Authentically Liberal

How Democrats Can Defeat Terrorism and Win Elections

Among the chattering classes, it has recently become commonplace to say that the Democrats are weak on national security. In the 1990s, when domestic issues dominated the public consciousness, polls showed little difference between the two parties on foreign policy. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a huge change. Until this spring, every poll taken in the past five years had indicated that the American public trusted Republicans -- seemingly any Republican -- more than Democrats on national security. "Foreign affairs assertiveness now almost completely distinguishes Republican-oriented voters from Democratic-oriented voters," a comprehensive report from the Pew Research Center stated in 2005. "Attitudes relating to religion and social issues are not nearly as important in determining party affiliation."

Given the actual record of the two parties since 1993, the Republicans' advantage is richly ironic. Although the first three years of President Bill Clinton's administration included foreign policy disasters in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda, Clinton steadily gained in confidence and ability. When he left office, the United States sat alone on the commanding heights as the world's only superpower and was also, according to contemporaneous Pew polls, the most admired and respected country in the world.

The current administration still has more than two years left, and for the most part, its record is bleak. George W. Bush and his team came to office proclaiming that they would restore the United States' leadership role in the world. They have since diminished it. After 9/11 (which the Bush administration sought to blame on its predecessors), most of the world rallied in support of the United States, and the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan received the widest international and domestic support of any U.S. military action since World War II. But the 2003 war in Iraq caused a stunning decline in the United States' international standing, and not just among the tired, old, left-wing intelligentsia. Besides the war and its fallout, many other factors have further diminished U.S. influence abroad, including an unnecessarily pugnacious, often deliberately insulting style that is peculiar to certain members of the current sometimes dysfunctional national security team. There have been some real improvements, especially in high-level relations with Europe, since Condoleezza Rice took over the State Department. But these are not reflected in the United States' standing in most of the world.

Although there has been a recent outpouring of books on the foreign policy of the Clinton and Bush administrations, very little has been written about the political factors and processes that underlie U.S. foreign policy. Two new books shed light from entirely different angles on this elusive but critical issue. In The Good fight, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of The New Republic, focuses on the internal struggle over national security policy that has raged within the Democratic Party since the end of World War II. In Politics Lost, Joe Klein, a Time magazine columnist and one of the leading political journalists in the United States, recounts how U.S. politics has been ruined by highly paid consultants and pollsters who mass-produce market-tested candidates lacking any soul or conviction -- the very process, as he describes it, by which Republicans gained their advantage on foreign policy.

THE ORIGINS OF ANTITOTALITARIANISM

Beinart has a Big Idea: liberal Democrats, who saved the free world during the Cold War with a sophisticated blend of idealism and pragmatism that he calls "liberal antitotalitarianism," can do it again in the war against the global jihad by returning to those ideals. Mining long-forgotten sources and recovering important buried history, Beinart's book is a fascinating journey through ancient, but still relevant, debates over national security within the Democratic Party during the past 60 years.

From 1946 on, including during today's debate over Iraq, Beinart argues, there have been two factions in the Democratic Party. One has opposed totalitarianism in all its forms, whether leftist, rightist, or jihadist; the other has been either semi-isolationist or soft on left-wing regimes. Beinart opens with a marvelous anecdote about a 1946 visit to Minneapolis by Henry Wallace, who had been Franklin Roosevelt's vice president until eighteen months earlier. Minneapolis' very young -- and very liberal -- mayor, Hubert Humphrey, who had supported liberals' anti-Nazi Popular Front alliance with the Communists during World War II, met Wallace, one of his political heroes, at the airport. Humphrey, then in the middle of a fight against communist efforts to take over his beloved Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, asked Wallace for support. Wallace's response was a blank stare and evasions. "Humphrey was stunned," Beinart writes. "Several open communists had driven Wallace from the airport. Liberalism was headed for civil war and the man [Humphrey had] once idolized would be on the other side."