[Rhodes22-list] Jesusland.

[brad haslett]

Stan,

This is a violation of my own stated December policy,
but what the hell, I'll throw in two cents worth. 
Here is an article from The New Republic that nicely
sums up a huge issue Liberals face.  I'm not fighting
your battles for you nor giving any ground as a
Conservative.  However, I try and look at things from
both sides but usually end up believing my first
instinct was indeed correct.  Here is the article in
full so you don't have to sign in.


  
 
  
 
 
 



 
     AN ARGUMENT FOR A NEW LIBERALISM.
A Fighting Faith
by Peter Beinart 

Post date: 12.02.04
Issue date: 12.13.04 
n January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at
Washington's Willard Hotel to save American
liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The
New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and
Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is
now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own
destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently
avoided the great political reality of the present:
the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that
changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this
country ... it is the right--the very extreme
right--which is most likely to gain victory." 

During World War II, only one major liberal
organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA),
had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard,
members of the UDA met to expand and rename their
organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold
Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth
Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt,
issued a press release that enumerated the new
organization's principles. Announcing the formation of
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement
declared, "[B]ecause the interests of the United
States are the interests of free men everywhere,"
America should support "democratic and freedom-loving
peoples the world over." That meant unceasing
opposition to communism, an ideology "hostile to the
principles of freedom and democracy on which the
Republic has grown great."

At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among
American liberals. Two of the most influential
journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The
Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former
Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals,
saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and
international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in
Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA,
it was virtually the only liberal organization to back
President Harry S Truman's March 1947 decision to aid
Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet
subversion.

  
 
 
 
But, over the next two years, in bitter political
combat across the institutions of American liberalism,
anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA's help,
Truman crushed Wallace's third-party challenge en
route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist
affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace,
its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union
(aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949,
three years after Winston Churchill warned that an
"iron curtain" had descended across Europe,
Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center:
"Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus
been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the
Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of
man. The consequence of this historical re-education
has been an unconditional rejection of
totalitarianism."

Today, three years after September 11 brought the
United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian
threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally
reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a
"historical re-education" has indeed
occurred--replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich
Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's
near-theological faith in the transformative capacity
of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as
defined by its activist organizations, remains largely
what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic
interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights,
and the environment, there is a positive vision,
articulated with passion. But there is little liberal
passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even
though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of
Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though,
if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect
of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation
of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious
minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a
thirst for modernity or freedom.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the
discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war,
against restrictions on civil liberties, against
America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp
contrast to the first years of the cold war,
post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and
institutions--most notably Michael Moore and
MoveOn--that do not put the struggle against America's
new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for
a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party
boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment
and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to
look tough. But, below this small elite sits a
Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle
as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and
two defeats, into the September 11 era, American
liberalism still has not had its meeting at the
Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

 

The Kerry Compromise

he press loves a surprise. And so, in the days
immediately after November 2, journalists trumpeted
the revelation that "moral values" had cost John Kerry
the election. Upon deeper investigation, however, the
reasons for Kerry's loss don't look that surprising at
all. In fact, they are largely the same reasons
congressional Democrats lost in 2002. 

Pundits have seized on exit polls showing that the
electorate's single greatest concern was moral values,
cited by 22 percent of voters. But, as my colleague
Andrew Sullivan has pointed out ("Uncivil Union,"
November 22), a similar share of the electorate cited
moral values in the '90s. The real change this year
was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of
voters cited "world affairs" as their paramount issue;
this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or
terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy
categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited
terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those
who cited moral values. And it was largely this new
cohort--the same one that handed the GOP its Senate
majority in 2002--that accounts for Bush's improvement
over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in
Slate, if you control for Bush's share of the vote
four years ago, "a 10-point increase in the percentage
of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the
most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush
gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the
other hand, has no effect."

