"Doughface" Liberals Mirror Moral-Clarity Conservatives

Peter Beinart, author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, doesn't want American liberals to be "doughfaces."

"The original doughfaces," Beinart quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as saying

... were "northern men with southern principles" — Northerners who opposed slavery but could not bring themselves to support the Civil War. Schlesinger called the [Henry] Wallace liberals [Progressive party members who opposed the Truman administration's proposal to aid undemocratic but anti-Communist regimes in Greece and Turkey] "democratic men with totalitarian principles." They opposed Communism, but would not endorse practical steps to combat it, so as not to implicate themselves in a morally imperfect action. In the "doughface fantasy," Schlesinger wrote, "one can denounce a decision without accepting the consequences of the alternative." It is a fantasy to which liberals fall prey to this day. (p. 7)

Schlesinger coined the term "doughface progressivism" in his 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, excerpts from which can be read here. Today, the expression Beinart uses is "doughface liberals," as he would like to de-stigmatize the word "liberal" by separating it wholly from such "doughface" sentiments. Today's doughface liberals, complains Beinart, resent all efforts of the United States to fight totalitarian Islamic jihadism around the world, especially when military force is used.

Modern doughfaces accuse U.S. power of being imperialistically motivated, as when Michael Moore suggests the Bush family is way too tight with Saudi oil interests. They secretly or openly believe that the 9/11 attack on America was a case of our imperialist chickens coming home to roost.

Not wanting to implicate themselves in moral imperfection makes doughfaces the mirror image of conservatives such as William Bennett, oldstyleliberal thinks. Bennett champions a return to "moral clarity" in his book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. That phrase, "moral clarity," shows up again in the July 31, 2006, issue of The New Yorker, in "Holy Toledo," Frances Fitzgerald's article on Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial race and the power of the Christian right.

Rod Parsley, Fitzgerald says, is a conservative Christian pastor of a megachurch in Ohio and the founder in the summer of 2004 of the Center for Moral Clarity, whose mission it was "to educate citizens nationwide about legislation in statehouses and Congress." The article continues, "That fall [of 2004], he [Parsley] travelled around Ohio, advocating the passage of Issue One." Issue One: that was the famous 2004 ballot initiative in Ohio to ban gay marriage, which, Fitzgerald reports, "passed with sixty-three per cent of the vote."

It seems to oldstyleliberal that both doughface liberals and moral-clarity conservatives have the same pathological fear of moral "imperfection." True, the one supposedly unforgiveable sin for leftists is different than for rightists. To the former, it's American power. To the latter, it's American decadence. Still, both extremes are alike in fastidiously shunning those aspects of worldly diversity and complexity that they most deeply abhor.

Who's a Totalitarian?

The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart, is the book which oldstyleliberal is currently reading and absorbing. Beinart, an editor-at-large of New Republic, points out that, first and foremost, mainstream liberals love liberty. So they ought to be leading the charge against radical Islamic terrorism, since the terrorists are basically totalitarians.

Totalitarianism — as in Fascism, Nazism, and Communism — is an "ideal type [which] no movement or regime embodies ... perfectly" (p. 94). Yet Osama bin Laden 's stateless Al Qaeda terrorist organization and the former Taliban government in Afghanistan both qualify as totalitarian. Beinart cites political philosopher Michael Walzer's analysis of what totalitarian regimes have in common. Let us take the three points in reverse order.


Totalitarianism, according to Walzer's third — and "decisive" — defining feature, "involves a systematic effort to control every aspect of social and intellectual life" (p. 95). The goal, says Beinart, is to transform people into "perfect human beings" by telling them exactly what to do and think, down to the minutest behavioral detail.

German politcal theorist Hannah Arendt wrote, "If totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has 'to finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,' that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever." No pastime, however innocent, can be allowed to interrupt the flow of coercion and control from the authorities to their subjects.

Totalitarianism's second defining feature, according to Walzer — so Beinart writes — is its "political messianism": its claim (per Arendt) "to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth." This, indeed, says Beinart, is the justification for all the thought and behavior control: people "themselves must change."

"As Arendt notes," says Beinart (p. 96), "totalitarianism's ultimate goal is 'the transformation of human nature itself'." Only when we stiff-necked, unruly humans have been duly transformed will there be peace and justice on earth.

Meanwhile, there remains the need for totalitarianism's first defining feature: the ruling party "hoards all power [and] decision making is clandestine" (p. 94). Hence, "public politics become, in Walzer's words, 'ritual performance'." The masses are not to be consulted or listened to; they are to be mobilized. One thinks of the hearty "Sieg Heils" elicited by Hitler's frenzied harangues.


