Product Description

In this passionate, provocative book, Peter Beinart offers a bold new vision and sounds the call for liberals to revive the spirit that once swept America and inspired the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #611664 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This stimulating manifesto calls for a liberalism that battles Islamist totalitarianism as forthrightly as Cold War liberals opposed Communist totalitarianism. Former New Republic editor Beinart assails both an anti-imperialist left that rejects the exercise of U.S. power and the Bush administration's assumption of America's moral infallibility. America shouldn't shrink from fighting terrorism, despite civilian casualties and moral compromises, he contends, but its antitotalitarian agenda must be restrained by world opinion, international institutions and liberal self-doubt, while bolstered by economic development aid abroad and economic equality at home. Beinart offers an incisive historical account of the conflicts straining postwar liberalism and of the contradictions, hubris and incompetence of Bush's actions. He's sketchier on what a liberal war on terror entails—perhaps a cross between Clinton's Balkan humanitarian interventions and the Afghanistan operation, with U.S. forces descending on Muslim backwaters to destroy jihadists and build nations. The tragic conundrum of a fighting liberalism that avoids enmeshment in a Vietnam or Iraq (the author now repudiates his early support of the Iraq war) is never adequately addressed. Still, Beinart's provocative analysis could stir much-needed debate on the direction of liberal foreign policy. (May 30)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Shortly after losing the 2004 presidential election in a campaign dominated by national security issues, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) appeared at a party for his staff. After dutifully thanking his glum team for trying to put him in the Oval Office, he praised them for going before the country with a message. "Everyone in that room was on edge," one staffer later remarked, "because everyone wanted to know: What was that message?"

Peter Beinart, an editor-at-large for the New Republic and a columnist for The Washington Post, argues in his deliberately provocative The Good Fight that liberals' inability to articulate a foreign policy vision has been their Achilles' heel. Conservatives, after all, have always had a coherent and appealing story to tell voters: America is good, and it does good overseas. Liberals have mocked this tale as simplistic and arrogant. But by dwelling instead on America's limitations and shortcomings, they have lost the opportunity to construct a compelling narrative of their own.

It is, of course, easy to exaggerate how much foreign policy has contributed to the political difficulties that liberals face today. After all, George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 not because of his diplomatic prowess but because voters believed that events overseas hardly mattered. And the public's disillusionment with Iraq seems to have Democrats poised to make big gains in this year's congressional midterm elections.

But the very fact that liberals needed the Iraq War to go badly to get a hearing for their foreign policy views attests to their vulnerability on national security issues. As Beinart documents in his thoughtful history of six decades of liberal thinking on foreign policy, this was not always the case. In the years following World War II, it was Democrat Harry S. Truman who developed a coherent and compelling vision of national greatness in the dangerous world. The Cold War liberalism -- a term Beinart takes as a compliment, not a slur -- of Truman's Democratic Party unified the nation and provided a blueprint for promoting U.S. security and prosperity that lasted nearly half a century.

But then came Vietnam, which shattered the liberal consensus on foreign policy -- and liberal confidence to boot. The anti-imperialist left coalesced around two wrongheaded convictions: that threats to American security were overblown and that narrow interests dominated Washington's calculations. Meanwhile, a new breed of reformers known as neoliberals responded to the debacle in Southeast Asia by draining foreign policy problems of their ideological content and treating them as technical issues to be solved by dispassionate analysis. Even after 9/11, liberal strategists wanted foreign policy to just go away, arguing (as they did before the October 2002 congressional vote to authorize the Iraq War) that if Democrats changed the conversation to domestic politics, they would fare better at the polls.

Conservatives have happily turned all of these positions to their advantage. Anti-imperialist rants about Halliburton and Big Oil driving U.S. foreign policy have become grist for the right's claims that liberals reflexively blame America first. The neoliberal disdain for ideology is taken by conservatives as evidence that liberals neither believe in America nor grasp what distinguishes us from our enemies. And the eagerness of Democratic strategists to change the subject seems to prove that liberals follow public opinion polls rather than lead them.

