Peter Beinart: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (Interview)
TNR Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again hits bookstores for the first time today. Kevin Drum, contributing writer and blogger for The Washington Monthly, interviewed Beinart for TNR Online.
Kevin Drum: In The Good Fight you draw a historical parallel between anti-communism in the 1940s and anti-jihadism today. But events on the ground don't suggest to me that Islamic jihadism is as dangerous and expansive today as global communism was in the '40s and '50s.
Peter Beinart: I try to take pains in the book to suggest that in many, many very important ways the moment we're in now is very different than the moment of the early cold war. No historical periods, of course, are ever the same. All historical periods differ in quite radical ways and one of the reasons I try to tell the story from 1946 through September 10, 2001, and then pick it up again after September 11, is to show that in these very different historical circumstances you can still pick up certain intellectual threads that I think are important. It's an intellectual history. One of the meta-points of the book is that understanding our intellectual history is going to be critical to a liberal revival, just as intellectual history was very important to what the conservative movement was able to do over the past couple decades. And understanding intellectual history is important not because the historical analogies are exact, but because most people don't think of great ideas de nouveau; they adapt ideas in their tradition that already existed.
I don't think that jihadism is the equal of communism. Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries. If there's any parallel it's between these cadre of globalization-related threats we face today and the communist threat.
But I would add, just by way of not being too light on the threat of jihadism, and because it is something that worries me a little bit, that there is a bit of a tendency sometimes amongst liberals to think that because George W. Bush has hyped this so much that it's mostly hype. If you look at the Lugar poll, which I cite in the book, Senator Richard Lugar, who is not an ideologue, gets together all these non-proliferation types and basically says what are the chances we're going to be hit with a weapon of mass destruction attack in the next ten years? They say 70 percent. He says what are the chances we are going to be hit with a nuclear attack? They say 30 percent. And 80 percent say it is most likely that one of those will come from a terrorist group. And these are not people who are on Karl Rove's payroll.
KD: How important is the antiwar intellectual tradition on the left that you're so worried about? The Henry Wallace left was routed pretty quickly in the '40s. Today, as you say in the book, nearly all liberals supported the war in Afghanistan. There's only a pretty small number who are genuinely antiwar as opposed to anti-Iraq war. If you attack the "antiwar left," aren't you really attacking a fairly weak straw man?
PB: Well, let me make a couple of points. First is that the Wallace tradition doesn't die out with Wallace, it goes underground. As I try to show in the second chapter of the book, it kind of comes back in the late '60s and the early '70s, so you have the party nominating a candidate in George McGovern who was a Wallace supporter, not a Truman supporter. Indeed I think that some of the general intellectual problems that you would associate with Wallace and McGovern still haunted the party through the end of the cold war, when the party en masse in Congress was against the Gulf War.
Today, I try to tell the story about what's happened since September 11 on the American left amongst liberals, and I explicitly say that for the first couple of years after September 11 the arguments that I would see as kind of McGovern/Wallace arguments were fairly weak. But there is mounting polling data which shows that, in fact, they have grown increasingly strong. So now you have one poll recently coming out done by MIT which shows that only 59 percent of Democrats would re-fight the Afghan war, compared to 94 percent of Republicans. That's quite a stunning gap. It's true, it's not a majority against, but it's disturbing nonetheless, and it sits with a lot of other polling--for instance from Pew and the Center for American Progress and Century Foundation that's come out in the last year or two about liberal alienation from anti-jihadist struggle--that I think one can't simply dismiss. One has to, I think, respond to it....
Read entire article at The New Republic (TNR)
Kevin Drum: In The Good Fight you draw a historical parallel between anti-communism in the 1940s and anti-jihadism today. But events on the ground don't suggest to me that Islamic jihadism is as dangerous and expansive today as global communism was in the '40s and '50s.
Peter Beinart: I try to take pains in the book to suggest that in many, many very important ways the moment we're in now is very different than the moment of the early cold war. No historical periods, of course, are ever the same. All historical periods differ in quite radical ways and one of the reasons I try to tell the story from 1946 through September 10, 2001, and then pick it up again after September 11, is to show that in these very different historical circumstances you can still pick up certain intellectual threads that I think are important. It's an intellectual history. One of the meta-points of the book is that understanding our intellectual history is going to be critical to a liberal revival, just as intellectual history was very important to what the conservative movement was able to do over the past couple decades. And understanding intellectual history is important not because the historical analogies are exact, but because most people don't think of great ideas de nouveau; they adapt ideas in their tradition that already existed.
I don't think that jihadism is the equal of communism. Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries. If there's any parallel it's between these cadre of globalization-related threats we face today and the communist threat.
But I would add, just by way of not being too light on the threat of jihadism, and because it is something that worries me a little bit, that there is a bit of a tendency sometimes amongst liberals to think that because George W. Bush has hyped this so much that it's mostly hype. If you look at the Lugar poll, which I cite in the book, Senator Richard Lugar, who is not an ideologue, gets together all these non-proliferation types and basically says what are the chances we're going to be hit with a weapon of mass destruction attack in the next ten years? They say 70 percent. He says what are the chances we are going to be hit with a nuclear attack? They say 30 percent. And 80 percent say it is most likely that one of those will come from a terrorist group. And these are not people who are on Karl Rove's payroll.
KD: How important is the antiwar intellectual tradition on the left that you're so worried about? The Henry Wallace left was routed pretty quickly in the '40s. Today, as you say in the book, nearly all liberals supported the war in Afghanistan. There's only a pretty small number who are genuinely antiwar as opposed to anti-Iraq war. If you attack the "antiwar left," aren't you really attacking a fairly weak straw man?
PB: Well, let me make a couple of points. First is that the Wallace tradition doesn't die out with Wallace, it goes underground. As I try to show in the second chapter of the book, it kind of comes back in the late '60s and the early '70s, so you have the party nominating a candidate in George McGovern who was a Wallace supporter, not a Truman supporter. Indeed I think that some of the general intellectual problems that you would associate with Wallace and McGovern still haunted the party through the end of the cold war, when the party en masse in Congress was against the Gulf War.
Today, I try to tell the story about what's happened since September 11 on the American left amongst liberals, and I explicitly say that for the first couple of years after September 11 the arguments that I would see as kind of McGovern/Wallace arguments were fairly weak. But there is mounting polling data which shows that, in fact, they have grown increasingly strong. So now you have one poll recently coming out done by MIT which shows that only 59 percent of Democrats would re-fight the Afghan war, compared to 94 percent of Republicans. That's quite a stunning gap. It's true, it's not a majority against, but it's disturbing nonetheless, and it sits with a lot of other polling--for instance from Pew and the Center for American Progress and Century Foundation that's come out in the last year or two about liberal alienation from anti-jihadist struggle--that I think one can't simply dismiss. One has to, I think, respond to it....