BERUBE ON BEINART

Michael Berube offers a critique of Peter Beinart's foreign policy prescriptions, and of the effect that they're having on the liberal conversation of foreign policy. It's very refreshing to see a left-liberal such as Berube honestly appraise Beinart's foreign policy views rather than simply caricature them, as so many others have done. I can think of no essay which has been more misunderstood, misrepresented, and which has induced the frenzied construction of more strawmen in such a short amount of time than Beinart's A Fighting Faith from last Demember. Berube's approach is a nice change.

I'm a little curious about this, however:

Yes, the Americans for Democratic Action met at the Willard Hotel in 1947. Yes, they announced their opposition to Communism “because the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere” and America should support “democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.” And yes, they had a better sense of totalitarianism than did their critics on the left at the time. But it doesn’t seem, in retrospect, that this managed to inoculate American liberals and progressives against McCarthyism over the course of the ensuing decade. A fat lot of good it did, actually. When the shock troops of the Right broke down your door fifty-odd years ago, searching for spies and softies and fellow travelers and people who’d voted for Norman Thomas in 1932 and people who knew someone who’d just denounced the Taft-Hartley Act, and when you insisted, as you were being led away, that you were in fact an anti-Communist, you remember what the reply was: they didn’t care what kind of Communist you were.

True enough, but I think Berube's (and Perlstein's) point that taking a more hawkish position on the War on Terror won't dissuade the Right from it's attacks is something of a non-sequitur. I don't think anyone, certainly not Beinart, has promulgated a more hawkish liberalism merely as a means to ending conservative attacks upon liberals. Conservatives don't attack liberals because they're soft on terror, conservatives attack liberals because they're liberals, indeed without the hatred of pointy-headed, wine and cheese eating liberal elites to animate them, the conservative movement would probably cease to exist.

While I don't agree with all of Beinart's ideas, I do strongly agree with him that the Democrats need to transform the way that they approach and represent national security issues; to recognize that, for better or worse, the war on terror is the issue around which U.S. foreign policy will be organized for the foreseeable future; and to develop a positive program which recognizes the profoundly liberal values at stake in this conflict. I like these ideas not because I think they will make conservatives stop hating us, I really couldn't care less. I like them because I believe they are correct. I also believe that, given that national security was by most accounts the main issue which broke in favor of Bush in the 2004 election, and given that it remains, and probably will remain, the number one most salient issue for American voters, a retooling of their approach to national security is necessary if the Democrats want to retake Congress and the Presidency.