The revival of Reinhold Niebuhr: : A foreign policy fable

• Autores: Robert B. Horwitz
• Localización: Public culture, ISSN-e 1527-8018, Vol. 28, Nº. 1 (Issue 78), 2016
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • A curious feature of the present political moment in the United States is the revival of two Cold War intellectual figures, Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Hofstadter. The Hofstadter revival is understandable, pegged in large part to the rise of the Tea Party movement and the effort to comprehend its enraged politics of restoration, the fevered demand to “take our country back.” The Tea Party’s grassroots conservative populist concerns and style hark back to the earlier right-wing movements coupled to Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, about which Hofstadter (1965) composed his celebrated theory of “the paranoid style in American politics.” How the paranoid style helps explain the Tea Party lay at the roots of the Hofstadter revival. I have written about this in a recently published book and will not dwell on it in this essay (Horwitz 2013). The Niebuhr revival is more complicated—and perhaps more consequential. It reflects the use—or misuse—of the presumed lessons of the Cold War in the justification of America’s current war on terror. Niebuhr’s tough-minded foreign policy realism, lauded in the day as “hardheaded” or “hard-boiled” and extolled for helping win the Cold War, has been resurrected uncritically by many policy makers and commentators since September 11 in an effort to legitimize the war on terror. This article examines Niebuhr, his restoration, and the foreign policy fable of unproblematic Cold War triumph that underlies the revival