Review: Power And The Idealists, By Paul Berman

I haven't made a habit of pointing out the various books and albums on my list of recommendations in the right column, but for Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists I'll make an exception.  After reading Berman's Terror and Liberalism when it came out in 2003, I became a fan.  His expertise is documenting the intellectual path of liberal-leftist thought and in Terror and Liberalism he took a look at the war on terror through that prism.  He is a liberal hawk through and through, and his perspective on our battle against al-Qaeda and what we're up against globally was influential in how I saw the Iraq War.  From the beginning I was troubled that liberals were failing to see the human suffering that was happening in Iraq and that their opposition to the war was something of an acceptance that nothing should be done about it.  It is one thing to oppose military intervention if it is used as a first tool of state interaction, but entirely another when war is opposed regardless of its potential for doing good.  At some point pacifism descends into de facto support of totalitarianism, and it seemed as though many on the anti-war left ignored this moral dilemma.

In Power and the Idealists, Berman dives into the intellectual brush of the leftism of the 1960s and 1970s.  He follows the career (is that really the best word?) of Joschka Fischer, a man who sharpened his political teeth in the leftist demonstrations and activism of the 1960s and who eventually evolved into a tremendously popular Green party leader and German Foreign Minister from 1998 to present.  Fischer and his ideological partners (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard Kouchner, etc.) in crime (sometimes quite literally) are examined by Berman in an effort to see just how the ideas and idealism of the "68ers" developed as new crises and new power structures emerged through the present day.  How, for instance, could Fischer, as a tried and true leftist of the 1960s anti-establishment, anti-NATO generation support (and campaign for, no less) the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999 as German Foreign Minister?  What had gone wrong (or right) in his mind? 

Extended to the present day, how could leftists of the 68ers generation find the ideological footing to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in Iraq?  While Fischer, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, was against the war, Kouchner was for it.  They both aired their misgivings about the American approach to the war (most of which have turned out to be quite prescient) but had come out on opposite sides of the argument.  To Kouchner the leftism of the 68ers generation was only effective if it was active.  How could leftists sit by, he asked, and watch totalitarianism destroy lives?  It was Kouchner who took his ideology and acted on it, founding Doctors Without Borders in 1971. 

Many on the left, however, simply continued to see a war carried out by the United States as they had for decades: as a war of imperialism and domination.  This was not how Fischer reacted, for his response as German Foreign Minister was one of misgiving about the method of ending Saddam's regime not an utter contempt for power, but it was this response that became firmly planted in the left that we saw oppose the Iraq War from the earliest days.  Amid the chatter of "Free Mumia!" and "No Blood For Oil!", were signs equating Bush with Adolph Hitler.  But wasn't it leftist-liberalism that had defeated Nazism and had stood up against totalitarianism?  Whatever happened to that sentiment?

Berman's Power and the Idealists does its best to answer these questions.  How could leftists, be they working German socialists, French student Maoists or radicals of the various leftist persuasions of that era, how could they realize their own transformation and adapt to realities of a new century while staying true to their founding ideology?  How can one be both against The Man, and be The Man?  How, quite simply, can one use power and still be an idealist?