Peter Beinart

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Peter Beinart
Peter Beinart.jpg
Peter Beinart in 2007.
Born 1971
Education Undergraduate at Yale; M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University
Occupation Journalist, author
Notable credit(s) Author of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Senior Political Writer at The Daily Beast, a contributor to TIME, Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation

Peter Beinart (pronounced /ˈbaɪnərt/; born 1971) is Senior Political Writer at The Daily Beast, a contributor to TIME, Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by Harper in June.

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[edit] Education

Beinart is a graduate of the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School and a member of the class of 1993 at Yale University, where he was chair of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union. Beinart won a Marshall Scholarship (which he declined) and a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University and received an M.Phil. in international relations[1] in 1995.

[edit] Career

Beinart became The New Republic’s managing editor in 1995. He became senior editor in 1997, and from 1999 to 2006 served as the magazine's Editor. For much of the time, he also wrote The New Republic’s signature “TRB” column, which was reprinted in The New York Post and other newspapers. The Week magazine named him columnist of the year for 2004. In 2005, he delivered the Theodore H. White Lecture on politics and the press at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government

For the December 13, 2004 edition of The New Republic, Beinart wrote an article titled "A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism," in which he argued that liberals should draw upon the anti-totalitarianism liberalism of the early cold war to develop a distinctive strategy against jihadist terrorism. New York Times columnist David Brooks called “A Fighting Faith” “the most discussed essay of the postelection period.”

Beinart spent 2005 as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution , where he turned his essay into a book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (HarperCollins, 2006). Drawing upon the work of the mid-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Beinart argued that, paradoxically, the only way for America to distinguish itself from the predatory imperial powers of the past is to acknowledge our own capacity for evil. Acknowledging our own moral fallibility, Beinart argued, would lead America to embed its power within structures of domestic and international law. This, Beinart argues, was the great accomplishment of early cold war liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther and Harry Truman. The Bush administration, by contrast, carried on the tradition of right-wing anti-totalitarianism—exemplified by cold war intellectuals like James Burnham-which warned that recognizing America’s fallibility would lead to crippling self-doubt. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called The Good Fight “a brilliant and provocative book in a great tradition.” Samantha Power said that “Beinart has given Democrats a blueprint for...taking back the White House.”

In 2007, Beinart left The New Republic to become a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he wrote his second book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, which Harper will publish in June 2010. In The Icarus Syndrome, Beinart asks why American foreign policy periodically goes berserk, why we fight unwinnable wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq. His answer: too much success is a very dangerous thing. When entire American generations come of age with no primary experience of political tragedy, when all they have seen is military, economic and ideological triumph, they tend to forget that they—and their nation—are fallible. And as in the Icarus tale, they fly higher and higher, until their wings are melted by the sun.

In The Icarus Syndrome, Beinart tells three stories of success, hubris, disaster and the search for wisdom. The first section, “The Hubris of Reason”, tells the story of the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher’s son who for a moment became the closest thing to a political messiah the world has ever seen. “The Hubris of Toughness” follows the dazzling, foolish Camelot intellectuals who led America into Vietnam. Finally, “The Hubris of Dominance” examines George W. Bush and the post-cold war conservatives, who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. In each case, hubris begot pain, and eventually wisdom, as new leaders and thinkers reconciled American optimism—our fundamental belief that anything is possible—with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will.

In the introduction to The Icarus Syndrome, Beinart reveals that he decided to write about the relationship between success, hubris and disaster in part because of his own regret at having supported the Iraq War.

In September 2009, Beinart became Senior Political Writer at the The Daily Beast, where he writes two columns a week, in addition to his status as a contributor to TIME. He also became Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.

Beinart has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Slate, Reader's Digest, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Polity: the Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Studies Association.

He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, The Colbert Report, MTV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC and many other television and radio programs. He regularly debates The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg on bloggingheads.tv.

He is represented for speaking engagements by Leading Authorities and Keppler Speakers Bureau.

[edit] Personal life

Beinart is a member of Kesher Israel synagogue. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.newamerica.net/user/213

[edit] External links

[edit] Basic information

[edit] Beinart articles

[edit] Beinart interviews

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