L.A. Times
Harry Truman would have given terrorists hell
Democrats know how to fight real wars, not just political ones, says Peter Beinart.
By Peter Beinart
PETER BEINART is editor-at-large of the New Republic and author of "The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again"
June 4, 2006
IN 1948, AMERICAN liberals went to war — with each other. The chief combatants were Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's former vice president and the most popular politician on the American left, and Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt's successor and a man widely derided as a party hack.
The issue was anti-communism and whether liberals should see it as a betrayal of their principles or as their natural culmination. For Wallace, liberals had one enemy: the reactionary right. For Truman, they had two: conservatives, to be sure, but also totalitarianism, in its communist as well as fascist guises. Liberalism, as Truman supporter Arthur Schlesinger famously put it, represented the "vital center" — defending social progress and individual freedom against tyrannies of both the right and left.
In one form or another, liberals have been replaying the Truman-Wallace argument ever since. Truman's anti-totalitarian liberalism carried the day in 1948 and reigned until Vietnam, when many liberals grew disgusted with the Cold War and nominated George McGovern, an old Wallace supporter, for president.
Even after the Soviet Union crumbled, Vietnam's legacy prevented most liberals from endorsing military action against the brutal Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in 1991. But as the 1990s rolled on, Bill Clinton slowly learned some of Truman's lessons — culminating in the 1999 bombing campaign against Kosovo, a multilateral war to prevent the neo-fascist Slobodan Milosevic from cleansing ethnic Albanians from their homes.
Informed by Clinton's legacy, and by patriotic fury at Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the United States, Truman liberalism seemed ascendant in the wake of 9/11. Polling in the months after the attack showed Democrats just as likely as Republicans to see the war on terror as a just and urgent cause. Had Al Gore been president, he would almost certainly have overthrown the Taliban. And facing a jihadist movement that, like Nazism and communism, seeks to stamp out all independent civil society in pursuit of a purified, utopian state, anti-totalitarianism would have likely come to define American liberalism again.
Tragically, things have not worked out that way. Instead, George W. Bush was elected, and he has wielded the war on terror as a political cudgel, spurning bipartisan compromises on issues such as the Department of Homeland Security and domestic surveillance even when they were easily achievable. His disastrous war in Iraq (which some liberal hawks, like myself, mistakenly backed) has left liberals enraged.
As a result, the war on terror has become just what Karl Rove hoped it would be: a wedge issue. In early 2005, when the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation asked self-described liberals and conservatives to cite their top two foreign policy goals, conservatives rated destroying Al Qaeda as No. 1. Among liberals, by contrast, it tied for No. 10. Last November, an MIT survey found that only 59% of Democrats, as opposed to 94% of Republicans, still endorsed the Afghan war. And only 57% of Democrats said they would use military force "to destroy a terrorist camp." Courtesy of President Bush, Wallace liberalism is back.
Politically, the problems this creates are obvious because Democrats have long been branded as weak on national security, and Republicans will keep making that an issue in elections to come. But the danger is far deeper. Defeating jihadism will require relearning liberal anti-totalitarianism's lessons. What Truman understood — and Bush does not — is that for the United States to change the world, it must also change itself. For Cold War liberals, the struggle against communism and the struggle for civil rights were intertwined — because only by overcoming injustice at home could the U.S. inspire others to do so abroad. Moral progress, then as now, requires moral reciprocity. For the U.S. to promote freedom in the Islamic world, Americans and Middle Easterners must come together to define a common vision of democracy and human rights, one that challenges American actions at Guantanamo Bay as much as it challenges the autocratic regimes of the Arab world.
The vehicles for such reciprocity are international institutions and international law, something liberals — unlike neoconservatives — have long supported. From NATO and the United Nations to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the heyday of Cold War liberalism — the late 1940s — was an extraordinary period of institution building. Those institutions forged the democratic alliance that outlasted Soviet communism.
Today, they have atrophied. And they must be rebuilt to accomplish the myriad tasks — from monitoring loose nuclear materials, to promoting democracy, to intervening in failed states — that winning the war on terror will require.
In the nation's new anti-totalitarianism fight, the liberal tradition, properly understood, furnishes the intellectual and moral resources necessary for victory. If a new generation of liberals can look beyond their hatred of Bush, it is theirs to claim.
Full Version: Truman and true Liberalism
Common Ground Common Sense > National & International News > Op-Ed Articles from the Mainstream Media > Op-Ed Articles from the Mainstream Media Archive
Beinart is at it again. I agree with some things in the article and disagree with others.
He makes it sound as though Henry Wallace and George McGovern favored totalitarianism. Wallace was an isolationist and McGovern hated war. I would hardly describe that as favoring totalitarianism.
