Punditry at the drive-thru.

• Author: Rieff, David
• Position: The Good Fight: Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again - The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris - Book review

Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 320 pp., $14.95.

Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 496 pp., $27.99.

It is a safe bet that most readers of this magazine don't much care for fast food, or that the minority that does views it as anything else but a guilty pleasure for themselves or a necessary concession to their advertisement-saturated, merchandise-craving children or grandchildren. The intellectual equivalent of this sensible preference for slow food should be for nuance and complexity. And yet in this age of the sound bite, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, multitasking and new media, the books that commercial publishers seem to want to publish, and that ambitious policy intellectuals aspire to write--which came first is probably best viewed as a chicken-and-egg question--are for the most part the intellectual equivalent of a meal at Burger King or Taco Bell. At first bite, tasty, appealing and seemingly complete; in the end, bloating, cloying and empty of genuine intellectual fortification.

In all fairness, punditry has always been the intellectual equivalent of fast food; given the reality of deadlines, it could hardly be otherwise. But a figure like Walter Lippmann was not dishing out "fast thought" in his books, which, to the contrary, tended to be reflective and deliberate. The ability to distinguish between the skills and necessities of the op-ed and work meant to last still marks the efforts of some policy intellectuals who are also pundits--Robert Kagan being an admirable example of what, regrettably, too often seems like a dying breed. What is more and more common are works of historical synthesis that are not even really open-minded, let alone written in the spirit of scholarly investigation, but rather in order to illustrate a thesis. Again, on the intellectual equivalent of what nutritionists call the empty-calorie principle.

After two books, it is clear that Peter Beinart is one of the abler practitioners of this hybrid form. The editor of The New Republic while still in his twenties and an enthusiastic early supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Beinart in 2006 published The Good Fight--a history of the decline of liberalism from the 1960s into the administration of George W. Bush. It was a call for a liberal revival based on Beinart's belief that Democrats needed to once again uphold what he viewed as the submerged tradition of liberalism's commitment to U.S. national greatness. Beinart argued that not only was the liberal iteration of America's duty to "defend freedom" the world over very different from the triumphalist messianism of George W. Bush and the neoconservatives--with its rejection of any constraint on American power--it was also far more likely to be successful in the contemporary context of global jihadism. The book's subtitle, "Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again," left no room for misunderstanding (or ambiguity either, unfortunately). To the contrary, Beinart's history of the past half century was meant to demonstrate that, as he put it in the book's introduction, "antitotalitarianism should sit at the heart of the liberal project." In Beinart's telling, the conclusion should have been obvious: since jihadism is totalitarian, and antitotalitarianism is at liberalism's core, liberals who are not prepared to passionately fight such a movement "have strayed far from liberalism's best traditions." And he went so far as to insist that the prospects for a true liberal revival in America depended as much on a full-bore commitment to this fight as it did to the promise of social reforms at home.

The Good...