On national security, Kerry's nomination was a
compromise between a party elite desperate to
neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base
unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11
world. In the early days of his candidacy, Kerry
seemed destined to run as a hawk. In June 2002, he
attacked Bush from the right for not committing
American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora.
Like the other leading candidates in the race, he
voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not
only pleased Kerry's consultants, who hoped to
inoculate him against charges that he was soft on
terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy
advisers as well.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment that
counseled the leading presidential candidates during
the primaries--and coalesced behind Kerry after he won
the nomination--was the product of a decade-long
evolution. Bill Clinton had come into office with
little passion for foreign policy, except as it
affected the U.S. economy. But, over time, his
administration grew more concerned with international
affairs and more hawkish. In August 1995, Clinton
finally sent nato warplanes into action in Bosnia.
And, four years later, the United States, again
working through nato, launched a humanitarian war in
Kosovo, preventing another ethnic cleansing and
setting the stage for a democratic revolution in
Belgrade. It was an air war, to be sure, and it put
few American lives at risk. But it was a war
nonetheless, initiated without U.N. backing by a
Democratic president in response to internal events in
a sovereign country.

For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard
Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed
like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that
embraced U.S. power. And September 11 validated the
transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not
only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally
felt it didn't go far enough--urging a larger nato
force capable of securing the entire country. And,
while disturbed by the Bush administration's handling
of Iraq, they agreed that Saddam Hussein was a threat
and, more generally, supported aggressive efforts to
democratize the Muslim world. As National Journal's
Paul Starobin noted in a September 2004 profile,
"Kerry and his foreign-policy advisers are not doves.
They are liberal war hawks who would be unafraid to
use American power to promote their values." At the
Democratic convention, Biden said that the
"overwhelming obligation of the next president is
clear"--to exercise "the full measure of our power" to
defeat Islamist totalitarianism.

Had history taken a different course, this new brand
of liberalism might have expanded beyond a narrow
foreign policy elite. The war in Afghanistan, while
unlike Kosovo a war of self-defense, once again
brought the Western democracies together against a
deeply illiberal foe. Had that war, rather than the
war in Iraq, become the defining event of the
post-September 11 era, the "re-education" about U.S.
power, and about the new totalitarian threat from the
Muslim world that had transformed Kerry's advisers,
might have trickled down to the party's liberal base,
transforming it as well.

Instead, Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan
affair--defined in the liberal mind not by images of
American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but
by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false
claims about Iraqi WMD. The left's post-September 11
enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al
Qaeda--epitomized by students at liberal campuses
signing up for jobs with the CIA--was overwhelmed by
horror at the bungled Iraq war. So, when the
Democratic presidential candidates began courting
their party's activists in Iowa and New Hampshire in
2003, they found a liberal grassroots that viewed the
war on terrorism in negative terms and judged the
candidates less on their enthusiasm for defeating Al
Qaeda than on their enthusiasm for defeating Bush. The
three candidates who made winning the war on terrorism
the centerpiece of their campaigns--Joseph Lieberman,
Bob Graham, and Wesley Clark--each failed to capture
the imagination of liberal activists eager for a
positive agenda only in the domestic sphere. Three of
the early front-runners--Kerry, John Edwards, and Dick
Gephardt--each sank as Howard Dean pilloried them for
supporting Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the Iraq war.

Three months before the Iowa caucuses, facing mass
liberal defections to Dean, Kerry voted against Bush's
$87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. With that
vote, the Kerry compromise was born. To Kerry's
foreign policy advisers, some of whom supported the
supplemental funding, he remained a vehicle for an
aggressive war on terrorism. And that may well have
been Kerry's own intention. But, to the liberal voters
who would choose the party's nominee, he became a more
electable Dean. Kerry's opposition to the $87 billion
didn't only change his image on the war in Iraq; it
changed his image on the war on terrorism itself. His
justification for opposing the $87 billion was
essentially isolationist: "We shouldn't be opening
firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in our own
communities." And, by exploiting public antipathy
toward foreign aid and nation-building, the natural
building blocks of any liberal anti-totalitarian
effort in the Muslim world, Kerry signaled that
liberalism's moral energies should be unleashed
primarily at home.

