JOLLY DAYS

Beinart and Goldberg, Liberal and Conservative

This discussion between Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg has more substance than one would expect in this kind of “battle of the…” set piece. Both Beinart and Goldberg are serious thinkers and made many interesting points:

• About patriotism: they discussed the feeling on the left that patriotism is dissent while on the right it is viewed as a familial/neighborhood affirmation.
• Goldberg emphasizes the genius of the American Revolution — the specialness of it. He also pointed out that the socialist dream of non-particularity is a dividing line between conservatives and liberals.
• Beinart emphasized the original sin of slavery as inextricably tied to the founding of America. He describes slavery as “the most grotesque of human evils”, ignoring its long sorry history in human affairs, from all cultures and far greater evils witnessed in mid-twentieth century Europe or the 1915 Armenian genocide. Goldberg points out that it is the very “dead white male” power structure that finally put an end to slavery. In general, Beinart sounded familiar in his all or nothing formulations about patriotism and the glass-half-full mentality about America — unwilling to acknowledge the growth in the system; Beinart's “Whiggish historicism”, as Goldberg put it — imposing current liberal standards on another age — is a tiresome tactic (often seen in academia).
• The most interesting point Goldberg made was about the patriotism of the left, which is really a trans-American patriotism — an attempt to bypass locale and neighborhood for the satisfying simplicity of elite argument: cosmopolitanism.
• About national service: Goldberg felt it an onerous demand but Beinart approved, as does Obama. Goldberg feels the forced volunteerism of national service undermines the enormously robust volunteerism and already in place ethos of charitable contributions in America — forcing the government into the mix.