In fact, one could argue that Truman was instrumental in making this country more fascist or totalitarian by strengthening the military industrial complex and making our foreign policy a slave to it ever since.
He makes it sound as though Henry Wallace and George McGovern favored totalitarianism. Wallace was an isolationist and McGovern hated war. I would hardly describe that as favoring totalitarianism.
In fact, one could argue that Truman was instrumental in making this country more fascist or totalitarian by strengthening the military industrial complex and making our foreign policy a slave to it ever since.
QUOTE(beamer619 @ Jun 4 2006, 08:52 AM)
... one could argue that Truman was instrumental in making this country more fascist or totalitarian by strengthening the military industrial complex and making our foreign policy a slave to it ever since.
Yes, one could argue. It would be an incredibly tough argument to make, but yes, one could certainly argue...
QUOTE(winston smith @ Jun 4 2006, 11:48 AM)
Yes, one could argue. It would be an incredibly tough argument to make, but yes, one could certainly argue...
Not so tough. Others have made the argument.
This is something I quoted from the film "One Bright Shining Moment."
QUOTE
Truman is described by Gore Vidal as the villain and corporate America wants him as a hero because he really started the Cold War. He kept it going by terrifying the people. "The Russians are coming." "They've got the bomb!" "They've got the super bomb!" And from then on the presidents say, "Ah, terrorism, that's the way." "So, our rulers, who are now plutocrats, rule entirely by terror, mostly invoked by them."
QUOTE(beamer619 @ Jun 4 2006, 12:04 PM)
Not so tough. Others have made the argument.
And from a revisionist perspective, the argument is a good one. But history is not revisionist, merely interpretive. Galbraith and many others would argue that much of what became the military/industrial complex would have evolved anyhow, and considering that: 1) Stalin had the bomb; 2) the Soviets and China had taken over a goodly portion of Europe and Asia in a seemingly monolithic manner; and 3) George Kennan's logic on containment made all kinds of sense, Truman seemed to grasp the importance of his mission. The Cold War was not his invention, but became very much a part of his engagement.
Truman might today be called a liberal neocon, sort of like how heart describes herself, and I love heart, by the way. I wouldn't want her deciding U.S. foreign policy though.
I will have to read up on Galbraith's writings on the MIC. Do you have a source to recommend?
I will have to read up on Galbraith's writings on the MIC. Do you have a source to recommend?
QUOTE
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions
From the Los Angeles Times
Neocons in the Democratic Party
Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to beef up the military and won't run from a fight.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn, a former Times editorial writer, is writing a book on neoconservatism.
May 28, 2006
DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback — and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party.
A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."
The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places such as the Progressive Policy Institute, whose president, Will Marshall, has just released a volume of doctrine called "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty." Beinart's book is subtitled "Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." Their political champions include Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and such likely presidential candidates as former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.
This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of the Bush administration. They support a U.S. government that would seek multilateral consensus before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to use force when necessary.
These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the squishes who have led the party to defeat in the past. Interestingly, that's how the early neocons saw themselves too: as liberals fighting to reclaim their party's true heritage — before they decamped to the GOP in the 1980s.
Indeed, the credo of the new Democratic hawks is eerily reminiscent of the neocons of the 1970s, who ran a full-page ad in the New York Times called "Come Home, Democrats" after George McGovern's crushing defeat, in a play on his campaign slogan "Come Home, America." In it, early neocons such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz called for a return to the principles of — you guessed it — Truman and President Kennedy.
They lamented the fact that their party had been taken over by the forces backing McGovern's run for the presidency in 1972 and wanted to purge the party of the McGovernites. They didn't want self-abasement about U.S. sins abroad but a vigorous fighting faith that promoted the American creed of liberty and human rights abroad and at home.
Now, a generation later, as the crusading Republican neoconservatism espoused by Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and others lies in the smoking rubble of Baghdad, a new generation of Democrats wants to dust off and rehabilitate those traditional Democratic principles, which they believe were hijacked by the Bush administration.
They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals such as Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic war, of course. Just as Republicans are being riven by debates between realists and Bush administration idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness its own battle.
Just as the old neocons wanted to expel the McGovernites, so the new ones want to rid the party of the Moveon.org types and move it to the right. As Beinart puts it, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."
In "With All Our Might," scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul — both Democrats — outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the 1975 Helsinki accords, which insisted upon human rights monitoring in the former Warsaw Pact nations, to the Middle East. "Freedom," they exhort, "is the fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror and oppression."
Other Democrats, who call themselves the "Sept. 11 generation," have formed what is known as the Truman National Security Project, whose avowed aim is to revive the "strong security, strong values of the Democratic Party — for Democrats of all ages."