Kerry's vote against the $87 billion helped him lure
back the liberal activists he needed to win Iowa, and
Iowa catapulted him toward the nomination. But the
vote came back to haunt him in two ways. Most
obviously, it helped the Bush campaign paint him as
unprincipled. But, more subtly, it made it harder for
Kerry to ask Americans to sacrifice in a global
campaign for freedom. Biden could suggest "a new
program of national service" and other measures to
"spread the cost and hardship of the war on terror
beyond our soldiers and their families." But, whenever
Kerry flirted with asking Americans to do more to meet
America's new threat, he found himself limited by his
prior emphasis on doing less. At times, he said his
primary focus in Iraq would be bringing American
troops home. He called for expanding the military but
pledged that none of the new troops would go to Iraq,
the new center of the terror war, where he had said
American forces were undermanned. Kerry's criticisms
of Bush's Iraq policy were trenchant, but the only
alternative principle he clearly articulated was
multilateralism, which often sounded like a veiled way
of asking Americans to do less. And, 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.

 

The Softs

erry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the
fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the
party's liberal base, which would have refused to
nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic
Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge
for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of
presidential candidate. It is to transform the party
at its grassroots so that a different kind of
presidential candidate can emerge. That means
abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed
American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a
sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from
the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two
such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn. 

In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American
liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards,
epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the
fundamental litmus test for a decent left.
Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the
totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for
membership in American liberalism because communism
was the defining moral challenge of the age.

The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily
communists themselves. But they refused to make
anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the
threat to liberal values came entirely from the
right--from militarists, from red-baiters, and from
the forces of economic reaction. To attack the
communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil
rights and economic justice, was a distraction from
the struggle for progress.

Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States
today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq
war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not
recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does
not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail
to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does
not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore,
terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses.
In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly:
"There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why
has our government gone to such absurd lengths to
convince us our lives are in danger?"

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed
communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only
enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi
extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but
the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most
liberals naïvely consider Moore a useful ally, a
bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be
torched. What they do not understand is that his real
casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes
the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the
sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq
war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first.
When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a
national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he
makes it harder for liberals to claim that their
belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished
vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is
not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic
National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom
Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of
Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's
box at the Democratic convention, many Americans
wondered whether the Democratic Party was
anti-totalitarian either.

f Moore is America's leading individual soft,
liberalism's premier soft organization is MoveOn.
MoveOn was formed to oppose Clinton's impeachment,
but, after September 11, it turned to opposing the war
in Afghanistan. A MoveOn-sponsored petition warned,
"If we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people
oppressed by the Taliban, we become like the
terrorists we oppose." 

By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with
9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who
would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman.
One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to
"[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the
bombing," and to "[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of
global unity and support for international law."
Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for
the CIA and the deployment of American troops to
assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines.
In October 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated
into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that
the United States should have "utilize[d]
international law and judicial procedures, including
due process" against bin Laden and that "it's possible
that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation
from the Taliban."

In the past several years, MoveOn has emerged, in the
words of Salon's Michelle Goldberg, as "the most
important political advocacy group in Democratic
circles." It boasts more than 1.5 million members and
raised a remarkable $40 million for the 2004 election.
Many MoveOn supporters probably disagree with the
organization's opposition to the Afghan war, if they
are even aware of it, and simply see the group as an
effective means to combat Bush. But one of the lessons
of the early cold war is scrupulousness about whom
liberals let speak in their name. And, while MoveOn's
frequent bulletins are far more thoughtful than
Moore's rants, they convey the same basic hostility to
U.S. power.

