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Grenada, medical experimentation, football, abortion, AIDS, the
rise of religious fundamentalism, OPEC, comparable worth, isola–
tionism and the Bitburg fiasco, never once following a perceptible
party line - other than the belief that liberal pieties are no longer sac–
rosanct.
However, the future ofliberalism-and by extension the fate of
the Democratic Party- is the central concern of
Cutting Edges.
Like
his colleagues at
The New Republic,
Krauthammer has taken a long,
hard look at the history of the left in America and, perhaps spurred
on by some of the more accurate criticisms leveled at left-liberalism
by the neoconservatives, has found much that is wanting. He would
like to transcend the mistakes of the past - the softheadedness that
has led to knee-jerk responses - and fashion what some of the pundits
in the press have called a more muscular brand of liberalism.
This supposedly "new" politics is described in an essay titled
"Whatever Became of the American Center?" Here Krauthammer
attempts to revive the tradition ofliberal internationalism, which he
feels has lost its way since the death of Senator Henry Jackson. Be–
ginning with Woodrow Wilson, liberal internationalism has striven
to give democratic capitalism a human face. "At home," Krautham–
mer writes, "that meant developing and defending the institutional
embodiments of the national conscience: ciyil rights, Social Security,
Medicare, welfare (what ambivalent conservatives, using the lan–
guage of rescue teams and circuses, call the 'safety nets'). In foreign
affairs it meant an unapologetic preference for democratic pluralism
everywhere, and a willingness to 'bear any burden' in defense of the
cause (what the left now calls 'the cold war mentality'). In short: big
government for big enterprises, at home and abroad."
Yet Krauthammer works diligently to avoid one of centrism's
inherent flaws: its negativism, what he describes as an "on-the-one–
hand, on-the-other-hand passivity that searches constantly for the
lowest common denominator, that seeks the neutrality of the center
as a refuge from the passion of the extremes."
There is nothing neutral or passive about any of the opinions in
Cutting Edges,
as is demonstrated (to choose but one example) in
Krauthammer's defense of deterrence. The author knows just what
deterrence means: that it is a plan built upon fear and that, because
each su perpower has the capacity to incinerate innocent people sev–
eral times over, it makes any act of aggression tantamount to suicide.
And yet deterrence has a track record.
It
has prevented the outbreak
