The great liberal debate.

The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart Harper Collins. 208 pages. $25.95.

Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea by George Lakoff Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 266 pages. $23.00.

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid By Joe Klein Doubleday. 246 pages. $23.95.

As the midterm elections draw near, the debate over how to win back the government and recapture the hearts and minds of voters is heating up. A glut of political books takes up the questions: How did conservatives manage to conquer American political culture and occupy all three branches of government? How can the Democrats fight back? What new opportunities and old pitfalls must activists, citizens, and politicians consider if they are ever going to forge a progressive political future?

The most ambitious of the current crop of commentaries on these themes is The Good Fight, by Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic. Although I disagree with Beinart's deep admiration for Democratic centrism and anti-Communism, I found myself intrigued by what he had to say.

Unlike some of his New Republic colleagues, Beinart manages to critique the activist left without being dismissive or snide. His thoughtful, considerate style makes his analysis both nuanced and palatable. While flawed, his book raises important points about the fragmented nature of politics on the left and makes some good suggestions for broad, unifying themes.

The book is a historical analysis of where he says liberalism went wrong--from Henry Wallace and the Communist Party members who supported him to Michael Moore and those on the left who blamed American imperialism for 9/11.

Just as Wallace and American communists did not take Stalin's repression or the Soviet threat seriously in the lead-up to the Cold War, Beinart argues, many on the anti-imperialist left do not appreciate the threat posed by radical, jihadist Islamic terrorists today. His example of the latter: "A December 2001 cartoon in The Nation imagined America on the couch, describing its powerful desire to kill the people responsible for 9/11. 'You cannot face your real problem,' explained the fictional therapist. 'Your real problem is simply the way that millions and millions of people around the world feel about you' because 'you kill people who are poor and desperate.' In other words, America's 'real problem' was America."

For too long, Beinart argues, the left has been hamstrung by its tendency to emphasize the evils of American imperialism over the evils of totalitarianism. That gives conservatives the perfect opportunity to condemn liberals as anti-American defeatists, he says. Instead of adopting the willfully ignorant, simplistic view of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush that America is good and its enemies are evil, he argues that liberals have the capacity to be honestly self-critical and to see America's greatness in its potential to do the right thing: to reform itself through the civil rights movement, for example, and to promote free speech and free elections, as well as international institutions that act as a curb on its own tendency to go astray. "America must recognize its capacity for evil and build the restraints that hold it in check," he writes.

If liberals are to reassert themselves, win elections, and make the world a better place, he says, they need to rediscover a grand political philosophy that promotes freedom, condemns totalitarianism, and connects the struggles for civil rights, democracy, economic opportunity, cooperation, and fairness, at home and abroad.

George Lakoff agrees. In Whose Freedom? he describes how conservatives have managed to co-opt what was traditionally a liberal term, and how liberals must take back the idea of freedom if they are ever to win elections again. Both authors are onto something important.

Beinart's policy prescriptions are basically benign: He abhors the Bush Administration's use of torture, indefinite detention, and the suspension of civil liberties in the name of the war on terror. He calls for an enlightened foreign policy: economic aid with an emphasis on reducing female illiteracy in the Middle East, debt forgiveness, international coalitions, deterrence, diplomacy. Yet, he cautions, "anti-imperialist liberals have been tempted by the hope that humanitarian methods could fully substitute for violent ones." Instead, he writes, we must be prepared to go to war, and "make the tragic choices that defending freedom requires."

But in practice, those tragic choices are none too clear. Beinart concedes he supported the Iraq War, although he says he now sees that he made the wrong call. Yet Iraq renders suspect the very sort of idealistic use of military force he continues to support. He is also a big fan of the Cold War, and gives short shrift to the nuclear freeze movement and to arms control--arguing instead that it was the NATO missile buildup in Europe that ultimately persuaded the Soviet Union to back down. Likewise, Beinart makes only passing reference to the damage done by the Red Scare and presents American anti-communism as a proud chapter in our nation's history.

There is no question that some on the American left shamefully sided with Stalin, even as evidence of his crimes against humanity mounted. But to present Henry Wallace and others who warned against the cost of isolating the Soviet Union as discredited ignores the high cost and sheer madness of Mutually Assured Destruction. It also denies the possibility that history might have turned out differently--that the nuclear arms race and decades of proxy wars might never have happened.

