Cold comfort: liberalism's hawkish past is less useful as a guide to confronting future threats than Peter Beinart would like to believe.

• Author: Kaplan, Fred
• Position: The Good Fight - Book review

The Good Fight By Peter Beinart HarperCollins, $25.95

John Kerry lost the 2004 election, it can reasonably be argued, not because of abortion or gay marriage but because of his own indecisiveness. Too few citizens trusted him with the nation's security in a time of terror (and, face it, many of us who voted for him did so with qualms). In the subsequent year-and-a-half, George W. Bush has squandered the advantage he held on that score--and wrecked the Republican Party's broad lead on military matters, to boot--but the Democrats have yet to devise an alternative vision. Peter Beinart, former editor and now editor-at-large of The New Republic, lays out his version of one in The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

It's a thoughtful, provocative, well-written book--but, ultimately, muddled and unsatisfying. Beinart contends (correctly) that liberals need to put forth a "narrative" that defines America's purpose at home and abroad on their terms. He further contends (less persuasively) that an ideal narrative lurks in the Democrats' own past--specifically, in the "cold war liberalism" that dominated American and Western politics from roughly 1947-64. There are two problems with this narrative, at least in Beinart's telling: It's a bit of a fairy tale, and it's not likely to inspire a lot of voters to put liberals back in the White House in 2008.

The Good Fight grew out of a much-discussed article--called "An Argument for a New Liberalism: A Fighting Faith"--that Beinart wrote for The New Republic in December 2004. Both the article and the book begin with an historic meeting in January 1947 at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C., when 130 leaders of the Americans for Democratic Action, the era's vital coalition of liberals and labor, expelled former Vice President Henry Wallace's faction of communists and fellow-travelers from their ranks. That moment defined the liberal mainstream for the next 20 years: a domestic policy built on FDR's New Deal and a foreign policy that recognized the central threat posed by Soviet totalitarianism. And cold war liberals--unlike their conservative counterparts--would wage this struggle not as a self-righteous crusade but through alliances and international institutions: not only with power but also with legitimacy. Just as the ADA expelled Wallace's faction at the start of the Cold War, Beinart argues, today's liberals must expel the likes of...