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Was This the Worst Article Written for the Old New Republic in the Decade of the 2000s? (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Peter Beinart: A Fighting Faith: "On January 4, 1947... 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that 'the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction.' Liberals, they argued, 'consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.' Unless that changed, 'In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... it is the right--the very extreme right--which is most likely to gain victory.' During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard, members of the UDA met to expand and rename their organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, issued a press release that enumerated the new organization's principles. Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, '[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere,' America should support 'democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.' That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology 'hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great.' At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals, saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA, it was virtually the only liberal organization to back President Harry S Truman's March 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet subversion.
#Old-New-Republic #Peter-Beinart #Derp - bradford-delong.com