The Standard Reader

Berman raises two questions. The first is, Who are the terrorists, and what do they represent? The second is, Who are we, and what sort of political ideals should we stand for? In answer to the first question, Berman rejects Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” He reminds us that most of America’s recent military interventions were made on behalf of Muslims, for example in Somalia in 1993 and in Serbia in 1999. And he points out that many of the terrorists were not dyed-in-the-wool Muslims but people who had lived in the West.

In fact, Berman argues, the Islamists closely resemble the totalitarian movements that first emerged on Western soil at the beginning of the last century. The Islamic terrorists are the last heirs of Stalin and Hitler, and their intellectual roots are to be found less in the sands of Arabia than in the halls of the Sorbonne. Berman’s efforts in this direction are strained. Nazism and communism were in rebellion against religion, while Islamists claim to speak for religion. A holy war has been declared on America, and for all of Islamism’s resemblance to totalitarianism, the religious dimension will eventually have to be grappled with.

So, what political ideals should we ourselves stand for? Berman again looks to recent history for answers, resurrecting the anti-totalitarian liberal alliance of old that stood up to Hitler and Stalin, more or less. Indeed, herein lies the gravamen of Berman’s argument. For the Left, in whatever guise, doesn’t have a stalwart history of defense of liberal democracy. Not then and not now. As Berman points out, forty years ago, well-intentioned liberals “gazed at the craziest and most violent of the anti-liberal movements, and blinked, and saw no reason for upset.” It was their faith in reason that disarmed them before genocidal dreams. They simply could not accept the fact that there were evil men in the world. A similar dynamic, Berman believes, is at work among progressives now.

This raises the obvious question of how a liberal, anti-totalitarian movement can be reconstructed, and it is here that his argument goes astray. He moves in the right direction by looking to Abraham Lincoln for a “warlike” liberalism. But his is a watered-down Lincoln. He reduces Lincoln’s philosophy to “solidarity with the oppressed” and “defense of democratic self-rule,” mostly by equating Lincoln with the pragmatism of James and Dewey.

The concoction is more Bill Clinton than Lincoln. It was Stephen Douglas, not Lincoln, who championed democratic self-rule: Let the locals, the senator said, vote slavery up or down as they please. Lincoln grounded his liberalism in a theory of natural rights, to which he brought a profound religious sensibility. A modern leftist cannot abide the elements that made Lincoln who he was. In his search for a “warlike” liberalism, Berman only feints toward Lincoln. He concludes: “The new rhetoric could hardly be Lincoln’s–a rhetoric of popular will, of God, and of liberty: a language of nineteenth-century Christian America.”

What Berman ends up resurrecting is the old 1990s saw of a Third Way (he calls it “a Third Force”), a kind of liberal politics that supposedly avoids the cynicism of the Right and the anti-American rhetoric of the Left. But surely on September 11, this liberalism was shown to be an illusion. Wasn’t it the good humanitarians of Europe and America who sought to make excuses for the terrorists? Isn’t it the liberal internationalists who shrink from opposing totalitarian-like movements with American might?

Still, Berman has written a smart and mostly honest book that should be read if only for the author’s dry wit. Himself an opponent of capital punishment, Berman notes that the French are indignant over capital punishment in America. “Let the French look to places where the victims are buried by bulldozers,” he quips. That’s the kind of liberal we need more of.

–Adam Wolfson