Intervention and Its Discontents

Brooklyn, NY

Given that Anatol Lieven had six pages to discuss The Fight Is for Democracy, it's amazing how badly he informed Nation readers about its contents ["Liberal Hawk Down," Oct. 25]. Lieven chose to spend all that space attacking--nastily and unfairly--two of the book's contributors for their supposed sins of ignorance and extremism. Paul Berman and Michael Tomasky can defend themselves. But your readers have a right to know what else is in the anthology: essays on economic inequality, on globalization, on secularism, on critical thinking, on civic culture, on the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. There is nothing "messianic" about these writings. They are, to use the current term, nuanced, and written by some of our best journalists and critics at a high literary and intellectual standard. All of this was lost on Lieven, who had another, narrower agenda than thinking about and responding to the anthology I edited. True, The Fight Is for Democracy criticizes some of the mental habits of the left. Many of them can be found in Lieven's review. But the book is unequivocally on the side of making America more democratic--more equal and more free--and of turning US foreign policy toward the same ends abroad. These used to be the aims of American liberals; for me they still are. But Lieven wants to drum the book's contributors out of the Democratic Party. Presumably, once the party is purified of anyone who challenges its least useful orthodoxies, victory will be within its grasp.

GEORGE PACKER

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