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| Thursday, December 09, 2004 |
| Revisiting the TNR Argument |
A week ago I wrote a post discussing and linking to an article in The New Republic by its president, Peter Beinart, that argued that the Democratic Party needs to eliminate from its ranks those "softs" who don't recognize the importance of the fight against totalitarianism and Iraq's specific role therein, much the same way the party in the 40s had to purge communists to win the trust of the American people.
As you'll see I expressed some reservations, and later had a good email exchange with my friend Seth (the next Bob Schrum of the Democratic Party) about it. Here's another analysis from Ruy Teixeira, who wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, who links to others on TNR taking issue with the piece. I'll post those two articles in full in the link below.
Noam Scheiber argues that putting all the blame on the party is unfair, and that more of it should fall on the specific candidate we had, rather than the party's message. Included in his piece is a well-stated version on why I liked Dean all along:
It was one reason I thought Dean was a decent strategic choice (at least before his mid-winter gaffe-fest). My feeling was that the party was dysfunctional: You had to win the support of liberals to win the nomination, but what you had to do to win their support basically made you unelectable. The trick, in my mind, was to appeal to liberals in the least substantive (and therefore least damaging) way possible. In Dean, I saw someone who appealed to liberals stylistically--with his angry, anti-Bush screeds--while remaining substantively pretty moderate.
I disagree somewhat with Scheiber's assessment of the 2008 candidates. The most pragmatic democrats will first and foremost want someone who is decisive and strong-willed (Hillary works there). And rather than moving closer to the center (where TNR firmly resides), I think it's more important for the party to remove the stain from liberalism by showing what liberal values mean to working people. But that's another post...
In the second piece (full text in link below), John Judis makes some good points, including the fact that a Dem Party full of Joe Liebermen is likely to make people like me go elsewhere. He also takes Beinart (and Bush) to task for proposing a "neo-imperial" foreign policy. I wholeheartedly agree. I understand that we feel we are doing the right thing for the world by pushing democracy. But if the tables were turned, and Saudi Arabia or Iran had the world's best military, and they strongly believed that the world was better off as a calyphate, would that give them the right to make war at will to convert to that system? See the following quote: The United States cannot allow a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, with apocalyptic aims, to kill its citizens; nor could it allow a regime like the Taliban to harbor terrorists. But the United States also has to recognize the roots of Al Qaeda in the cauldron of the Middle East--not in its poverty or destitution, but in its troubled relations to the West, for which the West itself bears some responsibility. Invading and occupying Iraq was exactly the wrong thing to do.
And further, a much-better restatement of the argument I made to Seth: Should we be engaged, as Peter suggests, in a "global campaign for freedom"? America should always stand for freedom--although not the Republicans' Wal-Mart variety--but what we ought to do about it depends on historical circumstances. No one is suggesting, I hope, that the United States invade or break relations with China because it is still a communist oligarchy. And the Middle East is, if anything, an even more problematic region for advocates of global democracy. Genuine democracy, and not simply a transient, jerry-rigged electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos, will eventually come to that region, but it will be through the initiative of the people themselves, not through the imposition of a hostile power.
Feel free to discuss in the comments
Blame Worthy
by Noam Scheiber
date: 12.06.04
The major debate going on in the Democratic Party these days is over how much blame to assign John Kerry for his defeat in November versus how much to assign the party itself. The implications are obvious: If the party simply nominated an uncharismatic and unlikeable standard-bearer, we can fix the problem by nominating someone more likeable next time around. But if the party needs a fundamental overhaul, then even a highly charismatic, highly skilled candidate won't save Democrats from themselves in 2008.
In this week's TNR cover story, my boss, Peter Beinart, puts the blame for Kerry's loss squarely on the party. He argues that Democrats lost the election because they failed to convince the country they had a compelling agenda for winning the war on terror, or that this agenda was their highest priority. (It's an assessment I completely agree with.) Peter further argues that there are structural forces within the party that prevent it, or its candidates, from fully embracing national security issues--namely, the party's reflexively dovish left-wing, best epitomized by Michael Moore and MoveOn.org, which he dubs "softs." Peter writes, "Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel"--the meeting where anti-Communist liberals decided that the struggle against totalitarianism would be the central struggle of cold-war liberalism. He concludes that "the hour is getting late," by which I take him to mean that Democrats will not regain their political footing until they put the fight against Islamo-fascism at the center of their agenda.
