Democracy and Opportunity

"The A.D.A.'s most important intellectual—its equivalent of James Burnham—was the tall, German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism, but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose sight of their own capacity for injustice. 'We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,' he wrote. 'We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.' Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism. Open-mindedness, he argued, is not 'a virtue of people who don't believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true.'"

The New York Times Magazine excerpts Peter Beinart's new book, The Good Fight.


U.S. News & World Report offers a Beinart profile.


"When it comes to foreign policy, the fundamental divide in American politics today is not between left and right but between those who subscribe to the myth of the 'American Century' and those who do not. Peter Beinart is a true believer."

In The Nation, Andrew J. Bacevich gives Beinart a negative review.


Jacob Heilbrunn calls Beinart a Neoconservative Democrat in the Los Angeles Times.


And Beinart and Michael Tomasky go toe-to-toe in Slate.