. RFK himself, it has been learned in recent years, spoke out in meetings of his brother's cabinet as early as 1962 and 1963 against putting so much blind faith in the corrupt, albeit anti-Communist, South Vietnamese government.
RFK, his brother's closest confidant, was always both hard-headed and idealistic, and inasmuch as he was as staunch an anti-Communist as his brother, his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968 came only after much soul-searching about the continued viability of the war effort. He ultimately decided a war fought for the wrong reasons — we were actually fighting not so much Communism as entrenched nationalist sentiment in Vietnam — had to fail.
Today, oldstyleliberal feels, we Democrats need to seize the anti-jihadist bit in our teeth and treat the external threat as seriously as the Kennedys did the Communist threat in the 1960s. Politically, the threat must be communicated to the American people and abroad in terms of a grand, overarching narrative: one by virtue of which America will rally international and domestic support for the worldwide war against terrorism and radical Islamic jihadism and ultimately win that war — for the greater good of humankind.
At one and the same time, we Democrats must be as capable of nuanced thinking as John Kerry notably was and is, so as to respond to all the different manifestations of the jihadist threat in strategically and tactically sound ways that will advance, not hinder, the cause. The way Bush got us into the Iraq War, for example, was ill-conceived, as is the way in which he is continuing to prosecute the war, leading to more chaos, not less.
Right now, oldstyleliberal doesn't see a single Democrat on the presidential horizon who can hold a candle to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in this regard. McCain, no dove, has long called for a stepped-up, smarter war effort in Iraq. At the same time, his has gotten out in front of congressional efforts to end the American use of torture on war detainees. How clear-headed! How consistent with narratives of this country's values and greatness! How likely to catapult McCain into the White House in January 2009!
Can we Democrats compete?
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