My biggest beef with Beinart's book is that he downplays the contributions of scruffy revolutionaries to fundamental social change. In fact, the civil rights movement happened because of radical, revolutionary action by courageous people like Fannie Lou Hamer, not the politicians like Hubert Humphrey, who tried to tamp down and manage them. (Beinart laments Hamer's refusal to accept Humphrey's offer of compromise for an integrated delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention.)

In the same vein, Beinart excoriates Wallace and praises Harry Truman for taking up the cause of civil rights, but ignores the fact that Truman was forced into that position by the more idealistic Wallace. It was the activists and radicals, whose grating voices Beinart would like to temper, who have pushed the establishment politicians to change.

I don't dispute that the young revolutionaries of the 1960s turned off mainstream, working-class, white voters. (Beinart seems particularly irked by Tom Hayden on this score.) But there was a certain inevitability to that cultural clash. Clucking over the failure of the activists to embrace the pragmatic, cautious, establishment perspective is spitting in the wind.

Of Nixon's rise and the "law and order" right, Beinart writes, "The New Left was polarizing the country. And a resurgent right was reaping the rewards."

Here Lakoff would vehemently disagree. The New Left did not cause the mainstream of the country to turn away from its values. Instead, consultants, pollsters, and some very smart rightwing political and media operatives worked very hard to reframe the debate about civil rights, crime, and other issues. "In politics, whoever frames the debate tends to win the debate," Lakoff writes. "Over the past thirty-five years, conservatives have framed most of the issues in American political discourse."

Joe Klein tells more of that story in Politics Lost. Political consultants and pollsters are the main characters in his book. He is more interested in the game of politics--and the personalities of the politicians--than broad, ideological forces. Where Beinart's and Lakoff's books are heavily researched and serious, Klein's is utterly entertaining. Klein is not nearly as cordial as Beinart. He, too, lashes out at the left. (Both authors take umbrage at the left's divisiveness, and yet both focus almost all of their criticism on fellow liberals and progressives.)

The "problem with books lamenting the sad state of American public life is that they are mostly written by losers. That means they've tended to be written by Democrats in recent years," writes Klein. "Inevitably, such books decry the shallowness of American public life because mainstream candidates refuse to talk about such high-minded, vegetarian notions as state-run health care and the imperialistic cruelty of the American empire."

That pretty much dispatches my kind of politics. I can't help it, though, I enjoy reading Klein. He is funny, and full of tasty anecdotes about politicians. He hates what he calls the "pollster-industrial complex," not for what it has done to policy, but for the way it has drained the humanity and the roguish personalities out of politics. Klein deftly describes how M Gore's consultants made him completely unlikable, and ultimately cost him the election. Klein is a big fan of "authenticity" in candidates. Oddly, for my taste, he adores Ronald Reagan, whom he maintains was true to himself and his vision of the country, even if what he said was authentic bullshit: "Reagan kept the faith with his troops through gaffes ... made-up stories about people buying orange juice with food stamps and using the change to buy vodka." Most of all, Klein likes Reagan's natural instinct for politics, and his disinclination to study the polls.

That doesn't mean he doesn't like pollsters, though. He tells a fascinating story of the "brilliant misfits" who ruined politics--Lee Atwater, Bob Shrum, and Patrick Caddell--and the rise of their diabolical art.

Klein doesn't buy good-government liberalism: "the welfare-dependent culture of poverty ... the stone-stupid bureaucracies of the past." Lakoff would point out that he, like a lot of mainstream journalists, has "unconsciously adopted a conservative frame" when he talks about major issues. But Klein also decries the Democrats' centrist, poll-driven politics. In 2002, he writes, "the Democrats had become the party dedicated to the principle that the most important issues (war, taxes) would not be discussed, and the segment of the population that had once thrilled to the party's idealism (young people) would be ignored. It was a shameful campaign, and rightfully rejected by the public."

The Presidency of George W. Bush, meanwhile, "represented the final, squalid perfection of the Permanent Campaign," Klein writes.

Klein is not optimistic about the future of politics. But he places his faith in people's preference for candidates who say what they mean--even if it's not popular. "Any politician who can communicate strength, originality, and a vibrant humanity ... probably will win ... and so will we."

It may not be that easy. An authentic leftwing Democrat would still have to overcome the criticisms from Beinart and everyone to his right. And such a candidate would also have to grasp Lakoff's insights about how language shapes our brains, and how we ignore what doesn't fit into our preexisting frame of reference. That may be the formidable challenge progressives have to overcome to turn back the dangerous, dumbed-down politics that are leading us so far from anything we can recognize as freedom.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.