In his interpretation, totalitarian movements of the right and the left arose in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War as a reaction to the successes and failures of liberal civilization.
He identifies two principal totalitarian tendencies in the Muslim countries, Baathism and radical Islamism – mutually hostile movements whose doctrines, in his interpretation, overlap and have allowed for alliances.
In July 2010, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and '40s.
"[8] In Berman's interpretation, observers relying on modern liberal values have sometimes found it difficult to identify the anti-liberal and anti-rational quality of totalitarian movements.
Berman's ideas have influenced writers such as Martin Amis and Bernard-Henri Lévy, helping to shape debates about the concept of the "post-left" in Britain.
A writer in The Nation magazine, Anatol Lieven, labeled Berman a "Philosopher king" of the liberal hawks and criticized him for "[promoting] and [justifying] the most dangerous aspect of the Bush Administration's approach to the war on terrorism: the lumping together of radically different elements in the Muslim world into one homogeneous enemy camp.
"[17] Once the invasion had begun, he nonetheless called on the liberal left to support the war on humanitarian and anti-totalitarian grounds,[18][19][20][21] even while continuing to elaborate his criticism of the larger Bush Doctrine.
In the run-up to the war, I became, on practical grounds, ever more fearful that, in his blindness to liberal principles, Bush was leading us over a cliff… It is true and it is a matter of satisfaction to me that, in the years since then, I have not made a career of saying 'I told you so.
Joschka Fischer, for example, the 1968 activist who would later become a leading figure in the German Green Party and Foreign Minister, decided that there was in fact the presence of anti-Semitic impulses in this movement when he saw the Revolutionary Cells participate in the Entebbe hijacking.
Also, Berman tracks major figures like Bernard Kouchner—the later founder of Doctors Without Borders—a member of the 1968 Generation who would later marry active improvement of human rights to established political goals.
He suggests that the war split the movement greatly, with many now deeply aware of the dramatic excesses of the regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as the potential negative consequences if such a dictator remained in power.
He was fired a few months later, partly for refusing to print an article by Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua.