The Beinart Thesis

Peter Beinart's "A Fighting Faith" prescription piece for Democratic Party rebirth has now started making waves with those who most need to read it - the liberal elite opinionate.

The piece is a tour de force and illustrates quite well what the DNC can and should do if they want their candidates to be taken seriously by the majority of Americans.

Andrew Sullivan immediately pointed out the strengths of the piece.

Democrats need is a new commitment to fighting totalitarianism - of the Jihadist variety. They should keep their commitment to America's minorities, to universal healthcare, gay equality, and abortion rights. But they need to convince Americans that they are serious about this new war. Actually, they need first to convince themselves.

Josh Marshall responded with a thoughtful, independent critique.

The problem is not principally dovishness but rather --- as Peter notes --- that Democrats are by and large simply not sufficiently interested in national security policy, as such. This is at least as much a problem in the Democratic operative world as it is at the grassroots. As I’ve written before, lack of interest in national security policy leads to lack of knowledge. And lack of knowledge leads to tactical and mutable political decisions on national security - which is both bad on principle but also feeds public perceptions that Democrats aren’t serious about the issue and that they’re not trustworthy guardians of the national security in dangerous times.

I would argue that it is precisely those differences between today and fifty years ago which explain why we don’t need and really can’t afford to start to define ourselves by instituting any purges. To the extent that there is any analogy between Moveon and anything that happened half a century ago, the analogy should be to organized labor more generally. The ADA Democrats didn’t try to purge labor. They mounted a campaign within organized labor to get unions to separate themselves from illiberal forces. In any case, whatever disagreements I may have with them on policy - and particularly foreign policy - I think Moveon is part of the solution not part of the problem in restoring a center-left in American politics that embraces liberal values both at home and abroad. And this comes from someone who vociferously attacked Dems and liberals who opposed US military involvement in the Balkans and is, I’m sure, more of a foreign policy hawk than the majority of the people who read this site.

So, to summarize, the war on terror is not the Cold War. Tying the two together in too tight analogies leads to errors in judgment and prescribed policy.

A few other points.

I think Peter raises Kerry’s vote against the $87 billion Iraq supplemental to an ideological significance it simply won’t bear. This wasn’t a vote for isolationism or against democratization abroad. It clearly did hurt Kerry in the general but it was a mix of political calculation and even more than that - and something that couldn’t really be discussed in the campaign - it was an effort to exercise some control over a president who was well on his way to creating the disaster we’re now saddled with by placing restrictions and oversight of his conduct of the reconstruction. He didn’t really vote against that money in way Peter implies.

Iraq. I don’t think we can deal with the issue of Democrats, national security policy and the war on terror, without addressing Iraq front and center and recognizing justwhat a disaster our enterprise there has become. This isn’t a secondary issue.

I still feel Josh is wrong to consistently ignore or downplay the humanitarian aspects of removing Saddam and the fact that such a goal is in fact always worth military action in a way that most other wars in this world are not. It still strikes me as both morally and intellectually unsound to advocate non-intervention in the face of tyranny, selecting as your moral code either from secular humanism or Jeffersonian liberalism or virtually any honest hybrid thereof. Neither of these core philosphies of the Left would push for inaction. Kennedy sure woundn't. Either might allow it in the case of rising against a far superior force, but that too is doubtful, and a moot point anyway. But there's no doubt that the DNC could use a lot more Josh Marshalls

Then Leftchurch Archbishop Kevin Drum wrote this responding to Beinart. Closing with this:

Bottom line: I think the majority of liberals could probably be persuaded to take a harder line on the war on terror — although it's worth emphasizing that the liberal response is always going to be different from the conservative one, just as containment was a different response to the Cold War than outright war. But first someone has to make a compelling case that the danger is truly overwhelming. So far, no one on the left has really done that.

Andrew Sullivan then noted the stunningly naive sentiment of Drum's piece.

If Kevin Drum still needs to be persuaded that Jihadist terrorism is a real and continuing threat to the U.S., then he is essentially unpersuadable. I would have thought that 9/11 alone was enough. Alas, not. A nuke in a major city maybe? If that's what it will take to get the Democrats to take the threat seriously, you can't blame the American people for deciding not to wait.

And then Jonah Goldberg dragged Kevin Drum into the street and beat the Political Animal over the head with Drum's own prosaic and politically infantile absurdities.

If Drum needs another argument to be persuaded about the threat, he is flatly unpersuadable. Indeed, if Beinart could surf back on the space-time continuum, he could have used Drum's response as an example of exactly his complaint: that the Democrats don't care enough about fighting Islamic totalitarianism.

But that's not even the annoying part. For the last two years, the main thrust of criticism from Democrats has been that Bush hasn't been doing enough to fight Islamic terrorism. Drum was a big fan of Richard Clarke's book. Well, Clarke's book was a criticism from the right. Bush didn't do enough. The whole "wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" mantra was shorthand for the argument that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat of Islamic totalitarianism.

Goldberg continues:

... So let me get this straight. The last two years of bleating and beating we've gotten from liberals — all the how-dare-yous and the Iraq's-a-distraction stuff — all of that was just a pose? You guys don't think any of it's a big deal after all? It was all just a way to smack George Bush around? How sad. How frick'n dishonest. And why is Drum so comfortable constantly saying he's not even going to address the "humanitarian" argument for fighting the war on terror? Since when are liberals so comfortable putting humanitarian issues in a box and hiding them away on a top shelf?

...Isolationist Republicans didn't back FDR because FDR was nice to them (neither did the isolationist Democrats Drum pretends didn't exist). They did it because the threat was obvious. National Review and The Weekly Standard — hardly nonpartisan institutions — supported Clinton's war in Yugoslavia (and according to the standards used to justify that war, Iraq was a no-brainer). Think about it. If you think Islamic totalitarianism is a real problem, an existential threat, you write articles like Beinart's. You don't say, "Y'know, I could really get behind this twilight struggle if only the Republicans were nicer to Democrats." You don't bend over backward for fear of seeming like you're "taking sides." Or at least you don't if you love your country more than you love your party (or more than you hate George Bush). Meanwhile, how can you blame some Republicans for thinking Democrats aren't worth reaching out to if at this point they still need to hear more War On Terror 101 arguments?

Which is sort of the whole point - if Dems won't engage and be engaged and teach their next generation to be engaged on the national security issue of the next generation of Americans, they. will. not. be. elected. Period. Fact. Law. Maxim. Not locally, not state-level, not nationally.

This transformation actually works in reverse - as the national party becomes more arch-leftist - meaning, so says I - more secular, more critical of American hegemony, more unwilling to see America as a positive force of change in the world - it will be harder and harder for even local and state dems to associate themselves with the national party.

(Excursus: Right now - the ONLY reason Dems get elected in Illinois is organized labor. From teachers to factories, it's the only bastion of Democratic power in the Midwest. And it's slipping. Gore won Illinois at 63%; Kerry at 55%. Union members are church-going, gun-owning, military veteran, middle-class, middle-income voters who actually do NOT want abortion and gay marriage to be their defining issues, and do actually think freeing other people from tyranny is noble and heroic. No one in the DNC gives a damn about what Midwestern Dems care about. They are treated like poor, dumb privates in a political war machine that doesn't even care what their values might be. And yes, these 'good soldiers' are more and more aware of it.)


Beinart has responded to Drum with a new piece.

And Drum responded to Beinhart with a few comments.


It's been quite a week, and it's quite an impressive dialogue; one that involved some of the brightest minds on the Left about what liberalism is going to mean in the next century. One which its every reader -liberal or conserative - would benefit from.