  
 
 
 
In the early days after September 11, MoveOn suggested
that foreign aid might prove a better way to defeat
terrorism than military action. But, in recent years,
it seems to have largely lost interest in any agenda
for fighting terrorism at all. Instead, MoveOn's
discussion of the subject seems dominated by two,
entirely negative, ideas. First, the war on terrorism
crushes civil liberties. On July 18, 2002, in a
bulletin titled "Can Democracy Survive an Endless
'War'?," MoveOn charged that the Patriot Act had
"nullified large portions of the Bill of Rights."
Having grossly inflated the Act's effect, the bulletin
then contrasted it with the--implicitly far
smaller--danger from Al Qaeda, asking: "Is the threat
to the United States' existence great enough to
justify the evisceration of our most treasured
principles?"

Secondly, the war on terrorism diverts attention from
liberalism's positive agenda, which is overwhelmingly
domestic. The MoveOn bulletin consists largely of
links to articles in other publications, and, while
the organization says it "does not necessarily endorse
the views espoused on the pages that we link to," the
articles generally fit the party line. On October 2,
2002, MoveOn linked to what it called an "excellent
article," whose author complained that "it seems all
anyone in Washington can think or talk about is
terrorism, rebuilding Afghanistan and un-building
Iraq." Another article in the same bulletin notes that
"a large proportion of [federal] money is earmarked
for security concerns related to the 'war on
terrorism,' leaving less money available for basic
public services."

Like the softs of the early cold war, MoveOn sees
threats to liberalism only on the right. And thus, it
makes common cause with the most deeply illiberal
elements on the international left. In its campaign
against the Iraq war, MoveOn urged its supporters to
participate in protests co-sponsored by International
answer, a front for the World Workers Party, which has
defended Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong Il.
When George Packer, in The New York Times Magazine,
asked Pariser about sharing the stage with apologists
for dictators, he replied, "I'm personally against
defending Slobodan Milosevic and calling North Korea a
socialist heaven, but it's just not relevant right
now."

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.
When The New York Times asked delegates to this
summer's Democratic and Republican conventions which
issues were most important, only 2 percent of
Democrats mentioned terrorism, compared with 15
percent of Republicans. One percent of Democrats
mentioned defense, compared with 15 percent of
Republicans. And 1 percent of Democrats mentioned
homeland security, compared with 8 percent of
Republicans. The irony is that Kerry--influenced by
his relatively hawkish advisers--actually supported
boosting homeland security funding and increasing the
size of the military. But he got little public credit
for those proposals, perhaps because most Americans
still see the GOP as the party more concerned with
security, at home and abroad. And, judging from the
delegates at the two conventions, that perception is
exactly right.

 

The Vital Center

rthur Schlesinger Jr. would not have shared MoveOn's
fear of an "endless war" on terrorism. In The Vital
Center, he wrote, "Free society and totalitarianism
today struggle for the minds and hearts of men.... If
we believe in free society hard enough to keep on
fighting for it, we are pledged to a permanent crisis
which will test the moral, political and very possibly
the military strength of each side. A 'permanent'
crisis? Well, a generation or two anyway, permanent in
one's own lifetime." 

Schlesinger, in other words, saw the struggle against
the totalitarianism of his time not as a distraction
from liberalism's real concerns, or as alien to
liberalism's core values, but as the arena in which
those values found their deepest expression. That
meant several things. First, if liberalism was to
credibly oppose totalitarianism, it could not be
reflexively hostile to military force. Schlesinger
denounced what he called "doughfaces," liberals with
"a weakness for impotence ... a fear, that is, of
making concrete decisions and being held to account
for concrete consequences." Nothing better captures
Moore, who 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. 

