May 31, 2006
How the Left Lost America
BY RONALD RADOSH
The thrust of Peter Beinart's powerful and well-argued message in "The Good Fight" (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95) is straightforward: The liberal left in America has abandoned its own best heritage for what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called "doughface liberalism." These liberals oppose terror and totalitarianism but recoil against taking any necessary steps to defeat it, fearful that their moral purity might be stained in the process.
Mr. Beinart first took up his case in a lengthy article in the New Republic, where he was editor from November 1999 until March 2006. He has now sought to explore how and why a once vital and dynamic American liberalism - devoted to asserting American power on behalf of democracy abroad as well as at home - went soft and, in Mr. Beinart's words,"preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world." He asks nothing less than that liberals (and Democrats) hark back to the much besmirched Cold War liberalism of President Truman, George Kennan, Hubert Humphrey, and others - and move away from the anti-interventionism of Michael Moore, George McGovern, and Howard Dean. The philosophical hero of "The Good Fight" is Reinhold Niebuhr, a man who gave up on pacifism. Niebuhr posited that Americans have to recognize their own capacity for inflicting evil by building restraints on un mitigated power, but not hesitate to act to prevent greater evils.
Niebuhr wrote about the crisis of the 1940s and 1950s, and Mr. Beinart asserts that Niebuhr's careful balancing act still holds. Many liberals today focus all their anger on the Bush administration and the right, seemingly unaware that the major threat to liberal values is from the new totalitarianism emanating from radical Islam - which requires liberals also to "support military as well as economic and political efforts to fight it," Mr. Beinart writes, even when their moral purity is compromised in the effort. ...
<http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=33568&access=419126>
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June 5, 2006
Our Terrorism, and Theirs: Liberal apologetics for American atrocities
by Justin Raimondo
We expected Bill Kristol and the usual neocon suspects to dismiss the atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha as nothing to get too excited about. After all, these guys don't believe in any morality but that which comes out of the barrel of a gun. So what else is new? Yet there are, perhaps, a few among us – not me, however – who somehow expected a little less knee-jerk defensiveness from the likes of liberal Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic. Alas, no:
"This horrible story from Haditha powerfully underscores the liberal vision, which is this. We are not angels: without sufficient moral and legal restrictions, and under conditions of extreme stress, Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. What's makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That's how we show we are different from the jihadists. We don't just assert it. We prove it. That's the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it's what we need right now in response to this horror."
To begin with, all meaningful moral and legal restrictions on American behavior were swept aside with the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of a country that had never attacked the United States, and represented no threat to us. Having embarked on a war of aggression, it wasn't too long before we began to slide down the slippery slope all the way to the bottom, wherein dwelled the subterranean horrors of Abu Ghraib.
Now more monsters from the American id are uncoiling, and we stand, aghast, in horror. All except Beinart, who sees this as the perfect occasion for a little self-congratulation. Certainly his sense of timing is off. He comes off as almost a caricature of the archetypal Ugly American, a poster boy for the unselfconscious display of American arrogance. ...
Carl