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The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 30, 2006
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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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateMay 30, 2006
- Dimensions6.75 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100060841613
- ISBN-13978-0060841614
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Beinart has given Democrats a blueprint for … taking back the White House.” (Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell)
“Peter Beinart takes us on a vigorous and entertaining search for a usable past … His reasoning must be heard.” (Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas)
“This is a brilliant and provocative book in a great tradition.” (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)
“An intellectual archeologist, Beinart excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book.” (The Washington Post)
“Beinart, in his deftly argued new book, . . . helpfully grounds the current debate in its oft-forgotten history.” (The Boston Globe)
“Insightful, provocative.” (Thomas Friedman, The New York Times)
“A thoughtful, provocative, well-written book.” (Washington Monthly)
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 Washington Post
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; First Edition (May 30, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060841613
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060841614
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,780,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,231 in Terrorism (Books)
- #5,768 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- #36,119 in International & World Politics (Books)
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In the past two years much has changed. Although he is still trying to enlist Democrats in the good fight, he admits that he was wrong about Iraq in several ways. One, of course, was the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, but the other, more importantly, was the failure to realize the limits of American power and legitimacy. Borrowing from Rheinhold Niebuhr, he now believes we would do well with a little humility.
That said, Beinart still believes that liberals are uniquely equipped to fight global jihad. He supports his argument by drawing on the Cold War era and the Truman administration. Centrist liberals from the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rejected communists and communist sympathizers at home as well as abroad. They set the Democratic Party on a centrist path and became mentors and supporters of the Truman administration. The policies of deterrence and containment advocated by Dean Acheson, George Marshall, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze served this country well up until the presidency of JFK.
In his potted history of this period, Beinart is trying to draw parallels between the fight against communist totalitarianism and today's Islamist jihad. There are, however, important differences. Osama Bin Laden is no Josef Stalin. Providing support for loosely connected cells of terrorists is much different than commanding the government of the Soviet Union and its nuclear equipped army. Moreover, demonizing communism in the 50's and 60's was one thing, but demonizing Islamist jihad, and by extension Islam, one runs the risk of inflaming a clash of civilizations that is already in danger of becoming full-blown. Even the Bush administration is tactful enough to call it simply a war on terror.
Fact of the matter is, Beinart doesn't need to draw on the Cold War era and the Truman administration. (Bush has already done that.) He should be paying more attention to Francis Fukuyama's latest book "America at the Crossroads." Fukuyama like Beinart agrees that the war on terror must be fought more agressively and more intelligently. And, if it is to be successful, it must be done multilaterally and through international institutions.
In the current chastened environment, Beinart is correct in noting that humility is in order. He tells us that when America recognizes that it too is capable of evil it will then be in a better position to determine the fates of others. This is why he believes Democrats will be better able to fight the good as opposed Republicans who believe in American infallibility and who confuse American interests with universal values. It's time to start leading more by example and consensus than by force, more by negotiation and less by confrontation. This will be the tone of the next administration whether it is Democratic or Republican.
The author refers to the centrist liberals of a half century ago who valiantly opposed Communism. Pray tell, what does that have to do with today's reality? At this very moment Democrats Senator Joseph Lieberman and Congresswoman Jane Harman are being persecuted by the leftwing elements within their own party. The Connecticut senator may even have to run as an independent. Even Hillary Clinton is feeling the heat. Could they all fit in a telephone booth If there was a national convention of fighting Democrats? Yesterday's liberals often believed there were things worthy of enormous self-sacrifice even to the point of death. Their progeny, on the other hand, are often nothing less than disingenuous pacifists. Subconsciously, if not even consciously, the United States is perceived to be the main threat to peace in the world. How can they die for something they don't really believe in?
Do I totally disagree with the author? Nope, he accurately rebukes the Bush administration for not realizing "before the war that Iraq democracy had to be built, and not simply unleashed." He also says a few others things in The Good Fight deserving of a hearing. But so what? He is first, last, and foremost, a Democrat. He is, to be blunt, on the side of the losers. These individuals are rarely serious adults. Only Republicans can be trusted with the defense of the United States. Is it possible that Peter Beinart may be upset with my remarks? Well, that is his problem and not mine. He was granted an opportunity to make a strong case for his position---and failed to do so. I can only conclude that Beinart, in his heart of hearts, knew that his project was doomed before it ever started.
David Thomson
Flares into Darkness