It's on this last point that we disagree. There's no question that today's softs are a problem for Democrats, especially among certain constituencies. (While reporting a piece about Republican outreach to Jewish voters this summer, I heard over and over--even from liberal Jews--that Kerry's reasonable-sounding positions on Israel and the war on terror were being overshadowed by the views of the party's liberal wing on these issues.) There's also no question Peter is right in his long-term prescription. It's hard to imagine Democrats staying competitive as a national party over the next several decades without making national security their central focus--at least not if Islamic terror ends up defining American politics during that time, which we have every reason to believe will be the case. All of that said, I don't see any evidence that the current structure of the Democratic Party prevented John Kerry from winning in 2004, or that it will prevent the party from winning the presidency in 2008--maybe not even in 2012. Peter was, I think, much too hard on the party and much too easy on Kerry.
Where Peter goes wrong is in his analysis of Kerry's victorious primary campaign, which he attributes largely to Kerry's vote against the $87 billion supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan in October 2003. It's certainly true that the Kerry camp felt it had to oppose this funding, given the hold of the party's liberal wing on the nomination process, and given Howard Dean's obvious success at wooing this wing. What's not at all clear is that Kerry's vote actually paid any political dividends for him. Kerry continued to languish far behind Dean in key primary-state polls for some six weeks after the vote. And when Kerry finally did reemerge as a contender in Iowa (and therefore in the larger nomination fight), it wasn't because he'd managed to out-liberal Dean. It was because he'd managed to out-sane him--or at least out-electable him. (And, you could argue, because he'd opted out of the public finance system and started spending millions of his own money.)
A series of gaffes--the biggest being Dean's comment that Saddam Hussein's capture hadn't made America any safer--highlighted Dean's flaws as a candidate. Meanwhile, as Dean imploded, Kerry played up his record of sober, steady leadership and his national security bona fides. He said the country faced a "dual danger": "On one side is President Bush, who has taken America off on a road of unilateralism and ideological preemption. On the other side are those in my own party who threaten to take us down a road of confusion and retreat." At campaign rallies, Kerry told supporters he knew a thing or two about aircraft carriers "for real"--an allusion to George W. Bush's tawdry USS Lincoln landing in May 2003--and that if Bush wanted to make the election about national security, he had three words for him: "Bring it on." The Democratic rank and file ate it up.
The sudden change in the dynamics of the primary race was probably best epitomized by the unofficial Kerry campaign slogan at the time: "Dated Dean, married Kerry." The flirtation with Dean had been a highly satisfying fling, but, when it came time to vote, Democrats wanted someone who could win, not someone who touched them in their Bush-hating erogenous zones. Exit polls of the Iowa caucuses showed Kerry's come-from-behind victory to be almost entirely a function of his perceived electability. In the end, it's likely that a vote in favor of the $87 billion would have actually enhanced Kerry's appeal rather than alienated liberals. At the very least, it's hard to argue that it would have undermined his campaign.
In Peter's (and the Kerry campaign's) defense, I also thought the Democratic base--and its liberal, antiwar reflexes--would be extremely influential in selecting the Democratic nominee. It was one reason I thought Dean was a decent strategic choice (at least before his mid-winter gaffe-fest). My feeling was that the party was dysfunctional: You had to win the support of liberals to win the nomination, but what you had to do to win their support basically made you unelectable. The trick, in my mind, was to appeal to liberals in the least substantive (and therefore least damaging) way possible. In Dean, I saw someone who appealed to liberals stylistically--with his angry, anti-Bush screeds--while remaining substantively pretty moderate. (Dean was more moderate than his reputation even on Iraq. He'd usually concede that, now that we were there, we had to stick around until we'd stabilized the country, because to cut and run would create an even bigger disaster.)
In retrospect, we were all too pessimistic. A heartbreakingly close 2000 election and three years of chafing under Bush had made Democratic primary voters incredibly pragmatic. They valued winning much more than they valued ideological purity, as they eventually demonstrated by nominating Kerry. In fact, had Peter and I (and the rest of the DC commentariat) been paying attention, we'd have realized just how pragmatic the Democratic base really was. One telling example: Michael Moore--Peter's archetypal "soft"--endorsed Wesley Clark several months before the Iowa caucuses. Clark's candidacy actually attracted a lot of support from Hollywood liberals and from the liberal elements of the blogosphere even though, as Peter notes, he promised to make the war on terror the focus of his campaign. Liberals didn't care. They saw Clark as a guy who could beat Bush at his own game. (Though it should be pointed out that Clark opposed the war in Iraq--at least on most days.)
