# Posted 11:44 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE FIGHT IS FOR DEMOCRACY: George Packer wants liberal Democrats to have a tough but principled foreign policy that can go head-to-head with the Bush administration's aggressive call for moral clarity. To that end, Packer has put together a collection of essays by prominent liberal thinkers whose purpose is to lay out a compelling vision that can command the support of a majority of the American electorate.

As someone who shares Packer's goal, I was very excited to get a copy of his book as a gift just a few days ago. So far, I have read the first three essays out of the ten that are in the book. They range from thoughtful to the strident. Yet even the better ones expose -- often unintentionally -- how desperate and hopeless the Democrats have become.

The first essay in the book is Packer's introduction. On page one, it eloquently captures the sense of mission that pervaded American life in the first days after September 11th. On the day of the attacks, an investment banker

...wandered through the smoke and confusion of Lower Manhattan until he found himself in a church in Greenwich Village. Alone at the altar, covered in ash and dust, he began to shake and sob. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he looked up. It was a policeman.

"Don't worry," the cop said, "you're in shock."

"I'm not in shock," the investment banker answered. "I like this state. I've never been more cognizant in my life."

Packer knows that this sort of intense awareness is the foundation on which a liberal internationalist foreign policy can be built. Yet this awareness faded after September 11th. With some justification, Packer attributes this dulling of the senses to the President's insistence that Americans must resist terrorism by refusing to let it interrupt their daily lives. Instead, what should have come from the White House was a call to arms in the name global democracy.

After making this solid point, Packer's introduction begins to wander. He rails against Americans' selfishness and says that American democracy has fallen into decay. His tone also makes clear that this volume essays is intended only for Democratic partisans. He tells us that "Conservatives today have no concept of the public good. They see Americans as investors and consumers, not citizens." (p. 9)

Packer tells us that liberal internationalists should fight for democracy, but finds it hard to elaborate how. He is more specific, however, about what liberals must abandon:

The relcutance to make judgments, the finely ironic habits of thought, the reflexive contempt for patriotism, the suspicion of uniforms and military qualities, the sentimentality about oppressed peoples, the irresponsibility about hard choices, the embarrassment with phrases like "democratic values" and "Western civilization" -- the softheadedness into which liberalism sank after the 1960s seems as useless today as isolationism in 1941 or compromise in 1861."

After Packer's jarring condemnation of his fellow liberal travelers, Michael Tomasky's essay is especially disturbing. Here is someone who clearly hasn't listened to a word that Packer has said. While its stated objective is to find a solid middle ground "between Cheney and Chomsky", the essay mostly provides vitriolic attacks on a strawman version of Republican foreign policy. Only its final pages does it provide a truncated agenda for American policy that has clearly suffered from its author's preoccupation with denouncing the Vice-President.

According to Tomasky, "What once represented the wish list of the right-most fringe of respectable opinion is now the policy of this country. It is a prescription for empire." (p. 40)The basis for the statement is a history of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy which shows that Cheney and Wolfowitz were aggressive unilateralists back in 1992, long before September 11th made it acceptable to talk about pre-emptive warfare.

Fair enough. But what does this have to do with 'empire'? Despite his occasional condemnations of Noam Chomsky and the far left, Tomasky adopts their vocabularly almost effortlessly. Does America seek to rule foreign nations? Does it make war for the sake of economic gain? Tomasky never says. Instead, he equates unilateralism with empire.

This kind of semantic issue matters because Tomasky's new Democratic foreign policy rests on its opposition to this sort of imperialism. As the author explains,

America is not an empire, it is a democracy. A democracy leads the world, but it does not seek to rule it. The Cheneyites want to rule the world. (p. 41)

I, for one, wish the Cheneyites wanted to rule the world, because if they did they might show a little more enthusiasm for the President's stated objective of rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the moment, however, let us grant that democratic anti-imperialism can serve as the basis of a new American foreign policy. What would such a foreign policy entail? Democracy promotion, of course. But what's that? For starters, "a massive aid package for the Arab world...tied to specific and measurable democratic reforms." That sounds nice. But will oil-rich dictatorships take American cash in exchange for giving up their hold on power? Besides, if Democrats are hesitant to support spending for the reconstruction of Iraq, why would they send massive amounts of aid to countries we don't occupy?

Another question Tomasky avoids is the use of force. As he informs us, there was a liberal case to be made for invading Iraq. Yet Tomasky doesn't say whether he himself would've supported the invasion on those grounds (presuming President Bush had done so). And if we can impose regime change on Iraq, why don't we impose it on other dictatorships as well? How about starting with dictatorships that don't sit on top of 10% of the world's oil reserves?

As a passionate advocate of democracy promotion, I know from experience that those questions are the first ones that critics (especially liberal ones) ask anytime one suggests that democracy promotion should be the foundation stone of American foreign policy. Yet Tomasky ignores them entirely. Then again, why bother? If all Dick Cheney stands for is empire, then talking about democracy should be enough to make the Democrats different.

The third essay in Packer's book is a discussion of humanitarian intervention by Laura Secor. Inspired by the humanitarian intevention in Kosovo, Secor clearly believes that American power should be used to promote democracy and human rights (even if diplomacy should be the first resort and violence the last). Thus the challenge Secor faces is how to differentiate her foreign policy from the one already advocated by neo-conservatives both in and outside the Bush administration.

In contrast to Tomasky, Secor is honest enough to admit that neo-conservatives are sincere in the call for a principled foriegn policy. Her only criticism of them is that they are too idealistic. As Secor explains,

Where liberal idealists tend to believe that the given the extent of its power, the United States must strive to promote the good, conservative idealists presume that in promoting itself , the United States does promote the good

In short, Secor is calling for a healthy dose of liberal guilt and self-flagellation. While I myself agree that neo-conservatives often come uncomfortably close to a "my country, right or wrong" approach, tempering their missionary zeal with self-criticism hardly constitutes a distinctive Democratic foreign policy. At best, it is a slight modification whose slightness emphasizes how little Democrats have to add to what neo-conservatives are already saying.

What, then, are the Democrats to do? Perhaps the next seven essays in Packer's book will answer that question. In the meantime, the Democrats best hope is to match the neo-conservatives ideal for ideal, criticizing the Bush Administration when it fails to live up to its own rhetoric.

As I noted on Sunday, Republicans are no less divided than Democrats when it comes to foreign policy. If the Democrats are patient enough, they can build up their credibility in the short-term, then attack Republicans from an unassailable idealistic perch once the Republican realists take back control of American foreign policy.

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