Liberal Talk Radio

So, as a radical centrist, I suppose I’m supposed to be all atwitter about Peter Beinart’s TNR article, A Fighting Faith. But I’m just not thrilled. Beinart’s central thesis is this: in 1947, parts of the American left renounced Communism once and for all. The labor unions and activists followed suit, and Cold War Liberalism was born. What’s needed today, he argues, is for the left to similarly come together to renounce Islamic fundamentalism, and purge Michael Moore from his seat at the table.

Fine.

The devil, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

Beinart argues that Kerry’s candidacy was a “compromise” between the Beinartesque hawkish foreign policy elite, and the isolationist, pacifist Democratic base. He writes:

…because he never urged a national mobilization for safety and freedom, his discussion of terrorism lacked Bush’s grandeur. That wasn’t an accident. Had Kerry aggressively championed a national mobilization to win the war on terrorism, he wouldn’t have been the Democratic nominee.

I don’t buy it. Let’s not re-write history here. Kerry won Iowa because he was “electable.” When it came right down to it, in the last few days, it wasn’t about his positions one way or the other on Iraq. Kerry and his advisors did a hell of a sales job, and it hinged on one sentence that Kerry delivered at the Iowa Democrats’ dinner: “Don’t send ‘em a message, send ‘em a president.” Kerry sold his resume to the Iowa caucuses. He sold his chin and his purple hearts. He sold his image.

Moving on (and not in the .org sense). Beinart goes on to defend “hawkishness” and “power” (words he repeats dozens of times) with the kind of obfuscation that would make George Bush proud. Speaking of MoveOn’s Eli Pariser, he writes:

Pariser’s words could serve as the slogan for today’s softs, who do not see the fight against dictatorship and jihad as relevant to their brand of liberalism.

Hmm… “dictatorship and jihad”… where have I heard that conflagration before? Ah, yes… nearly every George W. Bush speech about “terrorists and tyrants.” At least Bush had the decency to use the rhetorical flourish of alliteration. He made it almost sound believable.

Beinart does get a few things right, though. He’s mostly correct to argue that Liberals are best suited for the task of promoting democracy abroad because it’s 1. expensive, 2. big-government friendly, and 3. values liberty over theocracy. But Beinart never really makes his case that more war is the answer. He’s certainly into war. And he’s certainly into promoting democracy. But only in one sentence, where he says that Michael Moore “denounced the Taliban for its hideous violations of human rights but opposed military action against it–preferring pie-in-the-sky suggestions about nonviolent regime change,” does he even suggest a casual relationship between military action and democracy promotion. And even then it’s defined in the negative.

Beinart does much better when he frames the debate in economic terms:

It was the ADA’s ally, Truman, who had developed the Marshall Plan to safeguard European democracies through massive U.S. foreign aid. And, when Truman proposed extending the principle to the Third World, calling in his 1949 inaugural address for “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” it was congressional Republicans who resisted the effort.

Yeah! Liberals can fix the problem, because we’re willing to tax ourselves into oblivion! But nowhere in this paragraph does he mention the military. And that’s the big, huge, gaping hole in his argument. Because I’m all for spending a ton of money to fix the world’s ills. In terms of bang-for-the-buck, though, I’ll take foreign aid over war any day. Just tell me who to make the check out to!

So there’s two pieces here: (1) promoting democracy abroad, through an internationalst, anti-isolationist, freedom-loving mindset, and (2) the need for the democrats to be more militaristic. I, for one, don’t see the connection. And I’m thinking that Beinart doesn’t want me to. Because it ruins his analogy. Because the whole aid to the Third World thing never really panned out. And the one time that the Cold War Liberals actually got a chance to be hawkish and try to promote democracy abroad, the result was Vietnam.

And that’s not a track record I’d want to hang my hat on, either.