Bullderized.
I know I'm harping here but, frankly, Marshall Wittman's latest post is strange even by his standards. The idea is that Tony Blair is a real progressive and, well, Harold Meyerson is an asshole. My question though is whether Bull Moose reads anything other than Blueprint? If he did, he might be able to distinguish Blair's campaign speech of an essay from serious analysis... or serious news. Wittman writes:
[Blair] realizes that it would be disastrous to abandon Iraq to the tender mercies of Zarqawi. Moreover, the British PM deeply understands that this is now the central battleground in the fight against the Jihadists - if we lose our will, we will reap the whirlwind for many decades to come.
But the news just a couple of days ago was full of reports that:
Tony Blair will use the restoration of a democratic government in Iraq to activate a pull-out programme that could see UK troops start to withdraw within weeks.
Although Iraq remains convulsed by violence and under constant threat of civil war, Blair and US President George Bush will this week thrash out the final details of their plan to leave Iraq.
And:
British officials said they expected all foreign combat troops to withdraw from Iraq within four years, as Prime Minister Tony Blair flew into Baghdad to show support to its new government on Monday.
It was the firmest statement yet from one of the two main allies in the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein on a date for pulling out troops from Iraq. Washington has said it is too soon to discuss such a timetable.
I'm not saying the news of Britian's impending formalized withdrawal from Iraq -- exactly what many liberals to Blair's left are calling for -- can't be reconciled with Blair's Blueprint essay, but you think Wittman would at least address the issue before swinging into attack mode:
The Moose makes a distinction between "left" and "progressive." Indeed, in this fight against radical Jihadism, some conservatives promote progressive international objectives while some liberals would capitulate to reaction most foul. And this is a moment of unusual bedfellows. When it comes to national security policy, the American Prospect and the American Conservative are kissing cousins.
The Moose suggests that Old Robert Taft could identify more with these Democratic lefties than could Harry Truman.
Truman I don't know. But if the Moose would have stifled his incohate rage for a few minutes to read the Tomasky piece at the top of the page he links to at TAP, he'd see this:
The answer to the above question about whether the Iraq War belongs to the tradition of Cold War liberalism is a reverberating, ear-splitting “no.” The ’48ers, according to Beinart’s own argument, were masters of restraint. They would never have endorsed a unilateral and “preventive” war like the current one. They fought conservatives advocating “rollback” then (precursors to today’s neoconservatives); and, as of early 2003, two of them, Schlesinger and George F. Kennan, were still around to tell us that they opposed an invasion of Iraq.
For what it's worth, I just recently sat down and read The Vital Center and was going to blog on something similar. Like Tomasky says, Schlesinger explicitly argues in it against escalating the Cold War. His essential point is that liberalism ought to be confident enough in itself (without being overconfident in humanity in general) to believe that simply containing the totalitarian world and engaging in the diplomatic and humantarian arenas with marginal states that might be tempted by its embrace will be enough to eventually prevail in the battle of ideologies.
Moreover, as Tomasky notes, the "doughfaces" actually were, in many cases, members of the Amerian Communist Party, or at least overt communist sympathisers in the face of all the evidence of Stalin's Terror and even the ugliness an violence of Lenin's politics. Schlesinger harped on this fact. In The Vital Center, he specifically grounds the danger of communism to liberalism in the fact that it claims much of the same agenda and many of the same goals. Mainly that's economic and social egalitarianism and the fair return for labour services provided. But communism also espoused modern attitudes toward gender and race shared by many liberals, as well as the rejection of formal religion. The latter three are absolutely antithetical to radical Islam; the first two are only a secondary concern, not the driving force of the various Islamist movements that they were for communism. There's just no reason to fear that the appeal of jihadism as a philosophy will undermine a lazy liberalism. None at all.
I don't agree with the entirety of Tomasky's article. But nobody could possibly embody his basic point -- that, in the absense of any real doughfaces, the would-be neo-Schlesingers like Peter Beinart had to invent them out of serious liberals just slightly more skeptical about the use of force in the world -- better than Wittman. Wittman's analogies (not just in this post) are totally specious. There is no American Jihadi Party today. No serious voices on the left are defending Sharia law or the political tactics of radical Islam or actually hope to see it spread. (Or, for that matter -- though Wittman makes no apparent distinction -- Baathism.) In this debate, the questions whose answers TAP and TNR liberals differ over are far more practical than ideological. And, in a practical sense, the doves were apparently right with regard to Iraq. It follows, Tomasky and his colleagues say, that they should be listened to with regard to Iran and other future conflicts in the "War on Terror".
Wittman will never engage with arguments like these, or with Tomasky who, by all appearances, knows a hell of a lot more about the world than Wittman ever will. He bridles with outrage at a bit of Harold Meyerson snark, and dismisses the TAP brand of liberalism as a new form of doughface, both dangerous to and antithetical to "real" progressivism. This is grandiose and ignorant. The DLC embarrasses itself by continue to associate with his brand of non-argument.
[Blair] realizes that it would be disastrous to abandon Iraq to the tender mercies of Zarqawi. Moreover, the British PM deeply understands that this is now the central battleground in the fight against the Jihadists - if we lose our will, we will reap the whirlwind for many decades to come.
But the news just a couple of days ago was full of reports that:
Tony Blair will use the restoration of a democratic government in Iraq to activate a pull-out programme that could see UK troops start to withdraw within weeks.
Although Iraq remains convulsed by violence and under constant threat of civil war, Blair and US President George Bush will this week thrash out the final details of their plan to leave Iraq.