Beinart's discussion of totalitarianism in the abstract is admittedly less than wholly satistying to oldstyleliberal, feeling as he does that further attention ought to be paid to the distinctions between totalitarian movements, particularly when they are transnational, as with Al Qaeda, and totalitarian national regimes. For one thing, the former may be strong, while the latter may prove weak.

Even the Taliban in Afghanistan, Beinart admits (p. 95), "had less capacity to mobilize that masses than did the Bolsheviks and Nazis. But they tried." Now we hear of a resurgent Taliban pressing the attack again in southern Afghanistan. But by the standards of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, it has always been ragtag and weak.

Still, Beinart's main point is well-taken. There is nothing more anti-American than totalitarianism, no matter what form it takes.

It's not clear to oldstyleliberal how best to oppose radical Islamic jihadism in its totalitarian form, or, as Beinart identifies it, salafism — after the salafs, who were the original and supposedly most pure practitioners of Islam, Muhammad and his companions (see p. 89). He supposes he will gain more insight about that as he continues reading the book. But what is already clear to him is that American liberals need to step up to the plate and make the fight against totalitarianism once more the centerpiece of their philosophy.

Who's a Liberal?

In A Fighting Faith, oldstyleliberal talked about the new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart. He has now begun reading it, and it's even better than he had hoped. As he says in this post in another blog, the book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears from the earliest days of the Cold War.

At that time, many on the American left opposed our resisting the Soviet Union's intentions to expand Communism's influence in the world. While not necessarily Communists themselves, these leftists tended to identify with the stated goals of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to eliminate economic and social inequality on this planet. At the same time, they were relatively blind to Communism's basic threat to human liberty.

Others on the left recognized that Soviet-style Communism was actually a new form of totalitarianism, the successor to Nazism and Fascism. President Truman, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and that brash young Minnesota senator, Hubert Humphrey: all were on board with the newly founded Americans for Democratic Action in 1948, whose liberalism was anti-totalitarian through and through.


It was necessary for America, anti-totalitarian liberals said, to fight Soviet expansionism through a policy of containment. Defensive military pacts such as NATO were part of the equation, but so too were economic aid to war-ravaged European nations, in the form of the Marshall Plan; pragmatic support for nationalist governments that were more anti-Communist than strictly democratic; a progressive domestic agenda for civil rights and social justice, by which we might prove to the world our worthiness to win the Cold War; and an essential sense of modesty and restraint, avoiding all "my country right or wrong" pitfalls.

If we were to lead the world away from the brink of Communist enslavement, we had to earn that right by proving ourselves better and more just than our adversary. We could not simply wrap ourselves in a mantle of manifest destiny, vaunted exceptionalism, and ostensible moral superiority, and expect the world to follow.


The anti-totalitarians held sway over the American left for over a decade and a half, until the assassination of President Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War. From Truman through Kennedy and on to LBJ, if you were a Democrat, chances are you were committed to anti-Communism.

And, unless you were from the Deep South, chances are you were committed to some form, however watered down, of the civil rights agenda which sought equal rights for American blacks. True, President Kennedy dragged his feet on civil rights for reasons he thought were pragmatic at the time, during his early presidency, but he also recognized that if we shortchange the children of slaves here at home, "we have betrayed not only ourselves and our destiny, but all those who desire to be free" around the world (p. 26).

There was an essential linkage between facing up to our struggles to fulfill our potential for freedom domestically and our capacity to win the Cold War, anti-totalitarian liberals said. When Kennedy told us we had to "pay any price, bear any burden," among the prices and burdens we had to bear were resisting any soft and effete complacency. America had to work hard to be good.


That wasn't what the anti-Communist right said. On the right, the ascendant notion was that America ought to hold itself out as morally superior to its adversary, period. How could we win the war against Communism if we admitted to being really guilty of circumscribing liberty at home? How could we hope to win, if we became the next thing to Communists ourselves, with socialistic domestic policies right out of Moscow's playbook?

Meanwhile, there was always a (for more than a decade mostly silent, until Vietnam) wing of the American left that was the right's mirror image. How could we deserve to win the war against Communism if we historically and habitually circumscribed liberty and social justice at home? Let us clean up our own act, the New Left of the 1960s said ... and get out of the business of inserting ourselves into nationalist uprisings in far-off places like Vietnam.

It is apparent to oldstyleliberal that the for-a-time dominant anti-totalitarian coalition of Cold War liberals occupied an ultra-thin slice smack in the middle of the American ideological spectrum.


