Misreading America

The Conning Tower ^ | Dec. 12, 2004 | Trentino

[Davis]

Peter Beinart, Editor of The New Republic, deserves a modest amount of praise for attacking head on the problem of the Democratic Party's present crisis: its incoherence, its inability to win elections, its consequent minority status, and its dim prospects for electoral victory any time soon.

Additional modest praise is due Beinart for attempting to analyze the problem by looking into the ideas that have propelled it off course.

My polite but restrained applause is directed at Beinart's long article in TNR, An Argument for a New Liberalism. A Fighting Faith. (shortened and partly rewritten by him for the New York Post's op-ed page. It has attracted much attention in both left and right camps. I am pleased by its refreshing abandonment of the usual suspects offered to account for the Dems' decline.

Beinart refuses to assign blame for this crisis to tactical misjudgments, the "flawed candidate" John Kerry, the irremediable stupidity of Bible-thumping, bloodlusting Red-staters, to a 30-year-long capitalist conspiracy to destroy America or Karl Rove's Machiavellian machinations.

Beinart points to what seems to him a deep schism among Lefties: A majority of them deny that America faces a vital challenge from the Jihadists. "Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not 'been fundamentally reshaped' by the experience."

It is the reshaping of American liberalism—the Democratic party—that Beinart deems necessary for the health of liberalism and that Party. He points to the organization of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in January 1947 as analogous.

The threat to liberalism then, says Beinart, was communism, but a majority of liberals then didn't believe that. It took spunk and seriousness for the ADA to declare its opposition to communism—the Soviet Union then under the management of the old shortstop, Joe Stalin —to rid the Democratic Party of its Stalinoids.

The analogy to 1947 is strained and the account of it is tedious. I am unconvinced that the formation of the ADA had the significance that Beinart (and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who attended the meeting) attribute to it. It was an announcement, a press release, after all. It didn't rid the Democratic party of communists nor erase liberalism's fondness for the Soviet Union. As Beinart notes, the two most influential liberal journals, The New Republic and The Nation didn't sign on.

Beinart ignores the role of conservatives' continuing stalwart opposition to communism and of the pressures of events that revealed what a murderous hell hole the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Iron Curtain satellites were. He neglects to mention that 30 years after ADA was founded Jimmy Carter warned against our "inordinate fear of communism," and he is silent about the revulsion expressed in liberal circles when Ronald Reagan, our previous cowboy president, called the Soviet Union an "evil empire."

Beinart identifies Michael Moore and Moveon.org (representing Democratic "grassroots") as the culprits who haven't come to terms with the events of September 11, don't acknowledge its significance and are thus responsible for the crisis of the Left. "For Moore," writes Beinart, "terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: 'There is no terrorist threat.'"

But Michael Moore isn't to be taken literally. His actual text doesn't matter. Attitude is all.

Beinart doesn't understand Moore and the grassroots liberals' support for him. Moore's declared denial of a terror threat from the Jihadists must be understood as, "This country is evil, and we don't give a damn about defending it. Support the troops? You must be outta your mind?"

Yep, that's it. Ask anyone.

[thoughtomator]

The problem is that the libs want to ally with the jihadis, not fight them.

[carlr]

Every thing they believe and stand for has been proven to be a failure.

They thought Communism was a harmless even preferential system to ours.They wonder how we can make the Islamofacists be content to live side by side with us.They think the way to help those in poverty is to tell them they are a victim and deserve to be supported by those luckier than themselves.

There is no hope for them because they are wrong about everything.You cannot succeed in any plan when all the basis and fundamentals are false.