The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again - Hardcover

Beinart, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060841613 ISBN 13: 9780060841614

Publisher: Harper, 2006

Synopsis

Once upon a time, liberals knew what they believed. They believed America must lead the world by persuasion, not command. And they believed that by championing freedom overseas, America itself could become more free. That liberal spirit won America's trust at the dawn of the cold war. Then it collapsed in the wake of Vietnam. Now, after 9/11, and the failed presidency of George W. Bush, America needs it back.

In this powerful and provocative book, Peter Beinart offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure. That American leadership is not American empire. And that liberalism cannot merely define itself against the right, but must fervently oppose the totalitarianism that blighted Europe a half century ago, and which stalks the Islamic world today.

With liberals severed from their own history, conservatives have drawn on theirs—the principles of national chauvinism and moral complacency that America once rejected. The country will reject them again, and embrace the creed that brought it greatness before. But only if liberals remember what that means. It means an unyielding hostility to totalitarianism—and a recognition that defeating it requires bringing hope to the bleakest corners of the globe. And it means understanding that democracy begins at home, in a nation that does not merely preach about justice, but becomes more just itself.

Peter Beinart's The Good Fight is a passionate rejoinder to the conservatives who have ruled Washington since 9/11. It is an intellectual lifeline for a Democratic Party lying flat on its back. And it is a call for liberals to revive the spirit that swept America, and inspired the world.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Beinart is an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the senior political writer for The Daily Beast and a contributor to Time. Beinart is a former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Good Fight. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.

From the Back Cover

Once upon a time, liberals knew what they believed. They believed America must lead the world by persuasion, not command. And they believed that by championing freedom overseas, America itself could become more free. That liberal spirit won America's trust at the dawn of the cold war. Then it collapsed in the wake of Vietnam. Now, after 9/11, and the failed presidency of George W. Bush, America needs it back.

In this powerful and provocative book, Peter Beinart offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure. That American leadership is not American empire. And that liberalism cannot merely define itself against the right, but must fervently oppose the totalitarianism that blighted Europe a half century ago, and which stalks the Islamic world today.

With liberals severed from their own history, conservatives have drawn on theirs—the principles of national chauvinism and moral complacency that America once rejected. The country will reject them again, and embrace the creed that brought it greatness before. But only if liberals remember what that means. It means an unyielding hostility to totalitarianism—and a recognition that defeating it requires bringing hope to the bleakest corners of the globe. And it means understanding that democracy begins at home, in a nation that does not merely preach about justice, but becomes more just itself.

Peter Beinart's The Good Fight is a passionate rejoinder to the conservatives who have ruled Washington since 9/11. It is an intellectual lifeline for a Democratic Party lying flat on its back. And it is a call for liberals to revive the spirit that swept America, and inspired the world.

Reviews

Shortly after losing the 2004 presidential election in a campaign dominated by national security issues, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) appeared at a party for his staff. After dutifully thanking his glum team for trying to put him in the Oval Office, he praised them for going before the country with a message. "Everyone in that room was on edge," one staffer later remarked, "because everyone wanted to know: What was that message?"

Peter Beinart, an editor-at-large for the New Republic and a columnist for The Washington Post, argues in his deliberately provocative The Good Fight that liberals' inability to articulate a foreign policy vision has been their Achilles' heel. Conservatives, after all, have always had a coherent and appealing story to tell voters: America is good, and it does good overseas. Liberals have mocked this tale as simplistic and arrogant. But by dwelling instead on America's limitations and shortcomings, they have lost the opportunity to construct a compelling narrative of their own.

It is, of course, easy to exaggerate how much foreign policy has contributed to the political difficulties that liberals face today. After all, George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 not because of his diplomatic prowess but because voters believed that events overseas hardly mattered. And the public's disillusionment with Iraq seems to have Democrats poised to make big gains in this year's congressional midterm elections.

But the very fact that liberals needed the Iraq War to go badly to get a hearing for their foreign policy views attests to their vulnerability on national security issues. As Beinart documents in his thoughtful history of six decades of liberal thinking on foreign policy, this was not always the case. In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. The Cold War liberalism -- a term Beinart takes as a compliment, not a slur -- of Truman's Democratic Party unified the nation and provided a blueprint for promoting U.S. security and prosperity that lasted nearly half a century.

But then came Vietnam, which shattered the liberal consensus on foreign policy -- and liberal confidence to boot. The anti-imperialist left coalesced around two wrongheaded convictions: that threats to American security were overblown and that narrow interests dominated Washington's calculations. Meanwhile, a new breed of reformers known as neoliberals responded to the debacle in Southeast Asia by draining foreign policy problems of their ideological content and treating them as technical issues to be solved by dispassionate analysis. Even after 9/11, liberal strategists wanted foreign policy to just go away, arguing (as they did before the October 2002 congressional vote to authorize the Iraq War) that if Democrats changed the conversation to domestic politics, they would fare better at the polls.

