The Politics of Renunication

Great minds may think alike, but it only counts if you get it
written down in time. Story of my life. I've been puttering for a week
on comments in response to Peter Beinart's New Republic essay
calling for a more anti-terrorist Democratic Party modeled on postwar liberal anti-communism, but Josh Marshall
yesterday wrote almost exactly what I had drafted and what was in my head, right down to the basic structure of the argument, only better put.
So this will fortunately be a good deal shorter and perhaps just a gloss on Josh's
comments.

As it is for Josh, the emergence of liberal anti-communism in the late 1940s,
and the founding of Americans for Democratic Action, is a great
foundational myth for me, so Beinart's invocation of the period almost has me hooked. I think there is a small school of thought emerging, which includes Josh and me and others, and in a different way Beinart, that is based on admiration of that era and that tendency, which has been out of fashion since the rise of the New Left and the disintegration of the liberal consensus in the late 60s. We finally have enough distance to draw some lessons from that era for our own time, much as some liberals of the last decade, such as E.J. Dionne, drew lessons from the Progressive Era. In that light, I'd like to strongly recommend a very new book: Kevin Mattson's When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism is a group biography of Reinhold Neibuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith and the less-remembered newspaper editor James Wechsler, with cameo appearances by some equally fascinating figures such as the popular historian and commentator Bernard DeVoto. Kevin is an intellectual historian at Ohio University and writes beautifully, and I suspect that this book will be a key document in this new appreciation of the postwar anti-communist liberals.

Of course, like all history, this is contested territory, so where Beinart treats postwar liberalism as if it were indistinguishable from Whitaker Chambers' Manichean view of a final battle for civilization, Mattson is equally attentive to domestic liberalism, civil rights, and the opposition to McCarthyism that was also prominent in the ADA view. They were not the soft anti-anti-communists who forgave or forgot communist influence in the CIO and Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign, but they understood the danger of demagoguery, alarmism and false accusations and false choices as well. We know what Galbraith and Schlesinger would say today because they are alive and wonderfully productive, though Beinart treats his heroes contemptuously when they don't help him, saying, "Schlesinger, ironically, has moved toward a softer liberalism later in life." Of the others, it's quite likely that they would be no less concerned with civil liberties than mainstream liberals are today, not so much at the expense of a fight on terror as in recognition that it's not helping. Just as Wechsler noted McCarthy's record of never identifying a single actual communist, they would note John Ashcroft's comparable record of failure to identify and prosecute a single al-Qaeda terrorist. The fact that the threat is real is all the more reason to resist false choices about it and opportunistic misuse of it.

Of course, as Josh points out well, the metaphor is just absurdly strained. "Islamic totalitarianism" is real, it's a threat, but it is not the same kind of threat as Soviet totalitarianism in the 1940s and 50s. Soviet communism dominated half of Europe and much of the rest of the world. It controlled parties and front groups throughout the world, including in the United States. The liberal anti-communists had to deal with actual communists, supported by the Kremlin, in American labor unions and political movements. Are there al-Qaeda sympathizers in danger of obtaining direct control of major institutions in the U.S. and other countries? Are there countries or populations living under the domination of al-Qaeda totalitarianism? To ask it is to answer it. Al Qaeda is a huge and monstrous gang. It "threatens millions" in one major sense: if it gets a nuclear weapon it will use it. That's a big deal, but it's a very different deal. The one and only thing, I think, would be to make sure that they don't get a nuclear weapon. Yes, we can and should also destroy the monstrous gang. But there's no reason to believe that al Qaeda is the only monstrous gang that might aspire to commit mass murders in the future, and the others may not even be Islamic.

