# Posted 9:21 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BEINART'S DARK PORTRAIT OF CONSERVATIVES: The challenge for a centrist liberal such as Peter Beinart is to distinguish himself clearly both from those on his right as well as those on his left. In an earlier post, I challenged the clarity of his division between the Democratic center and the Democratic left. Here, I challenge his division of the Democratic center from the Republican right.

For Beinart, the essence of conservative foreign policy is its ignorant, anti-empirical faith in America's moral perfection. He writes that:

For conservatives -- from John Foster Dulles to Dick Cheney -- American exceptionalism means that we do not need such constraints [on our power]. Our heart is pure. In the liberal vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that make us exceptional. (page x)

Beinart's sanctification of self-doubt as the defining attribute of liberal foreign policy strikes me as somewhat peculiar. First of all, it plays directly into the hands of those conservatives who argued for decades that liberals just don't have enough faith in America. Then again, that sort of candid masochism seems to be ingrained in New Republic-liberals such as Beinart. Perhaps it is to their credit.

What is harder to understand is why Beinart has claimed self-doubt as the exclusive property of the left at a time when Republicans have demonstrated a certain interest in it. And by Republicans, I am not just referring to realists such as George Will (whose lavish praise of Beinart appears on the back cover of the book). Just two months ago, a journalist asked:

Mr. President, you spoke about missteps and mistakes in Iraq. Could I ask both of you which missteps and mistakes of your own you most regret?

Bush responded:

I think the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq is Abu Ghraib. We've been paying for that for a long period of time.

There is much to criticize about the President's record on prisoner abuse, and OxBlog has done it often. But willful blindness to America's imperfections does not seem to be Bush's way.

In Chapter 1, however, Beinart's concern is with the Republicans of the Truman era, not those of today. According to Beinart, the lies and paranoia of Joe McCarthy represented true face of the GOP in the Truman era. He writes that:

If conservatives saw the red scare as a sign of domestic health, anti-totalitarian liberals struggled to make the opposite case...

While conservatives applauded America's new faith in its moral superiority, liberals worried that McCarthyism undermined that superiority in the eyes of the world.(pp.20-21)

I would say that this is a grossly unfair caricature of conservatism in the 1940s and 1950s. Republicans dare not forget that McCarthy was one of their own, but theirs was also the party of Eisenhower, Dulles, Taft and Vandenburg.

Beinart also damages his own case by reminding his readers that Harry Truman imposed a "grossly unfair" loyalty program on federal employees for the purpose of forcing out Communists. Then, in 1954, liberal champion Hubert H. Humphrey introduced legislation that criminalized membership in the Communist Party. Although unhappy with this legislation, the heroic liberals of the ADA refused to come out clearly against it.

By Beinart's criteria, it would seem that liberals also had an exaggerated faith in America's moral superiority.

However, I think there is a clear dividing line that Beinart can employ to differentiate muscular liberals such as himself from neo-conservatives. For Beinart, the moral validation of American foreign policy depends on good faith efforts to let others, especially allies, exert a measure of control over our behavior. For neo-conservatives, the moral validation of American foreign policy depends on whether it serves the interests of democracy and freedom, regardless of whether other nations oppose it.

An interesting question is which side Truman would take if the choice were presented in this way. According to Beinart, there were "three interlocking planks" (p.15) that defined Truman's foreign policy. The first was the containment of Communism. The second was the economic reconstruction of Europe. And third:

Liberal foreign policy involved restraint. Rather than wield its enormous power alone, the United States would share it with other countries. NATO was the expression of this idea. So was Truman's support for the UN. (p. 16)

In an earlier post, I explained why I believe this to be a mischaracterization of Truman's foreign policy. NATO was a military alliance to which the Europeans were expected to deliver hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It was not about power sharing. With regard to the UN, Truman told Dean Acheson that he would've gone to war in Korea without its approval (which it only gave because of the Soviet ambassador's absence from the vote.)

From my perspective, the key difference between Beinart and the conservatives is the question of process versus outcome. For Beinart, moral validation rests on the process that determines when American power can be used. For neoconservatives, moral validation rests on the outcome that such a use of power achieves. In this instance, I side with the latter. (14) opinions -- Add your opinion