One Jerusalem held a bloggers conference call yesterday with Will Marshall, a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), president of the Progressive Policy Institute, and editor of the recent book “With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty” — a title that reminds me of Peter Beinart’s interesting book earlier this year, “The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”
Marshall is an articulate advocate and it was an informative conversation. The recording of the call is here and the key arguments of the book are summarized here. Equally interesting is Omri Ceren’s take on the call — a post that ought to earn him a Ph.D. without any further work:
Underneath this new liberal internationalism is a cluster of mistaken assumptions . . . the idea that the Bush administration has been hands off in Israel (not really), the idea that the Bush administration has been unilateral (insulting), and the idea that there are allies out there just waiting to join us in the global war against Muslim extremism (demographically problematic for them, to say the least). It’s an ideologically and institutionally myopic.
. . . [Marshall’s] . . . wrong because the starting assumptions are wrong — there is no difference between failing to get the Palestinians to genuinely make peace and never starting in the first place. Or actually, there is a difference — but it doesn’t end up positively for the people who brought Arafat to the White House.
But Allen Roth and David Goder [of One Jerusalem] are quite right in bringing center-right pro-Western bloggers into dialogue with people like Will Marshall. The stakes in the war against political Islam are too high to let partisanship get in the way either of fruitful intellectual dialogue or of contingent political alliances. . . . Will Marshall and his allies on the center-left are fighting the good fight against isolationists and neo-Realists of all stripes. They’re frighteningly wrong in some respects, but they remain critical to constructing a centrist coalition dedicated to protecting the West against the threat of jihadism.
. . . And if the center-left arguments can’t be addressed and answered (and we want to be very clear on this — we think they can be) — then they should be adopted. Because that’s how useful strategies and political visions are formed.
There’s more.