Conservatives have happily turned all of these positions to their advantage. Anti-imperialist rants about Halliburton and Big Oil driving U.S. foreign policy have become grist for the right's claims that liberals reflexively blame America first. The neoliberal disdain for ideology is taken by conservatives as evidence that liberals neither believe in America nor grasp what distinguishes us from our enemies. And the eagerness of Democratic strategists to change the subject seems to prove that liberals follow public opinion polls rather than lead them.

Beinart agrees with much of the conservative critique. To stiffen the Democrats' spine, he wants his fellow liberals to draw inspiration from the principles that drove Cold War liberalism. America once again faces a serious totalitarian threat, this time not from Nazis or communists but from Islamist jihadists. As was true during Stalin's heyday, victory requires embracing the causes of greater liberty and greater prosperity around the world. It also means working with America's democratic allies and understanding that America's goodness must be demonstrated rather than assumed. And it means recognizing that (as one of Beinart's heroes, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued in the 1950s) in wielding its awesome power, America will not be able to remain morally pure.

Each of these principles has its merits, but they probably don't make up a compelling foreign policy vision. The conservative narrative is powerful precisely because it is simple: America succeeds because it is strong; others will follow because America is good. Beinart's updated, post-9/11 version of Cold War liberalism -- he is hawkish on al-Qaeda but admits that his earlier writings supporting the 2003 Iraq invasion were misguided -- recognizes that the world is complex but offers no guidance on how to handle the dilemmas that such complexity generates. What should America do when its allies disagree? How beholden should it be to international organizations such as the United Nations? How far should it go in compromising its moral principles to defeat gathering threats? Such questions have long bedeviled liberal foreign policy thinkers, and Beinart doesn't try to square these circles.

Nor is it clear that even a suitably renovated set of liberal Cold War principles will resonate with the American public. The Iraq War has tarnished conservatives' foreign policy credentials, but it hasn't necessarily rehabilitated the reputation of liberals. In politics, the messenger is as important as the message, and The Good Fight gives ample evidence of why many Americans are suspicious of what liberals have to offer. This is especially so when they argue, as Beinart does, that Americans would be better off if they understood that "we are not intrinsically good." That's all well and good for a seminar on Niebuhr, but it's not much of a bumper sticker. Until liberals learn to communicate ideas in terms that appeal to the way Americans think of themselves, they will continue to deal conservatives a winning hand.

That would be a shame. Beinart rightly notes a core irony: President Bush stripped away the restraints on the exercise of America's freedom to act because he wanted to demonstrate America's strength; he has thereby made American power illegitimate in the eyes of much of the world, which has made us weak. A true fighting liberalism would not have fallen into that trap. The Good Fight may not provide all the answers on how to fashion a durable foreign policy vision for the very real dangers we face, but it provides us with a fine place to start.

Reviewed by James M. Lindsay
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

This stimulating manifesto calls for a liberalism that battles Islamist totalitarianism as forthrightly as Cold War liberals opposed Communist totalitarianism. Former New Republic editor Beinart assails both an anti-imperialist left that rejects the exercise of U.S. power and the Bush administration's assumption of America's moral infallibility. America shouldn't shrink from fighting terrorism, despite civilian casualties and moral compromises, he contends, but its antitotalitarian agenda must be restrained by world opinion, international institutions and liberal self-doubt, while bolstered by economic development aid abroad and economic equality at home. Beinart offers an incisive historical account of the conflicts straining postwar liberalism and of the contradictions, hubris and incompetence of Bush's actions. He's sketchier on what a liberal war on terror entails—perhaps a cross between Clinton's Balkan humanitarian interventions and the Afghanistan operation, with U.S. forces descending on Muslim backwaters to destroy jihadists and build nations. The tragic conundrum of a fighting liberalism that avoids enmeshment in a Vietnam or Iraq (the author now repudiates his early support of the Iraq war) is never adequately addressed. Still, Beinart's provocative analysis could stir much-needed debate on the direction of liberal foreign policy. (May 30)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Skittish about the "liberal" label, progressive politicians have virtually abandoned a history that offers lessons for addressing current domestic and international issues. Beinart, editor at large of the New Republic, offers a perspective on how liberalism has steered American politics away from its worse impulses, from the red scare^B through the cold war and Vietnam, in search of ideals of freedom that promised domestic and international security. He highlights the political trade-offs liberals have made, including struggles to remain true to ideals and avoid conservative charges of being soft on Communism, championing racial equality to strengthen the nation at home and abroad, later facing the brutal realities as the nonviolent civil rights movement transformed into rising militancy in the 1960s, and responding, ineffectively, to changes in domestic and international politics since 9/11. Beinart worries that liberals are so fixated on the threats posed by the Bush administration and the Right that they risk being too dismissive of the very real threat of terrorism. A thoughtful perspective. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060841613
• ISBN 13: 9780060841614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304