On The Third Hand

Jonah Goldberg on Staying Soft.

I’m very confused.

As this is not news to many, let me be more specific. Last week, my friend Peter Beinart wrote a much-discussed cover story [also recommended reading — kk] for The New Republic arguing that the Democratic party needs to become a “fighting party” that takes Islamic totalitarianism seriously. As I wrote in my syndicated column, I thought it was a wonderful and serious article, even though I thought his prescription was, if not naïve, then certainly overly optimistic.

Beinart opens with a flashback. “On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington’s Willard Hotel to save American liberalism.” Their cause, according to Beinart, was the pressing need to purge the “softs” from the leadership of the Democratic party. The “softs,” Beinart writes, “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.”

Fast forward to today. Beinart says that today’s Democratic party is plagued by Softs: The Next Generation. Michael Moore is the most obvious soft, though one could have an endless debate about his influence in the party. What is not debatable, however, is that Moore is a caricature of everything that is wrong with the American Left when it comes to, well, everything. But let’s stick to the foreign-policy stuff. Moore doubts that Osama was behind 9/11 and certainly thinks Bush is a bigger threat than Bin Laden. He asks, “Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?” MoveOn.org dabbles in isolationism, complaining — as the hard Left has for 60 years when it wants to change the subject — that the threat to civil liberties is greater than any external threat. It was to this wing of the party that Kerry pandered when he complained that we were opening firehouses in Baghdad but closing them in the U.S. (I didn’t know there was a federal Department of Fire Departments, by the way).

…

So, I was particularly intrigued by Drum’s initial response to Beinart’s cri de coeur: “What he really needs to write,” harrumphed Drum, “is a prequel to his current piece, one that presents the core argument itself: namely, why defeating Islamic totalitarianism should be a core liberal issue.” He continues later on: “That’s the story I think Beinart needs to write. If he thinks too many liberals are squishy on terrorism, he needs to persuade us not just that Islamic totalitarianism is bad — of course it’s bad — but that it’s also an overwhelming danger to the security of the United States.”

Read on… Jonah is highlighting what I’ve been saying, on and off, for quite some time now. It’s not that they are against the war in Iraq, or even that some of them were against us going into Afghanistan, it’s that they really don’t believe that we are at war with anyone. They simply don’t see the Islamist terrorists as any more of a threat than a local criminal.

I don’t even want to think about the type of attack that would convince them we are at war. As much as I’d like to see us all on the same side, I just hope an attack bad enough to convince them that this really is a war never happens.