Paul Starr: Is war fatal to liberalism? History suggests a different story.
[Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His new book, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, will be published this spring by Basic Books.]
War is always a risky enterprise for the political party or ideological faction that undertakes it. Like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War has broken the grip on national power of a dominant party that had been confidently reshaping American politics. Democracies want speedy victories, especially if they were promised one; a government that fails in war throws into doubt its whole view of the world. Even a party that leads a nation to victory in a war with overwhelming support may be punished at the polls afterward. Think of the defeat of Winston Churchill's Conservatives in 1945 and the reverses suffered by the Democrats after both world wars.
Since Vietnam, though, war has spelled particular trouble for liberals. Torn between competing values, liberals and the Democratic Party have been prone to divisions between hawks and doves and to ambivalence and uncertainty among their cross-pressured leaders. Liberals are dogged by charges from the right that they are unserious about national security; but they also worry that war endangers everything that they value and all that they want to accomplish domestically. The first argument claims that liberalism is unprepared to fight wars, while the second suggests that liberalism unravels in wartime. Either way, it seems, if war looms, liberalism loses.
It is not just about contemporary liberalism that such arguments have been made. The idea that constitutional government and liberal democracy are unsuited to the rigors of war has a long genealogy, and for a time the historical evidence was at least ambiguous. Classical liberalism had its heyday in the mid-1800s, when the conditions of world politics were relatively benign. Well into the twentieth century it seemed reasonable to suppose that, like a plant that grows only in bright sunshine, liberalism flourishes only in peace. Reflecting on his party's decline after World War I, David Lloyd George, Britain's last Liberal prime minister, wrote in his memoirs that "war has always been fatal to Liberalism."
Lloyd George may have been rationalizing his own failures as a party leader. If wars were generally fatal to liberalism, it could never have survived, given the frequency of war throughout modern history. If liberal governments under liberal leadership were incapable of seeing war through to a successful conclusion, the great struggles of the twentieth century against totalitarianism would have ended in catastrophe, and today we would live in a different world. Liberalism has turned out to be stronger and more effective in war than its adversaries have expected, and it has proved to be more resilient under the pressures of war than liberals themselves have feared. History does not prove that contemporary liberalism will have the same strength and the same resilience, and it certainly does not suggest that liberals should welcome war; but at a time when a conservative government has failed in war and thrown into doubt its whole view of the world, liberals would do well to remember a tradition that rightfully belongs to them and shows why they can do better in matters of both war and peace. ...
Read entire article at New Republic
War is always a risky enterprise for the political party or ideological faction that undertakes it. Like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War has broken the grip on national power of a dominant party that had been confidently reshaping American politics. Democracies want speedy victories, especially if they were promised one; a government that fails in war throws into doubt its whole view of the world. Even a party that leads a nation to victory in a war with overwhelming support may be punished at the polls afterward. Think of the defeat of Winston Churchill's Conservatives in 1945 and the reverses suffered by the Democrats after both world wars.
Since Vietnam, though, war has spelled particular trouble for liberals. Torn between competing values, liberals and the Democratic Party have been prone to divisions between hawks and doves and to ambivalence and uncertainty among their cross-pressured leaders. Liberals are dogged by charges from the right that they are unserious about national security; but they also worry that war endangers everything that they value and all that they want to accomplish domestically. The first argument claims that liberalism is unprepared to fight wars, while the second suggests that liberalism unravels in wartime. Either way, it seems, if war looms, liberalism loses.
It is not just about contemporary liberalism that such arguments have been made. The idea that constitutional government and liberal democracy are unsuited to the rigors of war has a long genealogy, and for a time the historical evidence was at least ambiguous. Classical liberalism had its heyday in the mid-1800s, when the conditions of world politics were relatively benign. Well into the twentieth century it seemed reasonable to suppose that, like a plant that grows only in bright sunshine, liberalism flourishes only in peace. Reflecting on his party's decline after World War I, David Lloyd George, Britain's last Liberal prime minister, wrote in his memoirs that "war has always been fatal to Liberalism."
Lloyd George may have been rationalizing his own failures as a party leader. If wars were generally fatal to liberalism, it could never have survived, given the frequency of war throughout modern history. If liberal governments under liberal leadership were incapable of seeing war through to a successful conclusion, the great struggles of the twentieth century against totalitarianism would have ended in catastrophe, and today we would live in a different world. Liberalism has turned out to be stronger and more effective in war than its adversaries have expected, and it has proved to be more resilient under the pressures of war than liberals themselves have feared. History does not prove that contemporary liberalism will have the same strength and the same resilience, and it certainly does not suggest that liberals should welcome war; but at a time when a conservative government has failed in war and thrown into doubt its whole view of the world, liberals would do well to remember a tradition that rightfully belongs to them and shows why they can do better in matters of both war and peace. ...