For Schlesinger (who, ironically, has moved toward a
softer liberalism later in life), in fact, it was
conservatives, with their obsessive hostility to
higher taxes, who could not be trusted to fund
America's cold war struggle. "An important segment of
business opinion," he wrote, "still hesitates to
undertake a foreign policy of the magnitude necessary
to prop up a free world against totalitarianism lest
it add a few dollars to the tax rate." After Dwight
Eisenhower became president, the ADA took up this
line, arguing in October 1953 that the "overriding
issue before the American people today is whether the
national defense is to be determined by the demands of
the world situation or sacrificed to the worship of
tax reductions and a balanced budget." Such critiques
laid the groundwork for John F. Kennedy's 1960
campaign--a campaign, as Richard Walton notes in Cold
War and Counterrevolution, "dominated by a hard-line,
get-tough attack on communism." Once in office,
Kennedy dramatically increased military spending.

Such a critique might seem unavailable to liberals
today, given that Bush, having abandoned the
Republican Party's traditional concern with balanced
budgets, seems content to cut taxes and strengthen the
U.S. military at the same time. But subtly, the
Republican Party's dual imperatives have already begun
to collide--with a stronger defense consistently
losing out. Bush has not increased the size of the
U.S. military since September 11--despite repeated
calls from hawks in his own party--in part because,
given his massive tax cuts, he simply cannot afford
to. An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack those
tax cuts not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless,
but, above all, as long-term threats to America's
ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today,
however, there is no liberal constituency for such an
argument in a Democratic Party in which only 2 percent
of delegates called "terrorism" their paramount issue
and another 1 percent mentioned "defense."

 

ut Schlesinger and the ADA didn't only attack the
right as weak on national defense; they charged that
conservatives were not committed to defeating
communism in the battle for hearts and minds. 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. 

Support for a U.S.-led campaign to defeat Third World
communism through economic development and social
justice remained central to anti-totalitarian
liberalism throughout the 1950s. Addressing an ADA
meeting in 1952, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of
Connecticut called for an "army" of young Americans to
travel to the Third World as "missionaries of
democracy." In 1955, the ADA called for doubling U.S.
aid to the Third World, to blunt "the main thrust of
communist expansion" and to "help those countries
provide the reality of freedom and make an actual
start toward economic betterment." When Kennedy took
office, he proposed the Alliance for Progress, a $20
billion Marshall Plan for Latin America. And,
answering McMahon's call, he launched the Peace Corps,
an opportunity for young Americans to participate "in
the great common task of bringing to man that decent
way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a
condition of peace."

The critique the ADA leveled in the '50s could be
leveled by liberals again today. For all the Bush
administration's talk about promoting freedom in the
Muslim world, its efforts have been crippled by the
Republican Party's deep-seated opposition to foreign
aid and nation-building, illustrated most disastrously
in Iraq. The resources that the United States has
committed to democratization and development in the
Middle East are trivial, prompting Naiem Sherbiny of
Egypt's reformist Ibn Khaldun Center to tell The
Washington Post late last year that the Bush
administration was "pussyfooting at the margin with
small stuff."

Many Democratic foreign policy thinkers favor a far
more ambitious U.S. effort. Biden, for instance, has
called for the United States to "dramatically expand
our investment in global education." But, while an
updated Marshall Plan and an expanded Peace Corps for
the Muslim world are more naturally liberal than
conservative ideas, they have not resonated among
post-September 11 liberal activists. A new Peace Corps
requires faith in America's ability to improve the
world, something that Moore--who has said the United
States "is known for bringing sadness and misery to
places around the globe"--clearly lacks. And a new
Marshall Plan clearly contradicts the zero-sum view of
foreign aid that undergirded Kerry's vote against the
$87 billion. In their alienation over Iraq, many
liberal activists seem to see the very idea of
democracy-promotion as alien. When the Times asked
Democratic delegates whether the "United States should
try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it
can, or should the United States stay out of other
countries' affairs," more than three times as many
Democrats answered "stay out," even though the
question said nothing about military force.