Beinart's metaphor reminded me of the period leading up to the Iraq War. I was not a "liberal hawk," rather, I was something more like a "liberal hawk wannabe." I certainly wanted to be as clear-eyed about the threat and the need for a response as, say, colleagues of mine were about Kosovo and people like Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff were about Iraq. Or, I wanted to be like the postwar liberals. Who wants to be on the soft side of history? But as much as I temperamentally wanted to be on that side and not the Michael Moore side, I couldn't get there. I couldn't have faith in the Bush administration to do things right, I couldn't bring myself to see the threat of Iraq as in any way related to Islamic terrorism. In the same way, reading Beinart now, I want to be like the historical figures he invokes, but I can't make it across the bridge of his metaphor, sorry.

Beinart's argument might make more internal sense as an argument for invading Iraq. But that's now thoroughly discredited, even at the New Republic. So Beinart's is an argument for Iraq without Iraq. If it's just about al Qaeda, yes, we should go after al Qaeda and its sanctuaries and its appeal in the Islamic world with all necessary weapons and all confidence of success. Is that task so overwhelming that in the richest and most resourceful country in the world, we can't also think about health care and education? Of course not. I think Beinart is in exactly the same trap as John Kerry: Kerry wanted to argue toughness on terror, and had the freedom to do so, but the question of toughness has already been framed as the question of Iraq. Kerry couldn't possibly support the Iraq war as conducted, but he didn't have the option of redefining the question. Iraq was a setup, a trap, that prevented Kerry from demonstrating that, in fact, he did "get it" on terrorism and had for decades. It might have been a little easier to get out of the trap if he had not voted against the $87 billion appropriation for Iraq, but not much. But most importantly, the trap was not set by Kerry or by moveon.org.

If the argument is about some definition of "totalitarianism" bigger than al-Qaeda itself -- Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's leadership, Syria, the Palestinian leadership, Iran, some big worldview thing -- then I'd at least want to know what it is. What tangible policy choice should we be advocating that most Democrats do not currently advocate, if we want to take Beinart's path?

The only clear thing I see is the politics of renunciation. Beinart asks us as Democrats to renounce and excommunicate moveon.org, Michael Moore, and anyone who was uncomfortable with the use of force in Afghanistan. The politics of renouncing is, like, so late '80s. Democrats were always facing demands to renounce Jesse Jackson, and Jackson was constantly confronted with demands to renounce whatever third-string black nationalist was stirring up attention that week with a "kill whitie" chant, as if Jackson was somehow responsible for everything that another black person said. It was offensive and there's no end to it. Bill Clinton finally renounced the rapper and writer Sister Souljah, as a proxy for renouncing Jackson, thus adding a phrase to the lexicon that long outlasted the brief flame of Lisa Williamson's celebrity, but that is probably the only renunciation that had any political value, although it was trivial and contrived.

I'm not a pacifist and I didn't oppose the use of force in Afghan, but I'm sorry, I see no point to renouncing those who did. They had no significant effect on the political process or the party, and did not slow down the decision or obstruct the use of force. I may think they're wrong, but so what? Should one denounce Jeanette Rankin, the pacifist elected only twice to Congress but who voted against U.S. involvement in both world wars? Of course not -- she was a principled person, even if the world would be worse off had her view prevailed. There exist true pacifists, Esperanto-speakers, and Level 5 vegans who won't eat anything that casts a shadow, as well as garden-variety infantile leftists. Is it my problem that they find the Democratic Party marginally more congenial to their views than the crazy-interventionist Republican Party?? Why is it my obligation to renounce them?

As for Michael Moore -- who, incidentally, supported one of the presidential candidates that Beinart rather arbitrarily identifies as more "serious about terrorism, General Clark -- earlier I mentioned Kevin Mattson, author of the new book about postwar liberalism. As it turns out, Kevin has also written about Moore, critically, but with much more subtlety than Beinart. As he sees it, the problem with Moore isn't that he's soft on terror, but that "his own lampooning tendencies, his vulgar materialism, his tendency toward cynicism about American politics, his contempt for all the 'dumb guys' we have to convince" reflects a takeover of entertainment culture in political debate. I recommend it as a good example of the kind of serious, thoughtful criticism that would have improved Beinart's essay.