A Fighting Faith?

I'm not big into the idea of conservatives telling liberals how to save themselves from being culturally ignored, or Republicans instructing Democrats how best to rise to the electoral challenge. First of all, you never listen to the opposition with much faith, even when they're clearly right; there's too much of a tendency to think they're screwing with you. Second, and more important, our own experiences don't provide a roadmap that the other side can follow, unless they come to the conclusion that they need to change.

That's why it's so heartening to see Peter Beinart's article "Fighting Faith" in The New Republic. TNR is one of the more rational outlets on the left -- certainly, it's more respectable than the screeching banshees over at The Nation. Beinart draws a legitimate historical analogy between the Left of today and the Left following World War II. He notes that folks like Henry Wallace were not devoted anti-Communist crusaders -- he and I might diasgree on whether Wallace and his sort were actually sympathetic (if not in favor) of the Communist cause, but he recognizes that many liberals did not bear antipathy toward totalitarianism. Today, it's much the same -- I think many Americans question whether some of these folks really love other nations more than they love this one. There's a difference between legitimate criticism of America and idiotic hyperbole, and too many on the Left have lost track of that. Or rather, the shrill voices are not told that they're idiots by the decent folks among them.

The real problem is that the shrill voices on the left -- Beinart notes Michael Moore and MoveOn -- really seem to believe that the greatest threat to America is George W. Bush, not Islamic terrorism. When you fail to acknowledge the problem, you immediately leave people wondering if you can recognize it, and whether you should be responsible for dealing with it. Beinart's article discusses both of these culprits in depth...

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.

In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.

The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily communists themselves. But they refused to make anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the threat to liberal values came entirely from the right--from militarists, from red-baiters, and from the forces of economic reaction. To attack the communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil rights and economic justice, was a distraction from the struggle for progress.

Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naïvely consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left.

...Like the softs of the early cold war, MoveOn sees threats to liberalism only on the right. And thus, it makes common cause with the most deeply illiberal elements on the international left. In its campaign against the Iraq war, MoveOn urged its supporters to participate in protests co-sponsored by International answer, a front for the World Workers Party, which has defended Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong Il. When George Packer, in The New York Times Magazine, asked Pariser about sharing the stage with apologists for dictators, he replied, "I'm personally against defending Slobodan Milosevic and calling North Korea a socialist heaven, but it's just not relevant right now."

Pariser's words could serve as the slogan for today's softs, who do not see the fight against dictatorship and jihad as relevant to their brand of liberalism. When The New York Times asked delegates to this summer's Democratic and Republican conventions which issues were most important, only 2 percent of Democrats mentioned terrorism, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. One percent of Democrats mentioned defense, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. And 1 percent of Democrats mentioned homeland security, compared with 8 percent of Republicans.

There's a lot more there, and it's worthy of a read. I don't think the liberals and/or the Democrats have the upper hand on domestic issues, because I think many of their solutions are nothing more than a rehashing of the failed big-goverment reforms of the past. Domestically, the truly innovative ideas are coming from the right, including Social Security reform, school choice, workfare rather than welfare, tort reform, etc. But these are areas where liberals and conservatives are supposed to differ, with the same goal in mind: a better America. The same should be true with foreign policy and national security -- we should differ on methods, but still seek a safer America. The problem today is that many liberals seem unwilling to recognize the threat to our safety -- and they're the big mouths everyone hears from.