The Talented Mr. Beinart and the New Republic's War on the Left

By Marc Cooper, WorkingForChange.com. Posted November 8, 2001.

Peter Beinart, the newest editor of the New Republic, is going to be a very busy young man in the weeks to come. Apart from running the magazine, and recently taking over authorship of its signature TRB column, Mr. Beinart, it appears, now intends to run his own sort of Homeland Security office.

As the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan stretches out over a longer time frame than some originally imagined and as more political debate and dissent naturally evolves, Mr. Beinart will be besieged with myriad requests -- from peace activists and civil libertarians from Berkeley to the Berkshires -- to have their activities vetted or vetoed after his personal review.

One's sympathy for Mr. Beinart's swelling work schedule should be tempered, however, by the knowledge that this heavy burden is a product of his own doing. In his first column after the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Beinart, relying primarily on some anecdotal and anonymous Web postings for evidence, attacked the anti-globalization movement for its supposed softness on the Al Qaeda network as he warned that it was on the verge of "hav[ing] joined the terrorists in a united front." Professing profound horror that otherwise honest American college kids might be led to treason by the fiends who had organized the protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle, Mr. Beinart throatily ruled that, in an environment of war, "domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides."

He did not detail, unfortunately, what the precise nature of the application process would be for those prospective protestors seeking moral sanction. Dissidents will merely have to check regularly the TRB column to insure they have not strayed to the wrong side of history. (Lucky for them it is now written by the vaguely more tolerant Mr. Beinart as his immediate predecessor, Andrew Sullivan, has already decreed anti-war activists to be a "fifth column".)

Under Mr. Beinart's stewardship, the New Republic has enthusiastically and rather unconditionally enlisted in the new patriotism. A recent lead editorial outflanks Colin Powell on the right, chiding him for his "fetishization" of the so-called Powell Doctrine: the demand that the U.S. employ overwhelming force in conflict to minimize American casualties. That same cordite-laced editorial excoriated ex-President Clinton for showing any concern over civilian casualties when he launched his own attacks on Bin Laden and -- now that Mr. Beinart has recently passed maximum draft age -- the editorial openly celebrates the notion that "America is less afraid of body bags now..."

As ardent a militarist as Mr. Beinart has become, his favored target seems to be the American Left. In yet another of his signed columns, this one based not on Web postings but rather on a demotion of a conservative university professor (which was reversed before the column even went to the typesetters), Mr. Beinart extended his attack on dissidents arguing that the Left's professed concern over maintaining civil liberties in times of national emergency are disingenuous.

"[W]hen the left condemns the war against terrorism for threatening free speech, its real motive may not be devotion to free speech at all," Mr. Beinart wrote. "Its real motive may simply be hostility to the war . . . "

To make his argument, Mr. Beinart submits to us the case of Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., the conservative Director of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). At a university public forum a few days after Sept. 11, Fairbanks got into a contentious shouting match with a young woman in the audience. Among other points, she took exception to a flippant reference that Professor Fairbanks had made to the Koran. A few days later, Mr. Beinart informs us, Professor Fairbanks was demoted from his job by the interim dean of SAIS.

On that basis, Mr. Beinart then expends a thousand words to argue that Fairbanks is only the latest victim in the Left's relentless war of political correctness and identity politics. Ipso Facto, the Left in persecuting Professor Fairbanks, says Mr. Beinart, reveals itself as a muzzler of free speech. Case closed.

Mr. Beinart's column appears in the same magazine he edits so I suppose there was no one there to gently tell him: 1) that at the end of his piece, in parenthesis no less, when he informs us that Fairbanks was re-instated to his job almost immediately, Mr. Beinart's argument .... um ... falls apart and, 2) that Professor Fairbanks' even brief travail was the result not of a leftist conspiracy or even a single leftist demonstration but rather a product of the usual sort of spinelessness shown by university administrations. It has been those quaking administrations -- horrified by the specter of student restlessness and possible legal liability -- that have been the most vehement enforcers of restrictive and, here I would agree with Mr. Beinart, outright odious campus speech and conduct codes.

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