Tough Liberalism
By Callimachus | Related entries in General Politics, History, Ideas, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, The WorldPeter Beinart, one of my favorite Democrats and a man who writes things that drives some other Democrats absolutely up the wall, has further thoughts on “Tough Liberalism.”
When John Kerry lost in 2004, I started in my despair reading about the late 1940s, the first years of the Cold War. That was the last time America entered a new era in national security. It started very fast in 1945 and 1946. And it was the last period where the country trusted liberals and Democrats to defend it.
Across the Pond, Oliver Kamm reads this and finds many parallels to the situation in Britain.
Throughout the past century the Left has fractured over the issue of national security. My book tries to plot a course for progressive politics by drawing on four pivotal historical debates on the British Left. These episodes comprise: collective security in the 1930s; opposition to Communist expansionism after World War II; the Labour Party’s rejection in the 1980s of its earlier anti-Communism; and President Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Running through these debates is an authentic left-wing tradition of militant anti-totalitarianism. Against it, though, there has been a recurring temptation for progressives, critical of their own societies’ failings, to excuse or even romanticise the ideological opponents of Western liberal democracies.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 and is filed under General Politics, History, Ideas, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 28th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Beinart nails it: [Dems] do not fundamentally see the post-9/11 world through the prism of anti-totalitarianism…. They see it through the prism of anti-imperialism. ” For the Dems to become a majority party, this must change. I don’t see it happening, despite Beinart’s pleas.
October 29th, 2005 at 6:35 am
Cal: you commented elsewhere that America may have to play bad cop (to Europe’s good cop). The Democratic Party would find this morally abhorrent, presumably because the threat of force reinforces our imperialistic image. This is more evidence of why Beinart’s hope is doomed. Too many Dems simply don’t understand the practical necessity of Bad Cop. It used to make me sad.. Now it makes me angry. In a face-to-face confrontation with a bully, they default to reason.
October 31st, 2005 at 12:11 pm
In a nutshell: Why should Americans place any faith or value in the Democrats’ vision of what America is, or should be, when part of that vision is a reluctance to defend itself from foreign enemies?