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.