George F. Will and Christopher Hitchens on ‘The Good Fight’: Faced with fascism, what does a liberal do?

Leave it to a conservative and a radical to remind us where American liberals came from -- from liberalism, as in liberty, as in liberation, as in feeling an urgency to free the world.

Both George F. Will and Christopher Hitchens say the Left is losing its liberalism.

Will, in his "Lessons for Liberals" column (hat tip: Kevin), recalls post-World War II America, another time when some who claimed to be liberals adopted the philosophy that the world’s biggest problem wasn’t the totalitarians, but the democracies.

Clear thinkers. At that time, Will tells us, the Democratic Party had leaders with the clear heads and courage to renounce that kind of stupid thinking. Will points to New Republic editor Peter Beinart’s new book, "The Good Fight," which traces the rise and fall of modern liberalism, and the corruption of "liberalism" as a word.

Will says:

Among the heroes of liberalism’s civil war of 60 years ago was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who today is 88. He stigmatized the [Progressive Henry] Wallace supporters’ anti-anti-communism as "doughface-ism." Beinart explains: "The original doughfaces were ‘Northern men with Southern principles’ -- Northerners who opposed slavery, but who could not bring themselves to support the Civil War." Today’s doughfaces are "progressives" who flinch from the fact that, as Beinart says, "America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first."

Post-Vietnam cynicism. The reality-based liberals formed the Americans for Democratic Action, got liberal Harry Truman elected to a full four-year term, and set liberalism on a practical, principled course. Then the Vietnam War intervened, and many Democrats irrationally concluded that defending the defenseless and freeing the oppressed no longer was a worthy cause. Large numbers of people calling themselves liberals dropped forever the idea of liberating foreigners.

The rule of the post-Vietnam War Democrat became: If we can’t hear their screams, they don’t deserve our help. If we have to risk tens of thousands of lives to save millions, it’s too much to ask.

Yet Beinart himself says his early support for the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Like Francis Fukuyama, Beinart now says we should have given the "containment" of Saddam Hussein more time. That’s where Christopher Hitchens, a radical liberal (or liberal radical), takes Beinart to task.

Good fights. Hitchens notes that Beinart’s book title, "The Good Fight," refers to the only time in history that American leftist radicals favored a "foreign entanglement" -- the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. After losing that war, most radicals reacted by refusing to declare any wrong was worth righting by force. It was their stand throughout the Cold War (1945-1991).

When the Cold War ended, Americans calling themselves liberals opposed the expulsion of Saddam’s army from Kuwait in 1991, even though the annexation of Kuwait would have guaranteed Saddam nuclear weapons and, potentially, a further expansion of his police state into other lands. "No blood for oil," cried the foes of the first President Bush’s Desert Storm.

A few years later, leaders of the soft Left gave lukewarm encouragement to ending the genocide in Bosnia, and that support came only after they could assure themselves and their peers that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in this U.S. rescue mission that would benefit U.S. capitalist pigs. "No oil for blood," Hitchens calls this policy.

Hitchens writes:

All of this was a dismal prelude to the crisis that struck the United States in the fall of 2001. One knew, before that terrible day was out, what would be said by the academic and journalistic and Hollywood Left. Much of the rhetoric of that time has been forgotten (though not by me), and now those who never wanted a fight in Afghanistan in the first place are free to complain that the war with al-Qaeda in Iraq is a distraction from the struggle they opposed.

Islamofascism, fascism and reality. Hitchens forgives the doughfaces of 1947 and 1948 for their failure to understand the deadly repression of the Soviet Union. At least the Soviets talked of rationality and equality. But Hitchens condemns today’s so-called "progressives" for pretending the Islamist fanatics and Baathist fascists could have been ignored.

The hard-liners in 1948 were principled enough to do the Democratic Party the favor of deserting it and running their own slate. They were also, one might concede, at least intelligible in their naivete about the U.S.S.R. A thinking person could, then at least, be brought to believe that state socialism was an improvement on monopoly capitalism, and that war was to be avoided at any price.

In the present case, however, not only are the hard-liners the activist and fund-raising core of the party; they also express ambivalence about a foe that does not even pretend to share the values of the Enlightenment, and that is furthermore immune to the cruder rationality of MAD. The Soviet leadership had every reason to avoid suicide, while the Islamist fanatics dream of nothing else.

In this context, Beinart’s wishful and halfhearted belief that Saddam Hussein could have been contained is the one position that nobody can seriously hold. He gives himself away when he argues that a continuation of the cruel and indiscriminate sanctions could have led the Baathist regime to self-destruct. Has he even tried to imagine what Iraq would have looked like on the day that that self-destruction occurred? Let us just assume that it would not have been a Velvet Revolution. It would have more closely resembled a Rwanda or a Congo on the Gulf. Bad as things are now, they would certainly have been worse.

Beinart in the mirror. Beinart argues that American liberalism has a duty to acknowledge there are atrocities worth stopping and principles worth fighting for. But in reversing his position on liberating Iraq, Beinart has a ready-made new chapter for his book on the doughfaces who claim to be liberals until the going gets tough.

By holding a mirror to Beinart, Will and Hitchens do him a favor. He’s got pseudo-liberal lines all over his face.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Christopher Taylor]

Doughface. Yeah I can work with that, that's a better term than "modern 'liberal'," although it's not sufficiently descriptive. The modern moonbat leftist is not simply opposed to taking proper action in defense of liberty, he's actually in favor of taking action that will reduce liberty among his own people.

[George Kiss]

Reading this in 2018, with 20/20 hindsight of course. This article encompasses the essence of neo-conservatism. Made a whole lot of sense at the time....

[Frank Warner]

And perhaps it did make sense.

But put a "neo" in front of anything, and you're bound to further confuse the already complicated.