Comments On The Meaning Of "unity"

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OPEN UNIVERSITY FEBRUARY 18, 2008

Comments On The Meaning Of "unity"

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1. In his posting of January 27th, Cass Sunstein,
with the success of “McCain, Obama and to some extent Huckabee” in mind, wrote
that “unifying candidates are now being taken as a most refreshing change from
the last years.” I beg to differ.

In my view, the most remarkable aspect of the Obama’s
campaign has been his ability to make the tone of his politics mask their
substance as well as the willingness of highly educated voters to go along with
this illusion. His voting record and his views on foreign policy place him
firmly on the left-wing of the Democratic Party. His are the views of the
left-liberal political and intellectual establishment echoed in print in The New York Review of Books and The Nation, and online via Moveon.org.
His most frequent remark about foreign policy during the campaign is that he
will withdraw from Iraq
as soon as possible. Despite the fact that the surge has achieved many of its
goals, the press has not challenged Obama–or Hillary Clinton for that
matter–about the consequences of an American withdrawal in the face of apparent
success. While the call to get out of Iraq as soon as possible is
unifying for the activist young and liberal and left-liberal intellectuals, it
is profoundly divisive in American society as a whole. Indeed, were either
Obama or Clinton to withdraw troops from Iraq
before the United States had
achieved a tolerable end result, the bitterness and turmoil in our country
could match that of the divisions over the war in Vietnam. “Snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory” would not be just a clever slogan. Millions of people, with
good reason, would believe it to be true. Were that to happen, partisan
division could become so intense that the Democrats’ domestic agenda would be
unlikely to survive the tumult. You could kiss goodbye to universal health
care.

2. A second, bizarre aspect of the primaries is that for
reasons of their own, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have stated the
most obvious difference between them. It is, especially in foreign policy, that
she is a centrist Democrat whose ideas are far “newer” than his while he is a
left-liberal Democrat whose ideas are largely those of the Democratic orthodoxy
of the pre-Bill Clinton Democratic Party. These are the same ideas that, except
for the Carter interlude, kept the Democratic Party out of the White House in
the three decades before Clinton’ election in 1992. If Hillary Clinton had
stated this simple truth, she could forget about getting the support of the
Democratic Party’s left-wing and thus would have little chance of getting the
Party’s nomination. If Obama had stated this truth, then the post-partisan,
unifying aura of his candidacy would evaporate. However fine a politician he
may be, his political views are not those of the political center. The
Republican Party will not be reluctant to bring this inconvenient fact to the
voter’s attention.

3. The Obama candidacy is said to express a new idealism. To
be sure, in the sociologist Max Weber’s terms, it does rest on an ethics of
conviction that focuses on intentions rather than consequences. The refusal to
publicly face the probable catastrophic consequences of rapid withdrawal from Iraq is typical
of this kind of idealism. It contrasts with what Weber called the ethics of
responsibility which focus as much or more on the consequences of actions than
on the intentions of actors. Yet there is another sense in which the mood that
has brought Obama to his recent successes is not idealistic at all. Aside from
a lunatic fringe, no one claims that the enemy in Iraq is anything but utterly
barbaric, inhumane and guilty of hundreds of repeated war crimes in the form of
the intentional murder of innocents. A suicide bombing is a war crime. Yet in
the face of this inhumanity, one looks in vain for passion and/or insight among
the Democratic candidates about the nature of this enemy. To my knowledge, neither
Clinton nor even more so Obama have even mentioned the phrase “radical Islamic
terrorism” in their campaign. The Party left-wing places Clinton on the defensive for her Iraq vote in 2003
but no one puts either her or Obama on t he spot for failing to speak clearly
about Islamic extremism. Why is indifference to the actions of an evil enemy a
form of moral idealism? The Republicans will not be shy about asking that
question.

4. This year’s Democratic primaries raise the following
question: Is the Democratic Party any longer the party of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, that is, the Roosevelt of the New Deal as well as the Roosevelt
whose leadership and decisions were absolutely indispensable to defeating Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in World War II? Cass Sunstein, among
others, rightly evokes Roosevelt’s legacy of
domestic social and economic reform. Today, in the form of the now familiar
varieties of radical Islamism, we face an enemy that bears more similarities to
fascism and Nazism than any other ideological movement of similar dimensions
since World War II. The radical Islamists celebrate the murder of innocent
civilians, proudly declare their hatred for the Enlightenment, liberal
democracy, capitalism, communism and socialism, feminism, wage war on black
Africans in Darfur, despise the United States and yes, also revive radical
anti-Semitism in ideology and practice. To point this out is not
“neoconservative ideology.” It is the unpleasant truth. These ideas and actions
call for an American counter-offensive, one animated by a liberalism with deep
and abiding memories of Roosevelt.

The political habits and short historical memories of the
past thirty years have brought us to a Democratic Party that does not want to
speak too loudly about the fact that its greatest President was a great wartime
leader in a war against fascism and Nazism. Vietnam became the formative
experience of the Party’s leaders and a loss of enthusiasm for the hard-line during
the Cold War became Democratic orthodoxy. It was not surprising that the
Republicans would have more enthusiasm for the Cold War against the Communist.
In the 1970s, Democrats who dissented from their Party’s course turned to the
legacy of Harry Truman. Yet Truman’s legacy was formed in the early Cold War
with the Communists. Today, although radical Islam has impeccably reactionary
credentials, the Democratic Party candidates do not present the fight against
it as a distinctly liberal endeavor. So it is no wonder that they don’t evoke
the memory of FDR’s wartime leadership.

Yes, there are vast differences in power, ideology,
geography and culture between the issues of the 1940s and those of our time. I
am, after all, a historian with all of the attention to awareness of difference
and specificity of time and place that our discipline fosters. Yes, much went
very wrong in Iraq and much
should have been done differently in the way the United States has fought the war on
the terror inspired by radical Islam. Yes, a President in 2009 cannot slavishly
copy the policies from the middle of the past century. Yet traditions and
memories offer us a sense of how a President might face friends and enemies
today. The unfortunate silence about Roosevelt,
in this time of war, stems from a political party that has forgotten or even
become uncomfortable with the ideas and policies of its most important
political figure. A considerable component of the activist and passionate wing
of today’s Democratic Party has distanced itself from the meaning of foreign
policy liberalism in the Roosevelt tradition.

This is a recipe for electoral defeat in fall 2008 and,
again, opens the door to the White House to a Republican willing and able to
appeal to voters in the political center many of whom still look back with
admiration to a liberal President whose revolution in American foreign
relations launched the United States to its subsequent path to world power.

--Jeffrey Herf

The New Republic

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