Beyond  /  Comment

Still Chasing the Wrong Rainbows

What historian William Appleman Williams taught us about foreign policy and the good society.
U.S. Information Agency/Wikimedia Commons

Williams was an unapologetic radical. Yet he was by no means unsympathetic to conservatives. Nor did he lack for patriotism. Indeed, viewed in retrospect, he was one of those American intellectuals who bridge the divide between left and right, thereby representing some distinctive amalgam drawing from both camps. (Among Americans, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christopher Lasch offer other twentieth-century examples).

So the remarks that Williams made some fifty-two years ago included the following reflection, worth pondering by present-day conservatives. “If we justify our intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that it is crucial to our national security,” he said, “we will soon be able to justify using our power for whatever we happen at the moment to want, or against whatever at the moment we do not like.” Furthermore, “That kind of moral arrogance—that kind of playing at being God—will destroy any chance we have to construct a good society.” Then Williams added:

Notice that I said good society. We already have a great society, and I think that may be the source of much of the trouble with our leaders. For greatness has primarily to do with size, strength, and power. But we citizens who are gathered here are primarily concerned with quality, equity, and with honoring our potential for becoming more fully and truly human.

In 1965, confusion about the distinction between great and good found American leaders “following the wrong rainbow.” President Johnson was promising Americans a “Great Society.” What he was actually delivering was an unnecessary war destined to cost the country dearly and leave it bitterly divided.

Today, in the era of Donald Trump, that confusion has returned with a vengeance.