Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I live in Boston, one of America's leading themed cities -- no longer standing alone and unafraid perhaps, we Bostonians still try to think politically in public. Even if its largely the regurgitations of our betters from higher elsewheres.

Take our cherished daily paper, the Globe. It's now a wholly owned subsidiary of New York's world-class Times, to which our paper bears about the same relationship as a national road show production bears to the original on Broadway.

In keeping with our status as re-chewers of the memes of our betters, don't we have a nice reworking by David Greenberg of Peter Beinart's recent haunch of "usable past" -- i.e. the resurrection of the deeds and creeds of famous liberal cold warriors long since dribbly and doddering, if not stone cold dead.

I point it out just for the comedy kick. Beinart via Greenberg is very like what we used to call, back in the late 60's, all those relentlessly crass teen pandering pop remakes: a bubblegum cover.

A few excerpts, with midrash from yours truly:

By the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton had come to be a champion of intervention,

Indeed, the Captain Kirk of the human rights empire.

anti-imperialist activists have conquered the blogosphere

Interesting how the word "anti-interventionist" is studiously avoided for the more contentious "anti-imperialist".

The Democratic party's rift between liberal internationalists and radical anti-imperialists is, of course, decades old.

Priceless prose, of course, but besides, notice the belt and suspenders compulsion -- "radical anti-imperialism" -- as opposed to what?

Beinart persuasively shows that calls by today's liberals for America to actively project its power abroad represent not a betrayal of principle but a return to what liberalism is really all about.

Well, Lord knows that's true enough.

The key moment ..... In 1946 a divide over foreign affairs emerged on the left ... On one side President Truman and like-minded liberals saw in Josef Stalin's ambitions and barbarism a threat to Europe's freedom -- and to America's world position.... In contrast, leftists such as Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace favored a conciliatory stand toward the Soviet Union as a step toward peaceful coexistence.

Greenberg tries to make this Harry vs Henry set-to look like a fair fight, won on principle because:

a small band of anti-Communist liberals led by Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey stepped to the fore to provide ideological direction. In 1947, they transformed a faltering liberal-labor alliance known as the Union for Democratic Action into Americans for Democratic Action, proclaiming a ''two-front fight for democracy, both at home and abroad."

ADA believed that ''fellow traveling" -- making common cause with American Communists and looking the other way at Stalin's crimes -- would betray liberalism's core values and hinder its quest for reform.

When in 1947 Truman proposed to help the governments of Greece and Turkey put down Communist insurgencies, Wallaceites called the move ''American imperialism."

Plus ca change ... this dribble could have come right out of a New York Times editorial from the period in question. But let's move on on to act two, the Nambo debacle:

"The Vietnam War, of course, wasn't a necessary outgrowth of liberal internationalism"

Really? Note too that we have skipped the crossing of the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950 -- when containment first clearly morphed into rollback.

Many of these (60's) leftists held no love for Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or liberalism itself. They saw scant difference between the parties....

Plus ca change... oh, I already said that.

When, like now, the liberals saw the Nam caper going south and turned against it too --

Liberals saw the war as a miscarriage of containment

... not not NOT:

an expression of American imperialism.

For my money, here's the money quote:

Beinart highlights as a telling moment the decision in 1965 by Students for a Democratic Society to delete the word ''totalitarian" from the description of the kinds of regimes it opposed- "a final break with the liberal tradition," he asserts.

Again, I couldn't agree more. The concept of totalitarianism is, or was, the linchpin of liberal preemptive interventionism -- the same kind of ideological construct that "terrorism" is now. Without some mythic notion of the mutant rogue post liberal nightmare -- a totalized state then, a failed state now -- the whole liberal grand Guignol collapses.

Here's the final hand-wringer .

Since 2002, then, the Democrats' dilemma has been that the two main foreign policy issues, Iraq and terrorism, suggest different, if not opposite, remedies. Iraq, underscoring the perils of reckless military intervention, calls forth a fear of unintended consequences and recommends a policy of humility and restraint. In contrast, the continuing danger of terrorism by al Qaeda and kindred groups entails a policy of bold and at times aggressive involvement around the globe.

You can always tell a truly mighty thinker by his tragic view of history.