Liberal journalist and pundit Peter Beinart ignited controversy among progressives with his article “A Fighting Faith” published in the December 2004 issue of The New Republic. In the wake of John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush, Beinart contemplated reasons for Democrats’ defeat by upholding the legacy of “cold war liberalism,” which he saw as a template for political recovery. In so doing, Beinart evoked the history of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and celebrated its role “in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism” through which “anti-communism gained strength.” As Beinart described, “With the ADA’s help, Truman crushed [Henry] Wallace’s third-party challenge en route to reelection” in 1948. Beinart lamented that the mobilization among liberals to fight the Cold War was not replicated in the context of the “war on terror.” Quoting from Arthur Schleinsger Jr.’s liberal anticommunist tome The Vital Center (1949), he argued that even though “September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not ‘been fundamentally reshaped’ by the experience.” Beinart contended that there was too “little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda—even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans.” Hence the remedy he proposed was to “wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace.” Beinart expanded his thesis into a book designed for easy consumption before the 2008 presidential election: The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win The War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006).

It likely displeased Beinart when Donald Trump successfully employed the slogan he had proposed for liberals eight years earlier. At the same time, as is illustrated by its prospective use by Democrats and Republicans alike, “making America great again” is a generic catchphrase that can be made to serve the rhetorical interests of both liberal internationalism and conservative nationalism (or deployed against whichever party holds the White House). Ironically, Beinart asserted that Kerry lost not because of his infamous “flip-flop” on Bush’s war of choice (saying he was “against it” after having been “for it”), but rather because he did not stick with his pro-war position and defend it to the hilt. Yet the issue was not the war itself, per se, but rather the vote to authorize “use of force,” which led to the March 2003 invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq. As Beinart indicated in a confession in the introduction to The Good Fight, he was supposedly fooled about Iraq in much the same way as Kerry, or for that matter Hillary Clinton claimed to have been: “I was wrong on the facts. I could not imagine that Saddam Hussein, given his record, had abandoned his nuclear program,” and “I could not imagine that the Bush administration would so utterly fail to plan for the war’s aftermath” (xii).

The Obama administration’s foreign policy demonstrates that Beinart’s proposals, or at least the vision on which they were based, carried significant weight. While Obama came to power as a result of rejecting rather than embracing the Iraq War, he, Kerry, Clinton, and others including Joe Biden proceeded to integrate the realities of that war—planned decades ago by neoconservatives—into their global outlook. Indeed, as Beinart had proposed, Democrats chose not to dismantle the Bush-Cheney post-9/11 imperial project, but rather attempted to replace its shaky foundation with a sturdier edifice.

There is perhaps no better figurative illustration of the folly of American empire than that its first three managers in the twenty-first century were George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Amid a transition from neoconservative to (cold war) liberal internationalist to authoritarian nationalist, very little has changed—except for escalating violence and increasing global instability. All of this begs the question: had Al Gore taken office at the end of the contested 2000 election, would the United States have invaded Iraq? And, would President Gore have made the climate crisis a national priority in the same manner that he did as a documentary filmmaker? If so, would Beinart have accused Gore of ignoring the global threat of a new totalitarian foe?

That a portrait of Socialist icon Eugene Debs once hung in the congressional office of Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders offers a striking symbol of the tragedy, hope, and hazards extant in the early twenty-first century American political landscape. With Sanders’s historic challenge to what had been presumed to be Clinton’s uncontested march to the nomination in the Democratic primaries, new possibilities were awakened on the left. Yet—as seen from one perspective—the grassroots Sanders coalition, built largely by disaffected youth who founded the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2013, was sabotaged by the “establishment.” Or as viewed from the other standpoint, left purists surrounding the Sanders campaign derailed Clinton’s historic chance to break the “glass ceiling” in the nation’s highest office and, worse still, divided opposition to Trump.

It was revealing that when the United States Senate took steps in the summer of 2017 to impose sanctions on Russia in response to allegations of interference in the 2016 elections, the only two members of that body who did not cast a vote in favor were Sanders and the libertarian Republican from Kentucky Rand Paul. It is highly indicative of the current state of affairs that they (and they in particular) were the only two senators who did not support an action that might increase hostility with a nuclear-armed rival; and that Russia is once again squarely in the crosshairs of American power speaks volumes about the nature of what lay beneath the Cold War facade.

Be it Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong-un, there will always be—as described by John Adams in 1821— “monsters to destroy.” With phrases like “new cold war” and “new McCarthyism” now commonplace in national discourse, there could be no better time to grasp the manner in which liberal anticommunism still influences US foreign policy; no less than the fate of the world is at stake.