And, of course, all this was doubly true by the time of the general election, by which point the desire to beat Bush was so intense Kerry was actually raising money at a faster clip than the president. Much of that money came from small donors over the Internet--the same group that had fueled Howard Dean's primary campaign. Even more astounding, Bush's colossal bungling of the war in Iraq had become so apparent, that, far from demanding a withdrawal, many liberals began attacking Bush from the right. "In early 2002 the Bush administration, already focused on Iraq, ignored pleas to commit more forces to Afghanistan," Paul Krugman complained in a September 14 column. "In the buildup to the Iraq war, commanders wanted a bigger invasion force to help secure the country. But civilian officials, eager to prove that wars can be fought on the cheap, refused. And that's one main reason our soldiers are still dying in Iraq." The column was warmly received, among other places, on Daily Kos, probably the most influential liberal blog around.
Peter is right that, even during this time, interest in national security among the Democratic rank and file was low (though the polling data he cites doesn't capture the obvious hostility to the Bush administration's Iraq policies). But the Democratic base was so pragmatic in its determination to oust Bush that Kerry could have gotten away with proposing a truly dramatic foreign policy initiative--say, a get-tough policy on Iran, possibly culminating in a military strike--without suffering more than a handful of defections. Making proposals like this a central theme of his campaign would have jarred swing voters out of the presumption that Kerry and the party were chronically suspicious of exercising military power. And it would have done much to reshape the views of swing voters on any number of issues, from Iraq to terrorism to proliferation. That Kerry didn't exploit the leeway liberals gave him is a reflection of his weakness as a candidate, and of his own hyper-cautious, excessively realist worldview.
The irony is that, now that Bush has won reelection, this apparent paradox on the American left--it is programmatically and rhetorically ideological but politically pragmatic--will only be heightened. The left will become even more shrill in its denunciations of Bush and even more worried about the damage the administration is inflicting on the country. But, at the same time, it will become even more convinced of the need to elect a Democratic president in 2008 (and maybe a Democratic congress before then). How do we know? So far, the only two prescriptions to emerge from Democrats' post-election round of self-flagellation have been that the party should move closer to the center on national security and on values (I happen to think the two are actually connected). Almost no one, not even on the far left, has suggested that the next Democratic nominee run further to the left in 2008 than Kerry did in 2004. (To the contrary, Hillary Clinton's stock among likely Democratic primary voters has plummeted since the election, as even liberal Democrats realize the party is unlikely to win running someone with such a liberal reputation.) The upshot is that the Democratic primary candidates in 2008 will have even more leeway to run to the center on security and values than Kerry did this year. Should they choose not to take advantage of that leeway, it will be another historic error--and much less excusable than this year.
One reason to suspect they won't repeat that mistake is that, as Peter points out, the Democratic elite--both the party's foreign policy establishment and its top layer of consultants and strategists--is either hawkish or functionally hawkish (in that it recognizes the political imperative of campaigning as a hawk). The combination of a hawkish elite and a highly pragmatic base probably ensures that the next Democratic nominee will make national security a central theme of his campaign. If you don't believe me, just look at the Republican Party. While it's true, as Peter says, that rank-and-file Republicans are far more concerned with national security than rank-and-file Democrats, it's a stretch to argue that there's much of a constituency in the GOP for the "near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might" that Peter attributes to Bush and Dick Cheney. (After all, the party includes a lot of Midwestern and Southern isolationists who'd just as soon devote the money we're spending in Iraq to tax cuts or agricultural subsidies.) Neoconservatism has been an almost entirely top-down project in the Republican Party to date. But that hasn't made it any less successful politically.
That said, even if it's possible to get by with a hawkish elite and a pragmatic or indifferent base, I agree that it's a lousy strategy for the long term. For one thing, you can't count on the base staying pragmatic forever. For another, when it comes to policy (as opposed to politics), tensions between the desires of the base and the desires of the party elite tend to surface pretty quickly. Had John Kerry won in November, he would have eventually had to choose between opening firehouses in Baghdad and opening those firehouses in Detroit, and that decision could have provoked a nasty intramural fight. (Or, maybe worse, not provoked a fight.) Finally, the tensions between a party's grassroots and its elite over policy tend to create big political opportunities for the opposition party--something we already see on the Republican side. As Peter points out, there's a huge tension between the GOP base's infatuation with tax cuts and the White House's commitments to Iraq and to fighting the war on terror. (Now if only the Democrats would exploit it...)
