The Revival Of Liberalism?

As all of you surely know by now, Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, recently published a cover story, “A Fighting Faith,” making an interesting argument that liberalism needs to undergo a revival and pointing to sources in its own history where both the proper values and tactics for this much needed revival can and should be found.

If you haven’t read it yet, read it. Briefly, his argument was that today’s liberals should emulate the liberals (Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, etc.) who formed the Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1940s and succeeded in displacing the “progressives” (as well as the capital-P Progressives who had supported Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party in 1948) from leadership positions in liberal organizations and in the Democratic Party. The ADA liberals, unlike those to their left whom Beinart labels “the Softs,” believed that the threat from Soviet totalitarianism was both real and paramount, while the Softs continued to believe that the most serious threats to American democracy came from Republicans and the Right at home.

Beinart’s article has already generated far too much comment on blogs and elsewhere to cite (TNR itself has already run two sets of letters about it), but a recent article by Jonah Goldberg is a good one to look at if you want to look at only one.

Not surprisingly, most of the discussion has concerned foreign policy, since that after all was the crux of Beinart’s argument. In the very few instances I’ve seen that have addressed domestic issues, the comments have been pretty much limited to concerns about civil liberties. Did the strong and outspoken anti-communism of the “Cold War Liberals” (another term for those Beinart would have current Democrats emulate) contribute to McCarthyism in the same way that the Ashcroft and the Patriot Act are crushing civil liberty today? Etc.

I believe the parallels, or lack of them, regarding civil liberties deserves more attention in this debate than it has received. For example, could one not make a good argument that the fear of threats from domestic communists, a fear that was at the center of McCarthyism, was overblown but that the parallel fear today is quite reasonable?

But whether or not one could make that argument, that’s not the argument I want to make, at least not today. Instead, I would like to point out something about the behavior of the ADA liberals in the 1940s and beyond that I have seen no one mention. The centerpiece of Beinart’s argument is that the ADA overthrew the reigning foreign policy orthodoxy among liberals and turned the Democratic Party toward a new, and in his view more responsible, course. What neither Beinart nor any of his critics that I’ve seen discuss is that the ADA and its like-minded allies did something equally dramatic on the domestic front. Not only did they lead liberals and Democrats to the front ranks of the cold warriors, they also insisted that civil rights be placed on the front burner of domestic politics. Hubert Humphrey’s speech supporting civil rights at the Democrats’ 1948 convention provoked the Strom Thurmond/Dixiecrat walkout and solidified liberal determination to push the issue of civil rights even if it risked a disruption of the Democratic Party that was as severe, if not more severe, than that produced by forcing out the Henry Wallace progressives on the left.

Not long ago I wrote, here and here, that the Democrats could “go a long way toward re-establishing their affinity with traditional American principles, principles that in the equality arena they are quite properly seen as having abandoned,” by rediscovering and reviving their traditional (until the late 1960s) commitment to the core value of treating all individuals without regard to race or ethnicity. In short, if they emulated the domestic as well as the forgeign policy agenda of the 1940s ADA — that is, if they rejected not only Michael Moore but the sort of multiculturalism that demands racial and ethnic preference — that would truly be “A Fighting Faith” worth writing home about.

That, of course, is a tall order, but it’s really no taller or more outlandish than the one Beinart in fact calls for.

An interesting and noteworthy (though unnoted by Beinart) example of how far liberalism has come since the founding of the ADA is that the ADA itself is today firmly lined up on the wrong side of both the foreign policy issue that Beinart emphasizes as well as the domestic one that is my concern here.