That was a very hard thing to do. Take the question of nationalism. Cold War liberals held it as axiomatic that nationalism was incompatible with Communism, and was one good way to fight the spread of Communism. Nationalist movements, even if they involved dictators and governments that were less than ideally democratic, were our best proxies.

That axiom worked well enough when it came to Europe, but in other parts of the world it broke down — as in North Vietnam, where the Communist Ho Chi Minh was preeminently a nationalist. Indeed, one of the fathers of Cold War liberalism, George F. Kennan, "the strategist behind [President] Truman's early policies toward the USSR," as early as the late 1940s had "believed nationalism and Communism could coexist."

"Partly for that reason," continues Beinart, "[Kennan] urged the United States to contain only Soviet Communism, not indigenous Communist movements, and even then only when circumstances were favorable. In his 1947 speech urging aid to Greece and Turkey, however, Truman had ignored that distinction, pledging the United States to oppose virtually any Communist movement. Behind that perilously expansive vision was the growing assumption that Communism and nationalism were incompatible. And with Kennan's distinction gone, containment suddenly meant preventing Communism's spread in every corner of the globe" (p. 40).

Thus, President Kennedy's willingness to string along with the anti-Communist government in the South Vietnamese capital in Saigon, no matter its lack of widespread support among the Vietnamese people, its corruption, its favoritism toward rich landowners, and its reluctance to send its troops to engage the enemy alone.


Anti-totalitarian liberalism thus occupies not just a narrow slice of the ideological spectrum, but a thin sliver thereof. If you feel America is so deeply flawed that it ought not to exert much influence externally to itself, you're way to the left of it. If you think America is just fine the way it is, hence ought to forcefully assert its hegemony abroad, you're way to the right.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to think America should behave with restraint abroad, but not with passivity.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to think America should call itself good, but not purely so. To the anti-totalitarian liberal, America's goodness is a work in progress. It is never a forlorn hope, as the "soft" left often believes, never simply a fact to be assumed at home and foisted on a skeptical world abroad, as the right would have it.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to be as skillful as George Kennan was in nuanced, this-does-not-really-imply-that thinking: supporting nationalism in Greece and Turkey does not necessarily imply supporting it in Vietnam. A lot of Cold War liberals were blind to that particular splitting of a hair, got us in over our heads in Vietnam in the 1960s, and unraveled the erstwhile anti-totalitarian liberal coalition here at home.


Who's a liberal today? Mostly, people whose thinking is soft on the new totalitarian threat of radical Islamism, Beinart says. In many ways, they're the heirs of the "neoliberals" of the 1970s, whose president Jimmy Carter was, who were in turn heirs of the "Come home, America" McGovernites who took over the Democratic Party between 1968 and 1972, who were the more-adult versions of the New Left student radicals of the early- and mid-1960s ... who were the ideological heirs of the not-particularly-anti-Communist leftists of the 1940s, whom the anti-totalitarian Cold War liberals had marginalized.

Cold War liberals understood the value of building coalitions among such disparate forces as ethnic white labor unions and black civil rights organizations, southern and northern Democrats, rural and urban interests, and all of America's social classes from bottom to top. That's why their platforms and policies were short on purity, long on pragmatics and prestidigitation — which ultimately drew fire from the radical, confrontational left of the '60s.


Anti-totalitarian liberalism is a point of exquisite ideological balance that many of its own practitioners have had a hard time keeping. One who had the knack was Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1968 as an antiwar candidate, before being struck down by a murderer's bullet.

RFK was held in suspicion by many of 1968's liberals for being quite the political street fighter, and for a "checkered past" on civil liberties and civil rights (see p. 47). His supporters, of which I was and remain one, believe he loathed effeteness and yet was capable of softening and growing in his world view. He represented a vital center — at least within liberal precincts — which could hold. When he died, the anti-totalitarian liberal coalition in America was a goner.

After RFK was gone, liberalism lost its way. It could no longer tell a story of the greatness we Americans together would find just over the next hill, if our country continued to strive to be all that it can be. Lacking such a coherent, unifying, uplifting message, liberalism began to substitute mere concepts and technical solutions for ideology, sources of national shame for wellsprings of American pride, and indifference to America's role in the broader world for a former muscular anti-totalitarianism.

Beinert's book is a study in how to get all that back again, now that we need it so desperately.

A Fighting Faith

“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.” Those are the words of Peter Beinart, then-editor of The New Republic, in an essay called "A Fighting Faith" published in that magazine not long after the 2004 election which Democrat John Kerry lost to President Bush.

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?