Beinart Busting
By Michael Berube channels Rick Perlstein:
Besides, as Rick Perlstein pointed out to me a few days ago, there’s something very, very troubling about the whole Beinart analogy between anti-Islamism and anti-Communism, and “principled realists” ought to be much more wary of it than they are. Yes, the Americans for Democratic Action met at the Willard Hotel in 1947. Yes, they announced their opposition to Communism “because the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere” and America should support “democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.” And yes, they had a better sense of totalitarianism than did their critics on the left at the time. But it doesn’t seem, in retrospect, that this managed to inoculate American liberals and progressives against McCarthyism over the course of the ensuing decade. A fat lot of good it did, actually. When the shock troops of the Right broke down your door fifty-odd years ago, searching for spies and softies and fellow travelers and people who’d voted for Norman Thomas in 1932 and people who knew someone who’d just denounced the Taft-Hartley Act, and when you insisted, as you were being led away, that you were in fact an anti-Communist, you remember what the reply was: they didn’t care what kind of Communist you were.
The rest of the essay is also very good. Read it.