Michael Kazin: Necessary Changes of Mind
[Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is completing a history of the American left to be published in 2011 by Knopf.]
Sometimes, Leon Wieseltier’s eloquence disguises a murky argument. “Political conviction cannot be indifferent to events,” he writes in his last Washington Diarist, “but not every event is an occasion for new thinking.” The Iraq war turned certain liberals (unnamed) who once believed “in the responsibility of American power to do good in the world” into Obama-admiring realists. They would be wiser, he counsels, to stick to their “fundamental beliefs.” And to grasp those, “The study of history should suffice. It is a better guide for moral and political understanding than experience.”
This is a puzzling way to draw instruction from the past. How can we attain liberal objectives unless both policymakers and ordinary citizens learn from the experience of idealistic ventures that went wrong? Liberals could not remain unabashed Wilsonians after the Great War made the world safer for fascists and Communists than for democracy. Few could retain their faith in the beneficence of American power after the Indochina debacle caused three million deaths. And when Paul Wolfowitz’s sanguine vow that the invasion of Iraq would be “a war for liberation, a war for peace and freedom” was broken by bloody reality, should liberals have kept sending the same message while condemning the messenger?
It is a fine and necessary thing to speak out for “democracy and human rights” in the making of our foreign policy. Without such rhetoric, America’s unrivaled power would stand for nothing but the desire to remain without rivals. But attention must also be paid to the always sad, often outrageous tales of policymakers whose convictions blinded them to the baleful consequences of their actions.
Read entire article at The New Republic
Sometimes, Leon Wieseltier’s eloquence disguises a murky argument. “Political conviction cannot be indifferent to events,” he writes in his last Washington Diarist, “but not every event is an occasion for new thinking.” The Iraq war turned certain liberals (unnamed) who once believed “in the responsibility of American power to do good in the world” into Obama-admiring realists. They would be wiser, he counsels, to stick to their “fundamental beliefs.” And to grasp those, “The study of history should suffice. It is a better guide for moral and political understanding than experience.”
This is a puzzling way to draw instruction from the past. How can we attain liberal objectives unless both policymakers and ordinary citizens learn from the experience of idealistic ventures that went wrong? Liberals could not remain unabashed Wilsonians after the Great War made the world safer for fascists and Communists than for democracy. Few could retain their faith in the beneficence of American power after the Indochina debacle caused three million deaths. And when Paul Wolfowitz’s sanguine vow that the invasion of Iraq would be “a war for liberation, a war for peace and freedom” was broken by bloody reality, should liberals have kept sending the same message while condemning the messenger?
It is a fine and necessary thing to speak out for “democracy and human rights” in the making of our foreign policy. Without such rhetoric, America’s unrivaled power would stand for nothing but the desire to remain without rivals. But attention must also be paid to the always sad, often outrageous tales of policymakers whose convictions blinded them to the baleful consequences of their actions.