# Posted 2:02 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE FIGHT IS FOR DEMOCRACY, PART II: In the first installment of my review of George Packer's new collection of essays, I focused on the inability of its authors to distinguish a principled liberal foreign policy from a principled (neo-)conservative one. Today, I want to focus more on the conceptual underpinnings of principled foreign policies rather than the specific initiatives of which such policies are composed.

The two big think-pieces in Packer's book are Susie Linfield's anti-relativist polemic and Paul Berman's attack on Islamic totalitarianism. Both essays direct themselves at the profound intellectual disabilities the authors hold responsible for liberal confusion in foreign affairs. In both cases, I strongly sympathize with the authors' respective messages. Yet again, I found myself asking what distinguished Linfield and Berman's views from those that are supposedly conservative.

The vocabulary of Linfield's essay borrows extensively from the lexicon of conservative culture warriors. Talking about multiculturalism, Linfield writes that "shame [has] spread too far, mutating into guilt and then ossifying into cowardice." (p. 167) Linfield then observes that "judgment is the linchpin on which the health of the culture depends." (p. 173) In the final analysis, this non-judgmental cowardice facilitated the liberal left defense of Stalin and even Pol Pot.

Linfield is right that there is nothing in liberalism inherently averse to pride or judgment. She writes that

We are forced to see that by severing ourselves from our own proud tradition of judgment-as-freedom, we allowed conservatives to "own" the realm of judgment" (just as some black students, in a perverse paroxysm of self-defeat, have relegated intellectual achievement to whites.)

Well, so much for political correctness. Moving on, Linfield runs into trouble when she tries to distinguish a liberal version of judgment-as-freedom from its conservative counterpart. Much like Michael Tomasky, Linfield is only capable of identifying that which is liberal by differentiating it from a conservative strawman. Thus she describes conservatives as being enamored of "cultural hierarchy and 'sacred order'" before tartly observing that

Osama bin Laden, from what I understand, is also an ardent fan of the past's hierarchies and its sacred orders.

Aha! The only problem is that American conservatism has demonstrated little interest in hierarchy, much interest in the sacred, but little interest in order. For more than two hundred years, American conservatives have defied political labels by espousing a revolutionary conservatism. Unfortunately, Linfield never addresses this all-important paradox.

Paul Berman departs from the liberal mainstream by insisting that there is no rational defense of terrorism and there that there should be no effort to empathize with terrorists or assign responsibility to root causes. With regard to violence perpetrated by French Muslims against French Jews, Berman writes that

Liberal-minded thinkers, reluctant to believe that a strictly doctrinal and irrational hatred is at work, have instinctively regarded the violence as a natural and resonable response to Israeli policies in still another part of the world, the Middle East, thousands of miles away...

There has been a temptation likewise to believe that anti-Americanism must similarly reflect genuine greivances against the United States. Yet what has America ever done to, say, Morroco and Algeria -- except help liberate those countries from the Nazis?

In spite of such passages straight out of the National Review, Berman constructs a sweeping historical argument on behalf of semi-pacifist view of democracy promotion. In under twenty pages, Berman summarizes and extracts the essence from two hundred years of Western intellectual history. While I could keep up with what Berman was saying, the breadth of his references and analyses made it all but impossible for me to provide informed criticism of his views.

Yet on those occasions when Berman touched on my areas of expertise, I found myself violently disagreeing with him. His paragraph on the origins of World War I demonstrates a total unfamiliarity with the combatants motives. Berman then writes that

Final victory in World War II was not achieved by troops rolling into Berlin. Final victory was achieved by de-Nazification, which took several decades and perhaps in some respects is still going on. (p. 279)

But the fact is that victory was achieved by force of arms. De-Nazification was a complete fiasco that embarrassed the US occupation authority and angered low-level Nazi officials while ignoring most significant Party officials. What persuaded Germans of the evils of Nazism was not the shining ideal of Western democracy, but the shocking realization that Nazism had brought Germany nothing but death, devastation and despair -- thanks to the Allied armed forces.

I go on at length about Berman's idiosyncratic interpretation of the Second World War because it effectively illustrates how he bends the past to serve his anti-interventionist message. Thus, it rings hollow when Berman says that "America's president has decided to withdraw from the war of ideas". (p. 288) One can argue that Bush's rhetoric is less than persuasive. Yet actions often speak louder than words. More than any speech, the President's bid to democratize Iraq will become the yardstick according to which his intentions are one day measured. As was the case with Germany and Japan, the use of force has been integral to defining America's position in the war of ideas.

The remaining essays in Packer's collection demonstrate just how great a chasm must be bridged in order to unite Linfield and Berman's broad-brush conceptual liberalism with the specific policies favored by their co-authors. Jeff Madrick's discussion of economic inequality in the United States concludes that "Our democracy is no longer working as it should." Presumably, this implies that we have no right to lecture the developing world about freedom until our own house is in order.

William Finnegan's essay on "corporate globalization" is a meditation on the beauty of indigenous cultures, the rapacity of multinational corporations,and the hypocrisy of the IMF and its member governments. If there was one essay in Packer's book that Noam Chomsky could wholeheartedly embrace, this would be it. Speaking more substantively, the problem with Finnegan is that he completely ignores important arguments by first-rate thinkers that globalization promotes growth and even protects indigenous cultures. While the pro-globalization case is far from impregnable, the one-sided nature of Finnegan's attack undermines Packer's aspiration to get away from the kneejerk liberalism of the past.

The contradictions exposed by "The Fight is for Democracy" come across vividly in anti-war patriarch Todd Gitlin's essay on patriotism. On the one hand, Gitlin describes how his decision to hang an American flag from his terrace after 9/11 became an authoritative justification on the Left for accepting the flag as a positive symbol. Yet only weeks later, Gitlin and his wife took down their flag because "the hardening of American foreign policy and the Democratic cave-in produced a good deal more triumphalism than [they] could stomach." (p. 134) This pattern of action and reaction ably stands in for the position of almost all the contributors to Packer's book; they recognize the imperative of breaking away from the guilt-ridden liberalism of the past but can't accept-- let alone comprehend -- the majority's embrace of actual American foreign policies. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion