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.