LOST IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM

How liberals lost their way (Robert Fulford, National Post, July 1st, 2006)

These ancient Cold War questions have recently been revived by a fascinating book hidden beneath a clumsy subtitle, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart of the New Republic.

This is a passionate political love story. Beinart adores the intellectuals who fought for president Harry Truman's anti-Soviet policies in the 1940s. And, Beinart believes, liberals of today can learn from that noble history. The same principles that eventually defeated communism (even if Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were in at the kill) can now inspire American liberals to fight jihadism.

Emboldened, they could breathe fresh life into the Democratic Party, defeat the Republicans, and build a new foreign policy. They could marry military strength to multilateral idealism, as late-1940s America married the threat of atomic weapons to the Marshall Plan. A patriotic, humanitarian and progressive Democratic administration could restore the internationally co-operative style of previous generations and discard George W. Bush's go-it-alone bravado.

Beinart believes liberals should be ready to use American power -- but in the spirit articulated by John Kennedy, emphasizing "not the export of arms or the show of armed might but the export of ideas, of techniques, and the rebirth of our traditional sympathy for the desires of men to be free."

Is Beinart dreaming? His back-to-the-future argument will certainly be discussed by Democrats -- but perhaps it won't go beyond discussion. Hard-core Democrats won't change their beliefs with a light heart. Their intransigence is founded on cherished 40-year-old memories. Even today, they remain governed by the 1960s. Beinart, a post-boomer of 35, doesn't seem to understand how deeply the '60s ethos burned itself into the souls of his parents' generation. He's studied that period with care, but he knows only the words, not the music.

Kennedy's assassination in 1963, followed by Lyndon Johnson's expansion of the Vietnam war, dissolved Truman's consensus. To the mortification of their elders, many eager young activists let it be known that they considered anti-communism a joke, an obsession of their fathers. The New Left, founded in 1962 to express a generation's ideals, turned against democracy itself, not just Vietnam and other American mistakes. In 1968 New Leftists rejoiced when they helped force Johnson to retire. For a giddy moment, the young and the radical imagined they had all the answers to questions of social justice.

They were fools, but important fools. Ignorant of history, contemptuous of freedom, they nevertheless shaped the underlying assumptions of the generation now controlling much of the Democratic party. And as the New Left gained force, traditional liberalism buckled.

Individuals can renounce the mistakes of their youth, but never a whole generation. Opposition to the war on terror and the visceral anti-Americanism that attends it are not fueled by any rational policy analyses or coherent world view, but by the desperate existential attempt of history’s most self-indulgent generation to cheat death by living the putative glories of their youths forever. The West will survive Darwin, Freud and Marx, but whether it can survive the legacy of these men-children is a whole other question.