"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.
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