What the ADA understood, and today's softs do not, is
that, while in a narrow sense the struggle against
totalitarianism may divert resources from domestic
causes, it also provides a powerful rationale for a
more just society at home. During the early cold war,
liberals repeatedly argued that the denial of African
American civil rights undermined America's
anti-communist efforts in the Third World. This
linkage between freedom at home and freedom abroad was
particularly important in the debate over civil
liberties. One of the hallmarks of ADA liberals was
their refusal to imply--as groups like MoveOn
sometimes do today--that civil liberties violations
represent a greater threat to liberal values than
America's totalitarian foes. And, whenever possible,
they argued that violations of individual freedom were
wrong, at least in part, because they hindered the
anti-communist effort. Sadly, few liberal indictments
of, for instance, the Ashcroft detentions are couched
in similar terms today.

 

Toward an Anti-Totalitarian Liberalism

or liberals to make such arguments effectively, they
must first take back their movement from the softs. We
will know such an effort has begun when dissension
breaks out within America's key liberal institutions.
In the late '40s, the conflict played out in
Minnesota's left-leaning Democratic Farmer-Labor
Party, which Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy
wrested away from Wallace supporters. It created
friction within the naacp. And it divided the aclu,
which split apart in 1951, with anti-communists
controlling the organization and non-communists
leaving to form the Emergency Civil Liberties
Committee. 

But, most important, the conflict played out in the
labor movement. In 1946, the CIO, which had long
included communist-dominated affiliates, began to move
against them. Over fierce communist opposition, the
CIO endorsed the Marshall Plan, Truman's reelection
bid, and the formation of nato. And, in 1949, the
Organization's executive board expelled eleven unions.
As Mary Sperling McAuliffe notes in her book Crisis on
the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals,
1947-1954, while some of the expelled affiliates were
openly communist, others were expelled merely for
refusing to declare themselves anti-communist, a sharp
contrast from the Popular Front mentality that
governed MoveOn's opposition to the Iraq war.

Softs attacked the CIO's action as McCarthyite, but it
eliminated any doubt about the American labor
movement's commitment to the anti-communist cause. And
that commitment became a key part of cold war foreign
policy. Already in 1944, the CIO's more conservative
rival, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had
created the Free Trade Union Committee (ftuc), which
worked to build an anti-totalitarian labor movement
around the world. Between 1947 and 1948, the ftuc
helped create an alternative to the
communist-dominated General Confederation of Labor in
France. It helped socialist trade unionists distribute
anti-communist literature in Germany's
Soviet-controlled zone. And it helped anti-communists
take control of the Confederation of Labor in Greece.
By the early '60s, the newly merged afl-cio was
assisting anti-communists in the Third World as well,
with the American Institute for Free Labor Development
training 30,000 Latin American trade unionists in
courses "with a particular emphasis on the theme of
democracy versus totalitarianism." And the afl-cio was
spending a remarkable 20 percent of its budget on
foreign programs. In 1969, Ronald Radosh could remark
in his book, American Labor and United States Foreign
Policy, on the "total absorption of American labor
leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism."

That absorption mattered. It created a constituency,
deep in the grassroots of the Democratic Party, for
the marriage between social justice at home and
aggressive anti-communism abroad. Today, however, the
U.S. labor movement is largely disconnected from the
war against totalitarian Islam, even though
independent, liberal-minded unions are an important
part of the battle against dictatorship and fanaticism
in the Muslim world.

The fight against the Soviet Union was an easier fit,
of course, since the unions had seen communism up
close. And today's afl-cio is not about to purge
member unions that ignore national security. But, if
elements within American labor threw themselves into
the movement for reform in the Muslim world, they
would create a base of support for Democrats who put
winning the war on terrorism at the center of their
campaigns. The same is true for feminist groups, for
whom the rights of Muslim women are a natural concern.
If these organizations judged candidates on their
commitment to promoting liberalism in the Muslim
world, and not merely on their commitment to
international family planning, they too would subtly
shift the Democratic Party's national security image.
Challenging the "doughface" feminists who opposed the
Afghan war and those labor unionists with a knee-jerk
suspicion of U.S. power might produce bitter internal
conflict. And doing so is harder today because
liberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact
liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless
liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in
the name of unity, they never will.

