A Principled Liberal Approach

I enjoy making fun of liberals. A lot. I'm not sure exactly why; I have never been (and am not now) a devoted conservative. But, given that I do enjoy many-a-chuckle at the expense of liberals, I thought it'd be nice to point out an example of the type of principled liberal dissent from the policies of our current government that is, well, exceedingly and lamentably rare.

Not surprisingly, the example comes from the pages of The New Republic, the most consistently honest liberal publication. In the June 28 issue of this year, TNR hosted a sort of literary symposium consisting of twelve writers - liberal and conservative - who reflected upon the high points, low points, and future of our ongoing military involvement in Iraq. And it was on page 31 that one Paul Berman, a Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute with extensive and impeccable liberal credentials, made the following statement:


"Sometimes you have to hold in your heart two contradictory emotions. To understand Saddam Hussein and the history of modern Iraq, you have to feel anger - or else you have understood nothing. But what if, in addition to feeling anger at Saddam (...and at Saddam's army, which was organizing suicide terrorists even before the invasion), you have come to feel more than a little
anger at George W. Bush?...What if, in mulling these thoughts [about what the US could have done better in Iraq], you find that angry emotions toward George W. Bush are seepoing upward from your own patriotic gut?

Here is the challenge: to rage at Saddam and other enemies, and, at the same time, to rage in a somewhat different register at Bush, and to keep those two responses in proper proportion to one another. that can be a difficult thing to do, requiring emotional balance, maturity, and analytic clarity - a huge effort.

...Bush has asked a great deal from America. He has asked us to draw on our emotional balance, maturity, and analytic clarity: the qualities that are needed to help us distinguish our feelings about the enemy from our feelings about the commander in chief. To distinguish between outright hatred and a certain kind of contempt."


Listen, I don't agree with everything Berman says here and in the rest of the article. In fact, there is much that I disagree with. However, I respect and admire his rational thought-process and his sense of perspective, all the more so because both are so rare today in liberal circles, where the target of popular hatred is Bush - not the mass-murdering Saddam, and not the Islamists who are actively trying to kill us.