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Alex Gourevitch
posted 17 November 2006

In 1948 Richard Hofstadter took the long view of the American political tradition and deplored the 'rudderless, and demoralized state of American liberalism.' He could have been speaking about today. Liberals are in a tizzy about their inability to develop a compelling vision that seizes hold of the popular imagination. Their failure to seize upon Bush's political weakness has emphatically demonstrated their political confusion, and as a consequence, a number of commentators have begun offering up new 'big ideas' for liberalism to embrace. Of the various offerings, Peter Beinart's recent effort is easily the most interesting - and the most chilling.

Beinart understands liberalism's basic idea to be 'the belief that government should intervene in society to solve problems that individuals cannot solve alone.' Do not read his book if you expect him to provide intellectual heft to this campaign slogan. His concern is not, in fact, with the domestic sphere. Rather, it is liberalism's external face, which Beinart identifies with 'anti-totalitarianism', that most exercises his interest. Indeed, Beinart thinks that what ails liberalism is not merely the challenge from the Right, which too many liberals focus their attention on, but equally the challenge from the antiwar Left. According to Beinart, liberalism's genius is that it has always recognized two enemies - the pacifist, anti-American left, which possesses no faith in the ability of the US to use its power for good, and the hubristic Right, which fails even to consider that the United States might err, or that absolute moral conviction can be worse than tempered conviction.

To establish these claims Beinart embarks on a lengthy discussion of Cold War liberalism and a group of intellectuals and politicians known as the Americans for Democratic Action, founded in 1947 with the explicit purpose of breaking from the earlier Popular Front alliance of liberals, communists and fellow travelers. Beinart believes it was at this time that liberalism came into its own, because it finally realised that the communist Left, no less and perhaps more than the fascist Right, was a threat to American society, and liberal capitalism. Moreover, Beinart believes that the insight liberals learned from their battle against twin enemies was that one must reject the Left's anti-imperialism, but that one must also reject the Right's insistence on national moral infallibility. Liberals must be willing to use American power for moral purposes, but accept their own fallibility. In Beinart's words, 'Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power, we accept the restraints that empires refuse...That restraint ensures that weaker countries welcome our preeminence, and thus, that our preeminence endures. It makes us a great nation, not a predatory one.'

What does any of this have to do with today? A number of the implications are straightforward. First, as problematic for American liberalism as Bush is, the antiwar Left is equally if not more so. This Left has lost any sense of pride in American values, and managed to instigate a kind of liberal crisis of faith. 'The central question dividing liberals today is whether they believe liberal values are as imperiled by the new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world as they are by the Right.' Second, the problem with Bush is not that he has fought his wars but how he fought them - especially in spurning international institutions and international law. Third, liberals should keep sight of who the Big Enemy is, or the new 'totalitarians': Islamic fundamentalism. The last claim is easily the most preposterous, as Beinart's attempt to lump a shadowy terrorist network in with Nazism and Stalinism forces him to redefine totalitarianism to the point where, if it ever meant anything at all, it is now absolutely meaningless.

Before discussing any of these implications, however, it is worth noting how deeply dependent Beinart's argument for a new liberal vision is on foreign policy. Beinart sees the war on terror as a means to cultural renewal. Indeed, he seems to see it in terms almost as instrumental as those of the neoconservatives - what matters as much as the enemy out there, is our response back home. How we respond is a test of our own moral fiber and belief in ourselves - and never mind the obvious differences between so-called totalitarian Islamists of today and the Nazis and Stalinists of the past. Almost the entirety of the book is dedicated to a historical and conceptual analysis of liberal anti-totalitarianism and foreign policy, all with the purposes of claiming that, because liberals possess the necessary humility, but also the faith in American power, they will be able to win the war on terror…and make America great again.

Usually, it is conservatives who look to a militaristic foreign policy as a means of national revival. Beinart book turns this expectation on its head, connecting the post-war liberal tradition to militarism. In particular, Beinart draws attention to the ideological trajectory of liberalism since the New Deal. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the rise of a pragmatic, technocratic approach to domestic issues - which favoured success in ameliorating social conflicts over fidelity to previous liberal principles of individualism, limited government, and economic freedom - meant that domestic politics lacked ideological vitality. While it is often noted that the American welfare state was highly dependent economically on American imperialism abroad, what is less often noted is that American liberalism was even more ideologically dependent upon its foreign policy. With domestic politics becoming the arid stuff of policy experts, it was only in international affairs that ideals could live. Indeed, realists like Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Neibuhr often complained of the excessively moralistic character of US foreign policy in the 20th century. By the end of the Cold War, as the decline of labour led to the withering of the American welfare state and the discrediting of Keynesian economics, liberals were left with an impoverished set of political ideas and institutional imagination. All that remained was an ethically-minded foreign policy, whose ideals bore an increasing legitimating burden as others faded. It is no surprise, then, to see one of contemporary liberalism's standard bearers turn to the international arena as the place where its ideals will be revived.

