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E.J. Dionne on the Future of Liberalism
By Michael Weiss / September 4, 2007
Apropos my defense of the Euston Manifesto and Nick Cohen's What's Left, here's another perspective from E.J. Dionne on the prospects for a revival of liberalism after George Bush. Money graphs:
[After] Bush leaves office, liberals will face a moment of truth on foreign policy. It is easy enough to reject Bush's unilateralism, his squandering of the post-9/11 opportunity, his failure to understand what the invasion of Iraq entailed and required, his expansive view of executive power. Far more difficult will be settling arguments between advocates of democracy promotion and opponents of imperialism; between realists who have learned the need for prudence from the Iraq adventure, and idealists who insist (as in Darfur) that there is still a role for American power to promote moral ends, and to avert moral catastrophe.
In principle, American liberals can repair the model of international cooperation pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But it would be foolish to assume that such an approach to foreign policy can be miraculously recreated in a world very different from the one they confronted, or to assume that the dilemmas of liberal foreign policy will disappear when the Bush administration does.
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yep, the crux of it is how to salvage internationalism without invoking the spectre of imperialism. It all comes down to the liberal taboo against paternalism, which comes out of post-colonial studies. Still one of the best books (a few years old now) on this specific question is Noah Feldman’s “What We Owe Iraq…”
"Cohen argues against a relativism — he sees it rooted in postmodernist scholarship — that refuses to place the same liberal, feminist, and democratic demands on radical Islamic movements that it has historically imposed upon Western conservatives and reactionaries." To demand democracy is to demand that the same right to be heard be accorded to liberalism and feminism as to conservative and reactionary viewpoints. Such a framework provides a useful corrective to either liberalism or conservatism, and also excludes exclusionary points of view from defining the rules of the game. I think that this is the spirit in which the Euston Manifesto was written.
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