Does this simply sound like Bush-lite? To the right and the left, it probably will, but the main opposition facing the would-be Truman successors will come from the latter. The battle will come from the generation of Democrats who came of age during the 1960s and who were instrumental in finishing off "Cold War liberalism" because of its failures in the jungles of Vietnam.
Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative, war, undertaken by warrior intellectuals who were liberal at home but saw falling dominoes everywhere around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the Bush administration, which has been trying to depict a global kind of Islamic totalitarianism, when the foe, as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse and less of a monolith than American leaders are prepared to believe.)
The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left — are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the McGovern era.
The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman and Co.
Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.
From the Los Angeles Times
Neocons in the Democratic Party
Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to beef up the military and won't run from a fight.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn, a former Times editorial writer, is writing a book on neoconservatism.
May 28, 2006
DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback — and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party.
A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."
The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places such as the Progressive Policy Institute, whose president, Will Marshall, has just released a volume of doctrine called "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty." Beinart's book is subtitled "Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." Their political champions include Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and such likely presidential candidates as former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.
This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of the Bush administration. They support a U.S. government that would seek multilateral consensus before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to use force when necessary.
These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the squishes who have led the party to defeat in the past. Interestingly, that's how the early neocons saw themselves too: as liberals fighting to reclaim their party's true heritage — before they decamped to the GOP in the 1980s.
Indeed, the credo of the new Democratic hawks is eerily reminiscent of the neocons of the 1970s, who ran a full-page ad in the New York Times called "Come Home, Democrats" after George McGovern's crushing defeat, in a play on his campaign slogan "Come Home, America." In it, early neocons such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz called for a return to the principles of — you guessed it — Truman and President Kennedy.
They lamented the fact that their party had been taken over by the forces backing McGovern's run for the presidency in 1972 and wanted to purge the party of the McGovernites. They didn't want self-abasement about U.S. sins abroad but a vigorous fighting faith that promoted the American creed of liberty and human rights abroad and at home.
Now, a generation later, as the crusading Republican neoconservatism espoused by Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and others lies in the smoking rubble of Baghdad, a new generation of Democrats wants to dust off and rehabilitate those traditional Democratic principles, which they believe were hijacked by the Bush administration.
They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals such as Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic war, of course. Just as Republicans are being riven by debates between realists and Bush administration idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness its own battle.
Just as the old neocons wanted to expel the McGovernites, so the new ones want to rid the party of the Moveon.org types and move it to the right. As Beinart puts it, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."
In "With All Our Might," scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul — both Democrats — outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the 1975 Helsinki accords, which insisted upon human rights monitoring in the former Warsaw Pact nations, to the Middle East. "Freedom," they exhort, "is the fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror and oppression."
Other Democrats, who call themselves the "Sept. 11 generation," have formed what is known as the Truman National Security Project, whose avowed aim is to revive the "strong security, strong values of the Democratic Party — for Democrats of all ages."
Does this simply sound like Bush-lite? To the right and the left, it probably will, but the main opposition facing the would-be Truman successors will come from the latter. The battle will come from the generation of Democrats who came of age during the 1960s and who were instrumental in finishing off "Cold War liberalism" because of its failures in the jungles of Vietnam.
Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative, war, undertaken by warrior intellectuals who were liberal at home but saw falling dominoes everywhere around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the Bush administration, which has been trying to depict a global kind of Islamic totalitarianism, when the foe, as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse and less of a monolith than American leaders are prepared to believe.)
The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left — are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the McGovern era.
The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman and Co.
Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.
QUOTE(beamer619 @ Jun 4 2006, 12:46 PM)
Truman might today be called a liberal neocon, sort of like how heart describes herself, and I love heart, by the way. I wouldn't want her deciding U.S. foreign policy though.
I will have to read up on Galbraith's writings on the MIC. Do you have a source to recommend?
I will have to read up on Galbraith's writings on the MIC. Do you have a source to recommend?
Not off the top of my head, Beamer, but I'll rummage through my library (in the attic that's about 120 degrees right now) and see what I can find.
And it wasn't just Galbraith- but the other names just don't come immediately to mind... 
QUOTE(winston smith @ Jun 4 2006, 12:49 PM)
Not off the top of my head, Beamer, but I'll rummage through my library (in the attic that's about 120 degrees right now) and see what I can find. And it wasn't just Galbraith- but the other names just don't come immediately to mind...
And it wasn't just Galbraith- but the other names just don't come immediately to mind... No need to subject yourself to heat stroke. I will try to locate something.
HARRY TRUMAN WOULD HAVE GIVEN TERRORISTS HELL: DEMOCRATS KNOW HOW TO FIGHT REAL WARS, NOT JUST POLITICAL ONES - PETER BEINART (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JUNE 4): What Truman understood -- and Bush does not -- is that for the United States to change the world, it must also change itself.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions
This was posted yesterday by Winston Smith in this same topic area.
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