And:
British officials said they expected all foreign combat troops to withdraw from Iraq within four years, as Prime Minister Tony Blair flew into Baghdad to show support to its new government on Monday.
It was the firmest statement yet from one of the two main allies in the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein on a date for pulling out troops from Iraq. Washington has said it is too soon to discuss such a timetable.
I'm not saying the news of Britian's impending formalized withdrawal from Iraq -- exactly what many liberals to Blair's left are calling for -- can't be reconciled with Blair's Blueprint essay, but you think Wittman would at least address the issue before swinging into attack mode:
The Moose makes a distinction between "left" and "progressive." Indeed, in this fight against radical Jihadism, some conservatives promote progressive international objectives while some liberals would capitulate to reaction most foul. And this is a moment of unusual bedfellows. When it comes to national security policy, the American Prospect and the American Conservative are kissing cousins.
The Moose suggests that Old Robert Taft could identify more with these Democratic lefties than could Harry Truman.
Truman I don't know. But if the Moose would have stifled his incohate rage for a few minutes to read the Tomasky piece at the top of the page he links to at TAP, he'd see this:
The answer to the above question about whether the Iraq War belongs to the tradition of Cold War liberalism is a reverberating, ear-splitting “no.” The ’48ers, according to Beinart’s own argument, were masters of restraint. They would never have endorsed a unilateral and “preventive” war like the current one. They fought conservatives advocating “rollback” then (precursors to today’s neoconservatives); and, as of early 2003, two of them, Schlesinger and George F. Kennan, were still around to tell us that they opposed an invasion of Iraq.
For what it's worth, I just recently sat down and read The Vital Center and was going to blog on something similar. Like Tomasky says, Schlesinger explicitly argues in it against escalating the Cold War. His essential point is that liberalism ought to be confident enough in itself (without being overconfident in humanity in general) to believe that simply containing the totalitarian world and engaging in the diplomatic and humantarian arenas with marginal states that might be tempted by its embrace will be enough to eventually prevail in the battle of ideologies.
Moreover, as Tomasky notes, the "doughfaces" actually were, in many cases, members of the Amerian Communist Party, or at least overt communist sympathisers in the face of all the evidence of Stalin's Terror and even the ugliness an violence of Lenin's politics. Schlesinger harped on this fact. In The Vital Center, he specifically grounds the danger of communism to liberalism in the fact that it claims much of the same agenda and many of the same goals. Mainly that's economic and social egalitarianism and the fair return for labour services provided. But communism also espoused modern attitudes toward gender and race shared by many liberals, as well as the rejection of formal religion. The latter three are absolutely antithetical to radical Islam; the first two are only a secondary concern, not the driving force of the various Islamist movements that they were for communism. There's just no reason to fear that the appeal of jihadism as a philosophy will undermine a lazy liberalism. None at all.
I don't agree with the entirety of Tomasky's article. But nobody could possibly embody his basic point -- that, in the absense of any real doughfaces, the would-be neo-Schlesingers like Peter Beinart had to invent them out of serious liberals just slightly more skeptical about the use of force in the world -- better than Wittman. Wittman's analogies (not just in this post) are totally specious. There is no American Jihadi Party today. No serious voices on the left are defending Sharia law or the political tactics of radical Islam or actually hope to see it spread. (Or, for that matter -- though Wittman makes no apparent distinction -- Baathism.) In this debate, the questions whose answers TAP and TNR liberals differ over are far more practical than ideological. And, in a practical sense, the doves were apparently right with regard to Iraq. It follows, Tomasky and his colleagues say, that they should be listened to with regard to Iran and other future conflicts in the "War on Terror".
Wittman will never engage with arguments like these, or with Tomasky who, by all appearances, knows a hell of a lot more about the world than Wittman ever will. He bridles with outrage at a bit of Harold Meyerson snark, and dismisses the TAP brand of liberalism as a new form of doughface, both dangerous to and antithetical to "real" progressivism. This is grandiose and ignorant. The DLC embarrasses itself by continue to associate with his brand of non-argument.
1 Comments:
Hi Dustin -- I guess I think Tomasky's piece would be better with the first few paragraphs, and the last, lopped off. IMO, the score-settling over Iraq is a bit tiring on both sides -- especially since it's score settling over a debate that (a) looks like a rock solid case mainly in retrospect and (b) liberals had no hope of influencing anyway. A united liberal-elite-journal concensus against invading Iraq the second time would have changed nothing; it was a Bush war and it was going forward so long as Bush's numbers were like they were. The debate is fairly academic, fairly personal. And that's the central thing to recognize. But Tomasky -- who is normally an amazingly level headed pundit imo -- treats the personal as the universal to some extent. He sort of nurses his grievances, however legit they might be on a personal level (Beinart was an ass in the WaPo and on TV in 2002. But pundits in elite journals aren't really in the business of attacking each other for assholery but for the strength or weakness of their arguments.) He also understates Beinart's apologia. Like Kaplan, Beinart was one of the earlier hawks (and the first at TNR) to repent, and he seems to actually have rethought other things between 2004, when he wrote the article version of A Fighting Faith, and now, cushy book deal or no. Tomasky asks: why listen to you about the future if you were wrong? But then he also says he'd like to "talk with Beinart about the future", but just "not yet". So how long does the period of repentence go on? Is there some defined period of penance during which Tomasky and other liberals shouldn't listen to Beinart before he's let back in the fold? The whole construct is just a bit nebulous, and the petulance - again, however pesonally justified -- undermines Tomasky's more substantive points, like the ones I highlighted above.
I'd be interested in your thoughts as well.
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