Ultimately, then, the debate between me and Peter comes down to timing: Peter wants to begin purging the softs and restructuring the Democratic Party today, the implication being that the party can't win again until that happens. (Though Peter would probably concede that things will get worse before they get better.) My advice would be to move more gradually. I'm convinced we can win the White House in 2008 with no top-to-bottom overhaul, just a better candidate and a smarter campaign. At that point, the job of restructuring the party along the lines Peter recommends would become much easier, since a Democratic president would be able to point to a tangible reward for his emphasis on national security (i.e., the White House)--and since, as Peter points out, it's probably easier to reinvent your party when you're in power than when you're powerless (since you can actually enact your desired policies--and reap the rewards from them in terms of public opinion. You can also punish dissidents more effectively.). One could argue that a debate over timing isn't really a debate at all. But it turns out that, in politics, timing is everything. Just ask Howard Dean and John Kerry.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at TNR.
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Purpose Driven
by John B. Judis
Post date: 12.08.04
There are two points that I strongly agree with in Peter Beinart's recent cover story on the Democratic Party. First, I agree that Kerry's difficulties stemmed to a great extent from his failure to articulate a clear and consistent foreign policy, particularly on the Iraq war. Kerry's equivocation reflected on his character and his ability to extricate the United States from its worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. Second, I agree with what is implicit in Peter's essay: that the Democrats lacked an animating moral purpose, particularly in comparison with Bush and the Republicans. Peter would endow the party with one by adopting a new crusade against terror in imitation of the older crusade against communism; my own feelings on where the Democrats' can find a moral purpose are more in line with historian Eli Zaretsky's take on the subject. But I think on these two points, Peter is generally right and has performed an important service.
As for our areas of disagreement: First, I don't favor his political prescriptions. Initiating factional warfare with, or even purging, everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman will not create a viable Democratic Party. Okay, that may be an exaggeration of what Peter prescribes, but there are clear echoes in his essay of Ben Wattenberg's Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which tried to do something similar after the 1972 Democratic defeat by creating a party centered around Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. The voters didn't buy it, and they won't buy Peter's party either.
Peter also misunderstands MoveOn.org and the various other Internet-based groups that have sprung up in the last five years. They are not an old-fashioned militant left but part of a college-educated post-industrial center-left politics that was developing under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One of their big issues was the deficit, hardly a left-wing concern. They became identified with "the left" because they were early and prescient opponents of the Iraq war--a position that can no longer simply be identified with the left and that is not a reason to criticize them. Sure, they shouldn't have participated in marches with the Workers World Party, but these new movements are organized by people who don't have long political pedigrees. If anything, they are the best hope for a new moral vision that will animate the Democrats.
It's difficult in a short space to lay out where I disagree with Peter's foreign policy, which is implicit in the piece and not fully explained. For starters, though, I don't accept the comparison between the Cold War and the "war on terror." The Bush administration has used an extraordinary disaster, the September 11 attacks, to justify a politics of fear and a neo-imperial foreign policy. Al Qaeda was the outgrowth--decadent and deranged, to be sure--of the centuries-old conflict between the West and Islam, and particularly of its post-1880s phase, in which the Arab and Islamic countries of the region were dominated, formally and informally, by the British and French and later the Americans. The version of nationalism that arose in response to this domination often took religious--that is, Islamic--form. With Al Qaeda, it has taken an almost entirely religious, messianic form.
That older imperial conflict has still not faded in the Middle East, as it has in, say, much of Asia--and it won't fade as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not equitably resolved and as long as the United States, now the main Western power in the region, is closely identified with autocratic regimes in the Gulf and in Egypt. The Bush administration's war of choice against Iraq and its uncritical support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have only reinforced and deepened the problem.
The United States needed to respond to the September 11 attacks, as it also needed to respond to attacks going back to 1993. But the Bush administration's undifferentiated concept of a war on terror (which Peter himself has criticized) elevated one part of the response to the whole. The United States cannot allow a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, with apocalyptic aims, to kill its citizens; nor could it allow a regime like the Taliban to harbor terrorists. But the United States also has to recognize the roots of Al Qaeda in the cauldron of the Middle East--not in its poverty or destitution, but in its troubled relations to the West, for which the West itself bears some responsibility. Invading and occupying Iraq was exactly the wrong thing to do. Now the United States needs to find a way to multilateralize and minimize our presence in Iraq, normalize our relations with Iran, and put our full weight behind the resumption of the peace process, regardless of who wins the Palestinian election. The rhetoric of the war on terror--and the comparison with the Cold War--blinds us to these imperatives.
