The Fight is for Democracy

"The Fight is for Democracy really captures a spirit that existed in the wake of 9/11 amongst the species known as liberal hawks. I myself was one at the time. To read this book is to understand the moral and intellectual nature of this species, which helps to explain why the Afghan war was so bipartisan and why even the Iraq war had so much support from Democrats and some liberals. In the essays you see the struggle against Al-Qaeda through the lens of a certain liberal conception of the Cold War. Liberals became more sympathetic to the whole enterprise of the Cold War after it ended and they also saw the struggle against Al-Qaeda through the prism of the war in the Balkans, which had a big impact on people like George Packer and Paul Berman and myself. The book really helps sets forth the basis of one of the important ideological strands that emerged after 9/11, this liberal-hawk perspective. They supported an active ambitious American role around the world, including openness to military force to spread democracy and human rights and an effort to combine that with a struggle for greater democracy in the United States. I think that twin vision was influenced by the efforts of people on the anti-totalitarian left in the United States, starting in the 1930s and continuing through into the first decades of the Cold War. The Good Fight was influenced by the same impulses: the effort to find a usable liberal anti-totalitarian past, to find a liberal language for expressing revulsion against what Al-Qaeda represented, and a path between what could seem like conservative neo-imperialism and a leftism that seemed to me at that point uncomfortable with the use of American power. The Good Fight outlined what the struggle against jihadist terrorism could look like from a liberal perspective, drawing from the way in which liberals thought about the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. The first point I stressed, as liberal anti-communists tended to stress, was that the health of American society at home was absolutely central to our long struggle against the Soviet Union. Our ability to regenerate ourselves and bring ourselves closer to our own democratic ideals, as we did during the Civil Rights movement, was crucial in our struggle to be a stronger society than the Soviet Union. So in The Good Fight I stressed the importance of America not sacrificing principles of human rights and civil liberties during the post-9/11 period. I also argued that America would not be able to sustain a long-term costly struggle against Al-Qaeda if we were not fostering a society in which average Americans were able to prosper. The second point I stressed was that international law and international alliances weren’t a source of weakness, as they were often imagined to be by figures on the right, both during the Cold War and after 9/11. They could actually be a source of great strength in a struggle against totalitarians."