"A Fighting Faith"

Many readers have wondered why I haven't weighed in on the debate swirling around Peter Beinart's essay in The New Republic (registration required). Actually, no reader has expressed any wonder at all, but why should I let that stop me?

It is an interesting debate. But I don't have much to add to Kevin Drum or, more recently, Josh Marshall.

Basically, Beinart starts with a history lesson on a pivotal period for the Democratic part. In 1947 Democrats were faced with a choice of directions to take in the post-war period: the pacifist wing led by former Vice-President Henry Wallace and the virulent anti-communist wing led by Harry Truman.

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... it is the right--the very extreme right--which is most likely to gain victory."

During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard, members of the UDA met to expand and rename their organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, issued a press release that enumerated the new organization's principles. Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, "[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere," America should support "democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over." That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology "hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great."

At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals, saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA, it was virtually the only liberal organization to back President Harry S Truman's March 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet subversion.

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism, anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA's help, Truman crushed Wallace's third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism."

Beinart goes on to argue that the Democratic party is faced with another turning point, with a choice between the "hard" liberalism of a small cadre of the Democratic elite and the "soft" liberalism represented by, according to Beinart, Michael Moore and MoveOn. "Hard" liberalism perceives the threat that fundamentalism (Beinart focuses on Islamofascists, but others, Like David Neiwert insist on including anti-government militias and white supremacist groups in this country as well) poses to civil rights, the status of women, etc. "Soft" liberalism, on the other hand, perceives this moment in our history, not as an age in which our freedoms are threatened by young men acting on the ravings of radical clerics, but rather perceive the real threat as George W. Bush, the Patriot Act, etc.

As I said, it is an interesting conversation (although it is turning into something far more vitriolic than that), and one that I think it is important for Dems to have.

There is a lot to agree with Beinart. I agree, for instance, that Islamofascism needs to be put much higher on the agenda of the Left. Fundamentalism, both abroad and in this country, is the true threat to liberalism both because of what the movement can effect when it is in command of a country (see Taliban, Afghanistan), and because of what fundamentalist terrorists can do when they strike this country again and the predictable clampdown on our rights tightens further.

I also agree that John Kerry did a poor job of articulating his position on Iraq and on terrorism overall. His position on Iraq, like a lot of us who initially supported the war, but feared the BushCo. prosecution of it, was extremely complicated. He was further hampered by the realities of Senate procedures (voting against the $87 billion in order to make a statement that it should be paid for by rescinding tax cuts for the wealthiest) and the realities of the Democratic primary which forced him to lean toward the anti-war Dem. voters. And while I agreed with his approach to terrorism -- to recognize that it is stateless and needs to be combatted with more than a military strike -- he failed to forcefully, repeatedly, hammer home that everything Bush is doing "combatting terrorism" is having the opposite effect, actually strengthening our enemies. Kerry failed to remind voters, day after day, that he is obsessed with protecting our security and killing bin Laden, while Bush pays lip service to fighting Islamofascists by failing to ask Americans who aren't in uniform to make real sacrifices in the effort, to forcefully crush the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to demand democratic change in the middle east while at the same time lauding Pervez Musharraf and descrbing Arial Sharon as "a man of peace."

But I disagree with Beinart when he conflates Iraq with terrorist threats against us. Just because Bush was able to convince a large number of people that Hussein was in bed with al Qaeda, doesn't mean Democrats should purge itself of the Reality-based community.

And speaking of purging. I also disagree with Beinart when he, like many on the Right, puts forth Michael Moore as a leader of the party. Moore is not the party spokesman. He's a successful clown, an ex-Naderite in full movie promotion mode last summer, and he should have been treated that way (not invited to share a box at the Democratic convention with Jimmy Carter). And MoveOn, who Beinart suggests is the other leader of the "soft" sect of the party, is a grassroots group that comprises an entire range of views. It is not -- at least not yet -- a shaper of ideology for the party. They're naive, they allowed themselves to be coopted in the run up to Iraq by scumbags like A.N.S.W.E.R. But they're not leading the party into limpwristed pacifism, nor are they ideologically hegemonous.

And I forcefully disagree, as do Marshall, Neiwert and others more intersted in returning to control of the white house, congress and statehouses, that we should be "purging" the party of antiwar liberals in order to have a unified party. The Democratic party will never be known for harmonious unity. It is a party of divergent views and of contentiousness. That's why the Democratic party truly represents the face of the U.S., despite some recent electorial setbacks and insistence by the anti-Reality-based of some kind of Man Date for Republicans.