Should we be engaged, as Peter suggests, in a "global campaign for freedom"? America should always stand for freedom--although not the Republicans' Wal-Mart variety--but what we ought to do about it depends on historical circumstances. No one is suggesting, I hope, that the United States invade or break relations with China because it is still a communist oligarchy. And the Middle East is, if anything, an even more problematic region for advocates of global democracy. Genuine democracy, and not simply a transient, jerry-rigged electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos, will eventually come to that region, but it will be through the initiative of the people themselves, not through the imposition of a hostile power.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at TNR and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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posted by CB @ 9:11 AM   |
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| 5 Comments: |
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CB,
You say "Genuine democracy, and not simply a transient, jerry-rigged electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos" will eventually come to the Mideast, and I think that sounds great.
However, I wonder, how could we characterize the U.S. version of democracy?
(1)Is it transient? I don't think so.
(2)Is it a jerry-rigged electoral process? Some Op-ed writer somewhere must have said this about our election either this year or in 2000.
(3) Is this electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos? No. But America is divided on some issues fairly sharply. For instance, I liked the Desperate Housewives MNF intro, and my guess is, Jerry Fallwell did not.
My point is, Democracy has issues as a concept. It's hard for the people to make a social contract sometimes, but that doesn't mean it's not a good thing or the best thing. Instead of looking at the Beinart idea of diplomacy as the U.S. becoming a Hobbesian Leviathan, scaring countries into submission under the aegis of spreading democracy as a public relations move, maybe try another perspective. I call it: "giving them a shot". See, we're giving them a shot at democracy. Sure, democracy is difficult to establish in a country where bullets and shrapnel riddle your kitchen as your eating some corn flakes, but democracy deserves that chance, no matter how bad the odds seem. And maybe it is jerry-rigged, but the voters will figure it out and make the system right, and if they don't then we have more of the status quo, so what's the harm in "giving them a shot".
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BB-
Where I think the harm is is in Hadley Arkes's favorite danger: might makes right. As Lincoln said to Douglas, just because white people are in power today they are able to enslave blacks. If the situation were reversed, and blacks were in power, would you think they had the right to enslave whites?
Similarly, I (perhaps narrow-mindedly) view foreign policy in somewhat the same way. It's convenient for me as an American citizen to be represented by the most powerful military. But because we believe democracy is right for the middle east, does that give us the right to violently impose it on them, rather than have them self-determine, perhaps with our encouragement? And what if in 30 years they develop a new-fangled remote control bomb that they can detonate anywhere anytime they want - does that then give them the right to impose their favored political system on us, because they think the world would be better off that way?
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It sounds like this guy Hadley Arkes you mention would respond:
Democracy is a universal good. And you are a moral relativist.
And if you disagree, then you've misfired.
And who is BB?
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Yea, Arkes and I never got along.
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Colin, I think you mistakenly assume that people in the middle east freely choose totalitarian regimes. The analogy to slavery fails because whites were oppressing blacks whereas the purpose of democratic intervention ( at least ideally even if not practiced by Bush) is to empower indivuals within such countries to freely choose their own governments. If Iraqis freely chose totalitarian dictatorship, then we would arguably be imposing our system of values upon them. Yet when one system - dictatorship - is imposed upon them, then what is the possible harm of replacing one imposition that does not even urport to require the consent of the governed with one that does. To revisit the slavery analogy, it would be as if the North was unjustified in abolishing slavery and invading the South, becasue the South, if militarily more powerful, could invade the north and re-enslave blacks.
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CB,
You say "Genuine democracy, and not simply a transient, jerry-rigged electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos" will eventually come to the Mideast, and I think that sounds great.
However, I wonder, how could we characterize the U.S. version of democracy?
(1)Is it transient? I don't think so.
(2)Is it a jerry-rigged electoral process? Some Op-ed writer somewhere must have said this about our election either this year or in 2000.
(3) Is this electoral process erected atop sectarian chaos? No. But America is divided on some issues fairly sharply. For instance, I liked the Desperate Housewives MNF intro, and my guess is, Jerry Fallwell did not.
My point is, Democracy has issues as a concept. It's hard for the people to make a social contract sometimes, but that doesn't mean it's not a good thing or the best thing. Instead of looking at the Beinart idea of diplomacy as the U.S. becoming a Hobbesian Leviathan, scaring countries into submission under the aegis of spreading democracy as a public relations move, maybe try another perspective. I call it: "giving them a shot". See, we're giving them a shot at democracy. Sure, democracy is difficult to establish in a country where bullets and shrapnel riddle your kitchen as your eating some corn flakes, but democracy deserves that chance, no matter how bad the odds seem. And maybe it is jerry-rigged, but the voters will figure it out and make the system right, and if they don't then we have more of the status quo, so what's the harm in "giving them a shot".