Two sides of liberals, then and now

Editor of the New Republic:

Harry Truman would have given terrorists hell

IN 1948, AMERICAN liberals went to war — with each other. The chief combatants were Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's former vice president and the most popular politician on the American left, and Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt's successor and a man widely derided as a party hack.

The issue was anti-communism and whether liberals should see it as a betrayal of their principles or as their natural culmination. For Wallace, liberals had one enemy: the reactionary right. For Truman, they had two: conservatives, to be sure, but also totalitarianism, in its communist as well as fascist guises. Liberalism, as Truman supporter Arthur Schlesinger famously put it, represented the "vital center" — defending social progress and individual freedom against tyrannies of both the right and left.

Liberals Need New Narrative That Takes Terrorism Seriously

John Leo

Peter Beinart thinks the left needs more anti-totalitarian liberals like Harry Truman and Scoop Jackson, and fewer anti-imperialist liberals (think moveon.org, Michael Moore and George Soros) who can't seem to take terrorism and the jihadist threat seriously. "The Good Fight," Beinart's new book, is a history of liberalism for his fellow liberals, and an insightful elaboration of arguments he made as editor of The New Republic.

Henry Wallace, he believes, is the model for today's blame-America, soft-on-totalitarianism left that has cost the Democrats so dearly at the polls. When communists pushed Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk out of a window in 1948, Wallace, America's leading progressive, thought it was America's fault. He said: "The Czechoslovakia story will repeat itself so long as our gun and dollar policies ... are continued." The modern Wallaceites feel the same way about jihadists. Moveon.org said: "The U.S. has become adept at creating monsters. Osama bin Laden is only the latest in a long line."

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