Peter Beinart - Biography

Peter Alexander Beinart (born 1971) is an American journalist.

Early life and education

Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of South African immigrants. His mother, Doreen, works at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and his father, Julian Beinart, is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His stepfather is theatre critic and playwright Robert Brustein. Beinart attended Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He then studied history and political science at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union, and graduated in 1993. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford University, where he earned an M.Phil. in international relations.

Career

Beinart worked in The New Republic as the managing editor (1995–97), senior editor (1997–99), and as the Editor (1999–2006). 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.

Beinart is the author of 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.

From 2007–2009 Beinart was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. At present Beinart is Senior Political Writer at the blog The Daily Beast, 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 Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and some other periodicals. Occasionally Beinart has appeared on various TV news discussion programs.

Views

Beinart was a vocal supporter of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq but by 2006 as he published his first book, he "had concluded that it had been a tragic mistake", according to George Packer in The New Yorker. His second book, then, in 2010, in Packer's words, "look[ed] back at the past hundred years of U.S. foreign policy in the baleful light of recent events [and found] the ground littered with ... the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence [as demonstrable in] a study of three needless wars", the First World War, Vietnam, and Iraq. Vietnam was presented in the context of ozio (indolence) in the wake of the necessary and successful World War II. WWI, Vietnam and Iraq were presented as each "based on an oversimplifying ism -- Progressivism, liberal anti-Communism, and neoconservativism -- and ... respectively, the hubris of reason, the hubris of toughness, and the hubris of dominance.

In a recent essay, Beinart has argued that the tensions between liberalism and Zionism in the U.S. may tear the two historically-linked concepts apart.

Personal life

Beinart lives with his wife and two children in New York City.

Works

• Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, HarperCollins, June 1, 2010, ISBN 978-0061456466
• Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, HarperCollins, May 2006, ISBN 978-0060841614

External links

• Profile at City University of New York
• Column archives at The Daily Beast