Bonehead Beinart's Book

So, I see Peter Beinart's book, "The Good Fight" is finally out, the one he's been working on for two years (after reportedly getting a $600,000 advance). Beinart is former Editor at The New Republic (TNR), and basically drove me away from that once-fine magazine. Peter Beinart is the evil Mr. Hyde to the august Walter Lippmann's (the founder of TNR) good Dr. Jekyll.

Beinart believes that liberals, and liberals only - no freakin' hippies or 'progressives' or union people or populists or anyone without an Ivy League credential - will set things aright. Walter Lippmann believed something of the same sort in the years following World War I. Trouble is, Beinart draws the liberal circle so tight that not many people can squeeze into his circle of the Elect. I consider myself to be a liberal's liberal, not the least bit interested in identity politics, but it's clear that even I'm too damned progressive for his company. The trouble is, politics is made up of grand coalitions, so who exactly is going to implement his vision of the future, if just about everyone is excluded? Lippmann, to my knowledge, never was so picky.

There was a time, in the fifties and sixties, when no good liberal in New York even knew what to think unless they had read Walter Lippmann's newspaper column first. That wonderful authority will elude Mr. Beinart: he has proven wrong on so many counts that he can't possibly recover.

George Will has some stern words for liberals, and predictably-enough, uses Beinart to make his points for him.

His project of curing liberalism's amnesia begins by revisiting Jan. 4, 1947, when liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard to found Americans for Democratic Action. It became their instrument for rescuing the Democratic Party from Henry Wallace and his fellow traveling followers who, locating the cause of the Cold War in American faults, were precursors of Michael Moore and his ilk among today's "progressives."

Beinart conflates the followers of Henry Wallace with those of Michael Moore. First, Moore is a social critic, not a leader. Moveon.org is an organizational device, not a party, And there is no danger of an AlQaeda fifth column in the U.S. among native-born Americans. Beinart's analogies fall apart at the slightest examination. Nevertheless, Beinart's solution is to purge all progressives. Thanks, Peter! George Will continues:

Today's doughfaces are "progressives" who flinch from the fact that, as Beinart says, "America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first."

Fine as far as it goes, which isn't far. There is no point building schools for Afghan girls if the girls suffer execution as an immediate consequence of attending those schools. They need protection. In today's Afghanistan, they don't get it.

... Since [Vietnam], Beinart argues, liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America's missions at home and abroad. It has been said that whereas the right-wing isolationists in the 1930s believed that America was too good for the world, left-wing isolationists in the 1960s believed that the world was too good for America. After Vietnam, Beinart says, liberal foreign policy was "defined more by fear of American imperialism than fear of totalitarianism."

Human rights is the liberal narrative of national greatness. Study Jimmy Carter, if you have a chance.

Beinart briskly says "I was wrong" in supporting the invasion of Iraq. Wrong about Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Wrong in being "too quick to give up on containment." Wrong about the administration's competence to cope with the war's aftermath. ("Staffers tasked with postwar reconstruction were told to bring two suits. They would be home by the end of summer.") Denouncing conservatives for waging a "war of hubris and impatience," Beinart says that "George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project. He has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak." Because "the more proactive America wanted to be, the stronger international institutions had to become."

Why should liberals - progressives if you will - follow someone who's always so wrong like Peter Beinart?

Beinart worries that "the elections of 2006 and 2008 could resemble the elections of 1974 and 1976, when foreign policy exhaustion, and Republican scandal, propelled Democrats to big gains." If so, those gains will be "a false dawn." The country will eventually turn right because, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."

This "false dawn" remains a possibility, because the Democratic party is so damned timid. Progressive muscle is needed!

The American Prospect has a better approach towards Beinart.

If we are to move forward along lines Beinart suggests, we need to know whether Beinart and other liberal hawks will recognize the difference between antitotalitarian liberalism and conservatism, neo- or otherwise, when they see it. Unfortunately, Beinart slips and slides around this question. His chapter on Iraq, which rehearses the administration’s various arguments for war, reads at first blush like a wise and disinterested account of a tragic march to folly. But he writes about this period as if he’d spent it on a mountaintop in Tibet instead of editing an influential magazine and cheering on the administration virtually every step of the way -- and accusing war critics, not all of whom (news flash: not even a majority of whom) are anti-imperialist Chomskyites, of “intellectual incoherence” and “abject pacifism,” as he so unforgettably put matters to The Washington Post in February 2003. I resented those comments at the time personally, I still do, and I know a lot of people who feel similarly.

I took Beinart's insults personally. I take this stupid book personally too. "This book should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

The hell with Peter Beinart and his ilk.