What is worse is that, as much as it claims to rehabilitate a set of liberal principles, the book itself is profoundly unprincipled. It is difficult to find the practical significance of the central principle that is supposed to divide liberals from conservatives - a moral humility and corresponding respect for international law and cooperation. Consider the following passage:

But the United Nations will never be enough. While America should support intervention in cases of genocide or humanitarian emergency, the stateless zones where jihadists take sanctuary may not be suffering either-which will make it harder to gain an international consensus.

In other words, according to Beinart, the US should follow international law, and subordinate itself to multilateral institutions when these conform to America's ethical and political priorities, but not otherwise. The meaninglessness of Beinart's distinctions is even more evident in the following discussion of Reagan's foreign policy:

But even as Reagan replenished America's confidence, the legacy of Vietnam kept confidence from becoming hubris. Reagan could depict cold war battlefields like El Salvador and Afghanistan as showdowns between good and evil. He could even send weapons to help the anti-Communist side. But he never seriously contemplated deploying American troops. With the exception of his Potemkin invasion of Grenada, Regan's behavior proved far more cautious than his rhetoric.

Are we supposed to conclude that Reagan was actually a liberal in the American sense? Are we really supposed to believe that Reagan exercised self-restraint in the slaughters in Central America? It is par for the course that Beinart never actually analyses any of these specific decisions - it is not what actually happened, but how events appeared or could be made to appear ('Reagan could depict') to the American public that matters for Beinart. And again, we have no idea what the dividing line between conservative hubris and liberal confidence is. If Reagan had sent troops, would that have made it hubris? That can't be it, because we know in other, later events, like the invasion of former Yugoslavia, Beinart thinks that it was a sign of moral cowardice for the US to have sent troops so late, and indeed Beinart hates the antiwar position. Did Clinton demonstrate 'liberal prudence' by sending troops to the former Yugoslavia without United Nations Security Council authorisation, but Bush demonstrate 'conservative hubris' for doing the same in Iraq?

By the end of the book, having traversed so many nonsense passages like the ones quoted above, we are left to conclude that the dividing line between a liberal and a conservative 'national greatness foreign policy' is not a matter of principle but simply a matter of who has made the decision. If Beinart liked it, then it is liberal; if he did not, then it is conservative. Indeed, as much as he speaks of restraint and self-criticism as a virtue of a liberal foreign policy, it is Beinart's The New Republic, of which he is now editor-at-large, who favored every single post-Cold War intervention - Somalia, Haiti, ex-Yugoslavia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even called for others. They have shown the least restraint of any political tradition in the Cold War terrain - less even than the neoconservatives, who doubted the bombing and invasion of former Yugoslavia. Beinart's book reflects not a new liberal philosophy so much as the strange convergence of a segment of (neo)liberal and a segment of (neo)conservative thinking and practice, in which ethically-oriented war is the means by which a lax and decadent America, with little passion for civic engagement, can achieve moral renewal.

When Hofstadter wrote that American liberalism had become 'rudderless and demoralized' he could not have known how complete the involution of its original principles would be by the end of the 20th century. Liberalism originated as a secular, universalist ethic, grounded in a view of the natural freedom and equality of all persons, and for whom the private sphere of economic exchange and contract was the domain of freedom. The liberal view of the nation-state was, in the 18th and 19th century, that it was a temporary stepping stone on the path to a universal human community, united by private, voluntary bonds of economic and cultural exchange. As much as liberalism accepted the idea of the nation, it was a thin notion of 'nationality' or of belonging to the same (temporary and necessary) political community, not anything more extensive, reactionary and particularistic, like 'nationalism'. Indeed, most liberals abhorred the conservative and relativistic elevation of the nation to a moral absolute, because they felt it undermined their universalist aspirations and Enlightenment ideals.

It is striking, then, to read Beinart's defense of 'liberalism' as it reflects the near total inversion of these liberal ideas. Already by the New Deal, the economic and individualist premises of liberalism were abandoned for a more corporatist view of liberal society, which bred many institutions but only a few inspiring ideas. In trying to bind individuals more tightly to their particular state, a very illiberal nationalism crept into the official ideology, which no invocation of human rights and democracy could fully conceal. With Beinart, the nationalist thrust of American liberalism has come entirely to the fore. Besides a cursory discussion of totalitarianism and a sentence fragment statement about the state solving problems the individual cannot, the book is not a study of liberal principles and ideas. Rather, the book is about 'American greatness'. It is a nationalist text, which sees in American foreign policy, the war on terror, domestic social policy, and everything else that comes under its remit only one purpose: how to re-enchant the rule of those who run the American state.

Indeed, even more than the neo-conservatives, Beinart seems to view the war on terror instrumentally - it seems to contain more potential than the humanitarianism of the 1990s to bind an apathetic citizenry to their leadership. One is struck, throughout the book, by how profoundly unethical its vision is, and how Beinart baulks at seriously considering the equality and humanity of those who live beyond America's shores. Beinart's only goal is national greatness, and he will plunder whatever historical resources, political labels, and moral ideas to achieve them. 'The premise of this book is that the liberal tradition provides the intellectual and moral resources necessary for victory. By rediscovering it, a new generation of American liberals can also discover ourselves.' American liberals will not discover themselves in this book, they will only discover the complete emptiness of their own political creed.