December 08, 2004

Shaking Up the Left

No, David, you're not the last weblogger to comment on Peter Beinert's piece on a new liberal foreign policy. It's a little obnoxious for a conservative like me to pontificate about what liberals should do. I'd be a little perturbed reading a Lefty offering the Right advice. But if Democrats and liberals continue on their present course the nation will be stuck with a one-sided debate. A smart, intellectually honest Democratic Party is good for the GOP and good for the country. So here are some of my thoughts.

Beinert writes:

Had history taken a different course, this new brand of liberalism might have expanded beyond a narrow foreign policy elite. The war in Afghanistan, while unlike Kosovo a war of self-defense, once again brought the Western democracies together against a deeply illiberal foe. Had that war, rather than the war in Iraq, become the defining event of the post-September 11 era, the "re-education" about U.S. power, and about the new totalitarian threat from the Muslim world that had transformed Kerry's advisers, might have trickled down to the party's liberal base, transforming it as well.

Instead, Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan affair--defined in the liberal mind not by images of American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false claims about Iraqi WMD. The left's post-September 11 enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda--epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA--was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war. So, when the Democratic presidential candidates began courting their party's activists in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2003, they found a liberal grassroots that viewed the war on terrorism in negative terms and judged the candidates less on their enthusiasm for defeating Al Qaeda than on their enthusiasm for defeating Bush. The three candidates who made winning the war on terrorism the centerpiece of their campaigns--Joseph Lieberman, Bob Graham, and Wesley Clark--each failed to capture the imagination of liberal activists eager for a positive agenda only in the domestic sphere. Three of the early front-runners--Kerry, John Edwards, and Dick Gephardt--each sank as Howard Dean pilloried them for supporting Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the Iraq war.

In a backhanded way Beinart blames the Bush administration for the Democratic base not fully supporting the Islamic War. But maybe it was the unrealistic expectations they have toward war. Democrats fail to comprehend how amazing the victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were. In both cases it only took weeks to topple nations and liberate their peoples. As an added bonus there were few Allied causalties. When you put the 1000+ troops that have died during the Iraq War and in post-war operations into historical context you see Iraq has been one of the least-bloody military operations in American history.

Beinert goes on:

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

Beinart will be disappointed in Oliver Willis' Brand Democrat campaign. For Willis it isn't about changing the party, just marketing it better to American voters. In fact, Willis writes, "Howard Dean was right. Peter Beinart, The New Republic, The DLC, and all the pro-Iraq war liberal hawks were wrong, wrong, wrong." Oddly, Willis endorses Howard Dean, M.D. for DNC chairman. Somehow, I don't think he's the greatest salesman for the Democrats.

Beinart sees little hope in Democrats getting their act together until the base realizes America is in a war. That means more than a tiny portion of Democratic delegates have to rate terrorism or defense as their number one issue.

One can only hope that many Democrats take Beinart's ideas to heart. I would love to see my country united, both Left and Right, in the fight against Islamism. A more unified U.S. could be better understood by a cynical Europe and Middle East. Domestic unity could inspire more international unity. In short, foreign policy unity could shorten the long war with Islamist totalitarianism. Doves and hawks, liberals and conservaties, Democrats and Republicans, all want that.

"A Fighting Faith"

[Added to OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam and The Show Trial.]