Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal

Last week’s NYT Magazine had a fascinating editorial entitled Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal.

Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed, they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such stories, after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.

 

…before Vietnam, and the disappointment and confusion it spawned, liberals did have a clear story of their own. In the late 1940’s and 1950’s, intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and policymakers like George F. Kennan described America’s cold-war struggle differently from their conservative counterparts: as a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survive. Even more important, they described America itself differently. Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves. The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world.

Thought provoking, and well worth a read, whatever end of the ideological spectrum you find yourself on.