 

bviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the
same. The USSR was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda
merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had
mercifully little access to the instruments of state
power. Communism was more culturally familiar, which
provided greater opportunities for domestic subversion
but also meant that the United States could more
easily mount an ideological response. The peoples of
the contemporary Muslim world are far more cynical
than the peoples of cold war Eastern Europe about U.S.
intentions, though they still yearn for the freedoms
the United States embodies. 

But, despite these differences, Islamist
totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before
it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of
millions across the world. And, as long as that threat
remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star.
Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a
legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the
centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that
liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more
illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus
test of a decent left.

Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by
the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about
the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is
Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than
Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global
jihad will be with us long after American troops stop
dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will
rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what
Schlesinger called "a fighting faith."

Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from
their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most
important is that national security can be a calling.
If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health
care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does
the struggle to protect the United States by spreading
freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the
moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals
yearn. As it did for the men and women who convened at
the Willard Hotel.

 

Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR. 


 


--- stan <stan at rhodes22.com> wrote:

> Steve,
> 
> and that is another thing, "our county is at war". 
> I never understood this 
> bullets and butter version - guess I am old
> fashioned.  I thought that when 
> we as a country are at war the whole country is at
> war, not just the poor 
> slobs who we force to do the bloody work while the
> rest of us keep our 
> comfortable jobs and run up record spending debt for
> all the Xmas goodies we 
> refuse to sacrifice to be without.  We do have
> something in common though: 
> neither your nor I will volunteer our lives for this
> half assed war.  Now if 
> we could get all of those from both parties who
> voted for this informal war 
> to understand that the rules were that a vote for
> the war also automatically 
> placed them in a draft where they might be one of
> those called to fight, you 
> would be amazed how they would find a more civilized
> way to solve the 
> problem.  For instance the money spent for all the
> killing could have easily 
> purchased their leader if not the whole government
> if not the entire 
> country..
> 
> stan/EC
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Steve" <rhodes2282 at yahoo.com>
> To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list"
> <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> Sent: Friday, November 26, 2004 9:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Jesusland.
> 
> 
> > Bob
> > Our country is at war.  Get on board or get out!!
> > Somebody has to do good in this world and it sure
> > isn't going to be the Democrats!!!!!!!!!!
> > Steve
> >
> >
> >
> > --- Robert Skinner <robert at squirrelhaven.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Nell wrote:
> >> > Now that Saddam is captured...
> >> > In the end, there will be nobody safe
> >> > from the cross hairs of the US and
> >> > Bush.
> >> > Including, possibly, sailboat owners.
> >> > nellwolfe
> >> ----------------------------------------
> >> Would that you were not so right, Nell!
> >>
> >> We are already running into restrictions
> >> on boat traffic between the US and Canada
> >> along the Maine coast.
> >>
> >> As Brad will probably be able to amplify,
> >> general aviation is seeing increasing
> >> limitations, and all forms of watercraft
> >> are a tempting target for regulation.
> >>
> >> There is a much stronger presence of the
> >> Coast Guard in Portland Harbor, what with
> >> our oil tanker traffic and cruise ships.
> >> A 22' boat can cary enough explosives to
> >> hole a big boat...
> >>
> >> I'd say that it is prudent to equip your
> >> boat so that there is no chance of
> >> misinterpreting your intent when
> >> periodically boarded by the Coast Guard.
> >> Weapons, which used to be a non-issue
> >> along this coast, are now an invitation
> >> to a nasty dance.
> >>
> >> /Bob Skinner
> >>
> __________________________________________________
> >> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> >> www.rhodes22.org/list
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > All your favorites on one personal page - Try My
> Yahoo!
> > http://my.yahoo.com
> > __________________________________________________
> > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> > 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> 



		
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