Beinart agrees with much of the conservative critique. To stiffen the Democrats' spine, he wants his fellow liberals to draw inspiration from the principles that drove Cold War liberalism. America once again faces a serious totalitarian threat, this time not from Nazis or communists but from Islamist jihadists. As was true during Stalin's heyday, victory requires embracing the causes of greater liberty and greater prosperity around the world. It also means working with America's democratic allies and understanding that America's goodness must be demonstrated rather than assumed. And it means recognizing that (as one of Beinart's heroes, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued in the 1950s) in wielding its awesome power, America will not be able to remain morally pure.

Each of these principles has its merits, but they probably don't make up a compelling foreign policy vision. The conservative narrative is powerful precisely because it is simple: America succeeds because it is strong; others will follow because America is good. Beinart's updated, post-9/11 version of Cold War liberalism -- he is hawkish on al-Qaeda but admits that his earlier writings supporting the 2003 Iraq invasion were misguided -- recognizes that the world is complex but offers no guidance on how to handle the dilemmas that such complexity generates. What should America do when its allies disagree? How beholden should it be to international organizations such as the United Nations? How far should it go in compromising its moral principles to defeat gathering threats? Such questions have long bedeviled liberal foreign policy thinkers, and Beinart doesn't try to square these circles.

Nor is it clear that even a suitably renovated set of liberal Cold War principles will resonate with the American public. The Iraq War has tarnished conservatives' foreign policy credentials, but it hasn't necessarily rehabilitated the reputation of liberals. In politics, the messenger is as important as the message, and The Good Fight gives ample evidence of why many Americans are suspicious of what liberals have to offer. This is especially so when they argue, as Beinart does, that Americans would be better off if they understood that "we are not intrinsically good." That's all well and good for a seminar on Niebuhr, but it's not much of a bumper sticker. Until liberals learn to communicate ideas in terms that appeal to the way Americans think of themselves, they will continue to deal conservatives a winning hand.

That would be a shame. Beinart rightly notes a core irony: President Bush stripped away the restraints on the exercise of America's freedom to act because he wanted to demonstrate America's strength; he has thereby made American power illegitimate in the eyes of much of the world, which has made us weak. A true fighting liberalism would not have fallen into that trap. The Good Fight may not provide all the answers on how to fashion a durable foreign policy vision for the very real dangers we face, but it provides us with a fine place to start.

Reviewed by James M. Lindsay
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Skittish about the "liberal" label, progressive politicians have virtually abandoned a history that offers lessons for addressing current domestic and international issues. Beinart, editor at large of the New Republic, offers a perspective on how liberalism has steered American politics away from its worse impulses, from the red scare^B through the cold war and Vietnam, in search of ideals of freedom that promised domestic and international security. He highlights the political trade-offs liberals have made, including struggles to remain true to ideals and avoid conservative charges of being soft on Communism, championing racial equality to strengthen the nation at home and abroad, later facing the brutal realities as the nonviolent civil rights movement transformed into rising militancy in the 1960s, and responding, ineffectively, to changes in domestic and international politics since 9/11. Beinart worries that liberals are so fixated on the threats posed by the Bush administration and the Right that they risk being too dismissive of the very real threat of terrorism. A thoughtful perspective. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

An Intellectual History On Par With The Vital Center...
"Good Fight" is quite possibly the best work of liberal intellectual history since Schlesinger's The Vital Center. It really is that damn good. Beinart knows his stuff. If all you're interested in reading is another empty-minded polemic on the Iraq War, don't buy this book. "The Good Fight" isn't about the War. It's about a historical narrative spanning 60 years. In the age of mind-numbing hyperpartisanship, books like these are becoming increasingly hard to find.

A must read for liberals and conservatives
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1988. Peter Beinart would probably consider me a "conservative." It may therefore surprise anyone reading this review that I have given his book five stars. It may also surprise you that I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, the first time I ever voted in a presidential election.

I am a product of working class liberals from Cleveland, Ohio. I viewed the arms race as dangerous and needlessly expensive. So Mondale got my vote. Then I spent a year in Europe. Being on one of the front lines of the Cold War transformed my thinking. Totalitarianism, and the threat it posed, was real. The Cold War needed to be fought, and it needed to be won. Reagan's policies gave us a chance to win it. I became a hawk.

