As seen on Medley’s Furl, Columbia PhD, Rutgers professor, and Slate “History Lesson” columnist David Greenberg reexamines the current divide between liberal internationalists and anti-imperialists among the Dems — and seems to think more of Peter Beinart’s recent “Cold War Liberal” argument and the protective camouflage DLC-types than I do — in the Boston Globe.
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I’ll have to link to this; David wrote a great article. It’s clear and it shows the continuity in the positions. I know I’m more sympathetic to the liberal position than you are, but I think you’re right that perhaps Feingold can be a bridge between the two (if the leftists will allow him).
“The Vietnam War, of course, wasn’t a necessary outgrowth of liberal internationalism. Its sharpest critics included Cold War liberals such as diplomat George Kennan, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, and columnist Walter Lippmann.”
Umm, rather strange choice of “Cold War liberals,” if you ask me. Lippman was a major critic of Containment at its inception (he coined the phrase “The Cold War” in his book of essays calling for negotiation instead of containment); Kennan was sort of a quasi-aristocrat and in any event was certainly not a mainstream liberal, and I wouldn’t really characterize Morgenthau as a liberal either. In fact, liberal internationalism would generally be opposed to IR realism (though Morgenthau isn’t quite as dogmatic on the issue of international organizations as pure realists).
So, if these are the best examples that Greenberg can present to prove that Vietnam wasn’t a necessary outgrowth of liberalism, I think he needs to work a bit harder.
Solid dissection, bc. I have similar problems finding quintessential progressives that embody all the tenets of the small-R republican/progressive/Emersonian ideology I like to espouse whenever possible…but I think mine — Croly, Addams, Borah — hew closer to that creed than these examples do to Cold War liberalism.
Plus, as I said before, there’s the Joementum question. Is Joe Lieberman really what we want the Democratic Party to be like? Not from this end.
I agree that finding ‘quintessential’ anything is difficult, but surely Kennedy, Truman, and Johnson were more solidly “Cold War Liberals” than the three mentioned.