More on Peter Beinart's "Fighting Faith"

I saw Peter Beinart speak at a lunch last week, which was off the record so I won't say much about what he said, although it wasn't very different from his essay, "A Fighting Faith," apparently soon to be a major motion picture perhaps starring John Cusack as the late Senator Henry M. Jackson. Suffice it to say that I was a lot more comfortable with his argument as he presented it than with the original essay, and I'm confident that the work of expanding it to book length will add a lot of subtlety and perspective.

Still (and this is the question I was going to ask but didn't, so I'm not really violating any off-the-record rules) it seems to me that a remaining problem for his argument is just that very subtlety. If Beinart were drawing a line between tough Democrats and not-so-tough Democrats based on support for the Iraq War, that would be pretty clear, and I would know which side of the line I was on. But he's not arguing for that war, of which his magazine asked "Were We Wrong?" [UPDATE: Originally, I had this headline as "We Were Wrong," not an insignificant difference. But the key point is that Beinart does not now make a pro-Iraq war argument.] He is clear that the Democratic Party should "renounce" those whose resistance to the use of military force extends to opposing U.S. action in Afghanistan; while I disagree with renunciation, it's also a bit of a red herring since that is very much a minority position within the Democratic Party and there was no presidential candidate who held that view. So the real, meaningful distinction winds up being between perhaps Kerry's legalistic, realist view that emphasizes multilateral institutions as a good in themselves, and perhaps Biden or others who have a more tough-minded tone and have absorbed some of the idealism of the Kosovo intervention, and are willing to dismiss international institutions in the interest of democracy and freedom or clear U.S. interests.

I don't intend to argue those distinctions and I'm probably not even doing them justice by my shorthand descriptions. It's not my field. But it strikes me that one of the things that those of us who are more involved in domestic policy have learned, and which is relevant here, is that the Bush approach grinds all such subtle distinctions into dust. Like Nicholas Kristof or Gregg Easterbrook, I could argue for a different approach to Social Security or tax reform, for example, and I have, but right now the only question on the table -- and the only one that will even be permitted onto the table -- is whether you are for or against the president's proposal as he has loosely put it forward. Any alternative has value only as rhetoric, and perhaps only to avoid the charge that you don't have an alternative.

I have an image in my head of Beinart as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, facing Bush in a debate. (Assuming that we amend the Constitution to get rid of that pesky 35-year-old rule at the same time that we amend it so Jennifer Granholm can run.) How would Beinart respond when Bush says, "You're not sending a message that supports the troops. First your magazine endorsed the war, then you said, 'We Were Wrong.' That's not leadership. You're not reliable." Is Beinart's answer really going to be much better than John Kerry's attempt to get around that same crude bludgeoning?

Beinart says he wants to redefine the terms of debate between liberals and Bush on national security, which is great. I'd like to redefine the terms of debate on the domestic issues. But that's not working right now. It's an academic exercise. Just as Bush said to Kerry, in effect, "either you're for the war on terror as I've defined it, or your shaky on it," he says to domestic liberals that we're either for Social Security "modernization" and opportunity, or for tax reform, or shaky and uncertain. This will be the third time in a few weeks that I've mentioned the two academic studies of last year -- Larry Bartels' "Homer Gets a Tax Cut" and the more prosaically titled paper by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson -- that basically show that the details of policy are of no significance whatsoever to public opinion or political success. Bush has used this phenomenon brilliantly, and we have to understand it.

[UPDATE: I have some real doubts about my own point in this paragraph, and was tempted to pull down the whole post. But there have been a lot of good comments, so that would be wrong. I'll say more about it shortly, and talk about some other examples of the kind of nihilistic despair that I lapsed into here.]

Again, this is not to say that the foreign policy approach Beinart argues for is wrong on the merits. It may be exactly the right approach to the question, and thus worth arguing for in its own right. But I would argue that it is a little naive to conclude that getting the policy just right will easily translate into political success. I wish that were the case, but it's not.

Here I think those of us who have been focused on domestic issues might have a better sense simply because we have more examples. We've seen the bludgeoning of distinctions on taxes three times, on Medicare, on Social Security, on tort reform, on the budget deficit, on education, etc., etc. It's heartbreaking. People like me live to develop alternatives, to redefine the terms of debate. It is extremely frustrating to be so unable to do so. we have to break down the current political dynamic so that these subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions can begin to matter again.