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WHEN AMERICA WAS GREAT: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism
by Kevin Mattson
Routledge, 194 pp., $26

Last December, Peter Beinart's brilliant "Fighting Faith" essay in The New Republic -- calling on Democrats to return to the muscular liberalism of the early Cold War -- usefully stirred a foreign policy discussion among Democrats in the wake of John Kerry's election defeat.

Ironically, a similar argument had already been laid out a year earlier by George Packer, of The New Yorker, and nine other prominent writers in The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World.

But the book's well-reasoned call to analyze America's failure to face global threats was drowned out by the know-nothing liberalism that drove first the Dean campaign and then the party into the ditch. This shortsighted view found its voice in such venues as a backyard party of liberals who gathered last fall in Brooklyn. "George Bush is the most evil man in the world," bellowed one participant, in a comment heard time and again last year at similar gatherings in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and South Florida. "More evil than Saddam or Bin Laden?" asked one guest. "Far more evil," came back the response, to the approval of most of the partygoers.

This sort of blind hatred of Bush, and a willful ignorance of the real threats we face, has driven liberalism into a left-wing box and made the writings of people like Packer important. Kerry's defeat was caused as much by his most rabid supporters as by himself; they were a political millstone around his neck. The paranoid style once associated with the right has migrated to the left and metastasized, to the extent that even U.S. aid in helping to create the framework for fair elections in Ukraine can be denounced in The Nation as an insidious CIA plot.

The reality is that left-liberal activists tend to be slow learners who, still reflexively clinging to a Vietnamera framework, are trapped in mindless negativism. Ironically, like Saddam himself, they also view any opposition to America as an updated version of the Vietcong. That's in part why the killers in Iraq are called "insurgents" instead of more accurately describing them as members of "death squads."

And that, along with Kerry's defeat, is due in part to the debate that never took place in the late 1970s, when one and one-half million Vietnamese took to the seas in rickety boats to escape the totalitarian depredations of the triumphant Communists. That was the moment to recognize that while America had been wrong to go into Vietnam, the regime in Hanoi was, as the supporters of the war had argued, cruel and despotic. But there was no debate, and Democrats have yet to regain their foreign policy compass.

Left-wing activists have glided seamlessly from the anti-anti-communism of the Cold War years to the anti-Iraq war and anti-globalist stance of the present without offering a geopolitical alternative. Though it was rarely argued, there was, after all, a case to be made against going into Iraq, on the grounds that it could end up strengthening Iran.

However, a small group of liberals, with Packer prominent among them, refused to remain trapped in a framework in which Republicans, having learned their lessons in the 1980s, became the supporters of democracy around the world, while backward-looking liberals were too often indifferent to the spread of freedom.

"The best role for critics in the president's second term," Packer argued in the wake of Bush's re-election, "will be not to scoff at the idea of spreading freedom, but to take it seriously -- to hold him to his own talk."

Packer has tried to lay out a plausible alternative to the rantings of Moveon.org and its brethren. Largely overlooked when it was published in 2003 -- except for a screed in The Nation encouraging liberal hawks to depart the Democratic Party as soon as possible -- The Fight Is for Democracy features an introduction by Packer and a collection of essays by such astute commentators as Michael Tomasky, Kanan Makiya, and Paul Berman. Berman provides an insightful anatomy of totalitarianism.

Packer's introduction describes the role reversal that has propelled the fortunes for both major parties. After the 1960s, Packer writes, "the right took up the universalist language of reason, freedom and truth... that have lain at the heart of the American experiment," while liberal multiculturalists produced apologetics for anti-American autocrats such as Castro, Arafat, and, more recently, Hugo Chavez. That, he rues, has allowed Bush to "fight a war on terrorism and still preserve all the privileges and injustices of ... unequal sacrifice."

In his essay, "Between Cheney and Chomsky," Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect asserts that liberals have suffered from "a crippling loss of nerve" on foreign policy that has led to a lack of ideas so that today liberals "essentially have no foreign policy argument." Alas, many of them don't know it and are still stuck in a 1960s time warp, even though "Al-Qaeda is no plucky little Vietnam."

Liberalism, Tomasky insisted well before the United States took the lead in tsunami relief, "needs to assert anew that American power can be employed for good ends, and indeed that American power must be used around the globe to support the principles to which liberalism is dedicated."

Both Tomasky and Packer hope that today's Democrats will "look to their predecessors who reshaped the world after World War II" -- the very argument later picked up by Beinart in his New Republic article. This hope is elaborated in Kevin Mattson's new book, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism. Mattson wrote the book, he tells audiences, to give a younger generation an arsenal of ideas for the future.

As a young leftist, Mattson explains, "it was easy for me to scoff at liberalism's inadequacies." But once he escaped from the graduate school funhouse of cultural theory, which reduced anti-communism to hostility toward "the other," and re-read books like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Vital Center, he realized that 1940s liberalism was far more textured and nuanced than he had been taught.

"Liberal anti-communism," he writes, "was not hysteria, but rather a balancing act. It recognized the threat of communist espionage while protecting civil liberties." In 1948, Cold War liberals turned away from the Communist-backed presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace, FDR's former vice president, to support the Truman administration's efforts to slow down Stalinism without resorting to war. Committed to pluralism at home and abroad, their arguments for backing Truman's policy of containment were advanced in liberal terms. To defend democracy around the globe, they argued, democracy had to be promoted at home by championing civil rights.

Mattson's well-argued book may help redeem 1940s liberalism from the condescension of the 1968ers now running academia, but it has little to say about our current challenges. Cold War liberals stand out from the apologists for the Soviet Union who preceded them and the apologists for North Vietnamese brutality and Palestinian and Islamic terrorism who followed them. After all, the multiculturalists argued, we have our own share of imperfections, so who are we to pass judgment? Due to the experience of the 1930s and the influence of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Cold War liberals recognized the reality of evils that can't be negotiated with. But, alas, the moral clarity of Cold War liberalism was a passing phase.

If we look at the challenges ahead, such as the emergence of a heavily armed China creating ties with Saudi Arabia and Europe in the name of a shared anti-Americanism, we find that liberals, the small circle around Packer excepted, are as unprepared for the coming threats as they have been for the threat of Arab and Islamic extremism.

It will be interesting to hear how liberals respond when, as is very likely, the welfare states of Europe they idolize decide to sell arms to a militarizing China. I suspect they will react either by reflexively blaming America for forcing those nice Europeans into arming the Chinese or with the silence with which they responded to the plight of the Vietnamese boat people nearly 30 years ago.

After Vietnam, many Democrats never regained a sure voice on foreign policy, and many activists came to see the very issue of national security as a Republican ploy designed to distract the public from urgently needed domestic reforms. Had Democrats shown that their support for democracy abroad was an extension of the values they applied at home, the party's often trenchant criticism of the Bush administration's incompetent handling of the war in Iraq probably would have struck home.

Fred Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union and culture editor of BLUEPRINT.