At the same time, I learned a little about WWII and the ensuing Cold War. I came to realize that Republicans were not the original hawks. They were largely isolationists. To my surprise, Democrats were the original hawks. From WWII into Vietnam, the Cold War was fought by Democrats. What happened to the Democrats between Vietnam and 1984, and then into the present? Where did Reagan come from?

If you have any curiosity about these questions and their answers, Mr. Beinart's book is a must read and earns five stars on his treatment of these historical issues alone. Mr. Beinart is a "liberal" partisan, so kudos to him for criticizing "liberals" where criticism is due and recognizing "conservatives" where recognition is due.

But Mr. Beinart did not write a book just to tell the history of the Cold War. He writes to persuade us that the war on terror is every bit as real as the Cold war and, perhaps more importantly, every bit as important to fight. In the process, he offers a fair assessment of why the war in Iraq might not advance, and may actually hinder the war on terror, just as the war in Vietnam did not advance, and probably hindered the Cold War. If Vietnam caused a generation of "liberals" to abandon the Cold War, Mr. Beinart is concerned that Iraq may cause "liberals" to abandon the war on terror. He has good reason to be concerned. He reports that "only 59 percent of Democrats - as opposed to 94 percent of Republicans - still approve of America's decision to invade Afghanistan."

As a "conservative," it is refreshing to hear a "liberal" voice speak honestly and directly about the dangers facing America today and about the need to confront those dangers using all available means, including military means. To the extent anyone, "liberal" or "conservative," needs reminding that the war on terror is real and worth the fight, again Mr. Beinart's book warrants five stars. To the extent anyone, "liberal" or "conservative," wants to critically assess what the war in Iraq means for the war on terror, his book will give any staunch (if open minded) "conservative" something to think about. After all, even George Will concedes that Mr. Beinart may have written "one of those rare books that turns a political tide."

Mr. Beinart would like to turn the tide for "liberals" and his partisanship on this issue is not subliminal: the subtitle to his book declares that only liberals can win the war on terror and make America great again. The subtitle is unfortunate if it serves to dissuade "conservatives" from reading the book because the very history Mr. Beinart elucidates without bias tells us that someone in either the Truman or Reagan mold can lead America to win the war on terror. Only diehard partisans care whether that person is a "liberal" or "conservative." The rest of us just hope that someone emerges as a leader because Mr. Beinart convincingly persuades that the "good fight" is worth fighting, which makes the "Good Fight" worth reading no matter your political stripe.

Superb History, Decent Analysis
Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large of The New Republic, admits something up front: he was wrong about the invasion of Iraq, which he supported. He devotes much of the introduction to analyzing why he and many Beltway Democrats supported the war and, unlike many top Democrats, admits he was wrong. Some have said this is not enough: they wish to condemn Beinart for eternity over his miscalculation. Instead, I see this as intellectual growth. However, the Iraq War is not really the point of the book.

Instead, the book consists of two parts: a history of the Democratic Party from 1948 to the present, and an analysis of the roots of fundamentalist Islam and the proper Democratic response to it. The first part is excellent, as Beinart (who wrote this as a fellow at the Brookings Institution) uses many sources not unearthed for decades. He paints a compelling narative starting with Henry Wallace's challenge of Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election, covers the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement (two turning points for the party) in depth, and then moves briskly through the Reagan and Clinton years to part two.

The second part should be appreciated as a primer, although there are much better (and more comprhensive) books on the roots of Islamism. In it, Beinart gives a quick overview of the rise of Sunni extremism, what it believes about the world and the state, and how it has manifested itself in al Queda. Then, he covers the lead up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, analysing the Democratic Party's response. He is critical of it, although he reminds readers of his own mistakes as well.

Beinart ends by saying the party should draft a new foreign policy that is willing to use force when it is in the nation's best interests, is mindful of the economic and historical roots of terrorism, and respects international opinion and institutions, as these can give the US global support for its efforts.

According to reviews, this has become a very hot book in DC. Regardless of what effect it has on national policy, it provides a quick read for those who want to think about an alternative to the Bush Doctrine. Highly recommended.