Must-Read: There were at least six different Cold Wars. Respectively, the Cold War in:
- the United States,
- the North Atlantic,
- Eastern Europe,
- East Asia
- Africa, and
- Latin America.
The Cold War in the United States saw realistic yet idealistic centrist advocates of containment by and large, successfully but imperfectly, hold the line and win the three-front long twilight struggle against the adversary behind the iron curtain, against the naïve who did not understand the dangers of Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism, and against the sinister who sought to win domestic political dominance via bad-faith arguments that the containerizes were cowards.
The Cold War in the North Atlantic saw the same struggle--save that the center and reasonable left were united against an unreasonable left that was, nevertheless, more dangerous because the GSFG on the far side of the Fulda Gap was closer.
The Cold War in Eastern Europe saw the rich and lazy of the Western alliance sacrifice two generations to suffer under the knout of the Kremlin, and then saw the rich and lazy refuse to pay the weregild they owed for their indolence.
The Cold War in East Asia saw the United States, tragically, failed to understand in Vietnam that its soft power was much stronger than its hard power; but otherwise rescue a third of a billion people from Mao's dungeons, communes, and work camps.
The Cold War in Africa saw a disaster of moral equivalence as the well-being of the continent who sacrificed for a generation as great powers competed to entrench identical-looking military dictatorships.
The Cold War in Latin America--well, I still want to know what Ronald Reagan told Jeanne Kirkpatrick and what Jeanne Kirkpatrick told her friends among the Argentine generals that made them think at the aid they had given d'Aubission and the contras gave them a check they could cash in to conquer two small islands, 1000 English-speaking shepherds, and 50,000 sheep.
Curiously enough, people's opinions today on Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine seem strangely determined by which Cold War they learned the most about when they were younger.
The past is not only not dead. It is not even past:
Patrick Iber (March 2016): @PatrickIber:
Jeet Heer @HeerJeet: @PatrickIber Would love to hear your thoughts on Chait!
Patrick Iber @PatrickIber: Oh, man, really? OK. Caught a bit of the conversation between you and @davidimarcus and that covered a lot. Here is the Chait essay everyone on the left hates today: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/reminder-liberalism-is-working-marxism-failed.html.
I think @HeerJeet is insightful to see Chait as a Cold War Liberal; they saw fighting the left as a way of fighting conservatism too. Because bad conservative government, with oppression, inequality, etc. was what caused people to turn to the leftist solutions. It isn't clear that this story is correct but it's the basic analysis of Cold War liberalism. But Cold War liberalism was not very successfully liberal; it tended to favor anti-Communism at the expense of liberalism.
Not saying this is the case for Chait, who I enjoy as a writer, but I think this is a real blindspot in liberal thinking about Cold War. Cold War is about 20% the triumph of liberalism over totalitarianism & about 80% a struggle between competing illiberal forms of power. Liberalism's refusal to countenance anyone to its left "forced" it into alliances with the right so often that it's a revealed preference. So while Chait may think he's punching left and right in defense of liberal social democracy, you need radical left to get there.
I have no idea why he thinks PC culture is Marxist or any kind of serious threat to liberty except as hippie-punching. Seems to me that "PC culture" emerges from non-Marxist left, but I could be corrected on that score with evidence. When I was in college ('99-'03), I was involved with campus left and we had debates all the time about disruption and free speech. I personally fought, not always successfully, for targeted protest rather than general disruption. Not sure if I was right. But would be crazy to say that teach-ins or even street blockages did more damage to life & freedom than the Iraq War we were fighting. And, in general, I think that young people who support Sanders are not hoping for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
In an essay, I once wrote that "Extreme inequalities can make freedom of choice an illusion: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-04-24-iber-en.html. Liberalism needs to grapple with that and for that it's going to need the left not as a punching bag but as a serious interlocutor
