Liberal "realists"

Washington's "Liberal realists" were (and are) neither liberal nor realistic. Since the Truman era they've served as enablers of very bad conservative things, and in the case of Vietnam they directly created some horrors of their own. And they're doing it again today in the Middle East. The "balanced" liberals who supported the invasion of Afghanistan while hoping Iraq would be next were being wilfully naive: by supporting Dubya the first time they made it easier for him to get his way the second time.

Back in the '50s Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was among the most prominent of these enablers. He dismissed as "dough faces" those progressives who wouldn't go along with the Cold War. (Later, while serving in the Kennedy administration, he wrote a memo promoting presidential deniability, anticipating the Nixon administration.) Today we have Peter Beinart writing The Good Fight, arguing that the Cold War was a triumph for these enablers and supporting enabling Washington's anti-fundamentalist war crimes. He even revived that word "dough faces"!
In my humble opinion, the Cold War was a mistake. An avoidable, destructive and protracted mistake. The Soviet empire was always more defensive than Washington would admit, but successive administrations wanted to avoid being seen as "losing ground." Millions of Vietnamese and central Americans paid the price. And a lot of Moslems are today paying the price of Washington wanting to "do something" about the terrorist threat.

In places like The Huffington Post you'll often see comments that start, "I'm as liberal as they come, but..." then go on to take an illiberal position. Claiming general liberalism as a rationale for specific illiberal positions does not impress me. Liberal is as liberal does. I judge the generality by the specifics, not the specifics by the generality.

Another example of their pseudo-realism is the scapegoating of Ralph Nader. The truth is that in the 2000 presidential election Albert Gore lost far fewer votes to Nader than he deserved to. Even in non-swing states where the Nader vote was never going to tip the balance, liberals virtually all stayed loyal to the Democrats, which is fine if your only goal is to punish Nader. The clear fact is that Bush might well have won without the Nader campaign, while Gore might well have succeeded with it. (And consider that one third of the Nader vote came from Republicans: didn't they deserve the extra option?) Liberals have gone from demanding solidarity to demanding unanimity! They should be blaming Clinton and Gore, not Nader. To blame Nader for offering voters one option too many is to show contempt for the voters.

Americans have a way of often learning the wrong lesson from experience. (What lesson did the Pentagon learn from Vietnam? Embed the reporters!) "Liberal realists" certainly learned the wrong lesson from their failure in 2000. When The Nation published an editorial in 2004 urging Nader not to run again, I think that was the moment when the magazine lost its relevance. Nader ran anyway, the left overwhelmingly voted Democrat anyway, and Bush got a second term anyway. This is what we expect from the "liberal realist" bible The New Republic, which I stopped reading about thirty years ago around the time that they came out in support of the terrorist campaign against Nicaragua.

Pragmatism should not be equated with practicality. It depends not on being the better option, but on being the only option. Rather than a cynosure, it's a slippery slope. Progressives went from choosing Gore over Nader--and failing anyway--to choosing John Kerry over Howard Dean (and failing anyway). "Liberal realists" are so eager to prove they can accept half a loaf that they only demand half a loaf in the first place, then accept half a half-loaf, then half a quarter-loaf, then half an eighth-loaf.... They'd be smarter to demand two loaves in the beginning, then settle for one. (That's how union negotiators do it.) Unfortunately, it's a religion to them.