WP Op-ed, P. Beinart (TNR) - The Dems Enemy Within Problem

[leveymg]

Beinart, advocates the Democratic Party Embrace a New Truman Doctrine to Fight Global "Islamic Totalitarianism", Create New McCarthyist Institutions at Home.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49824-2004Dec8.html

Can the Democrats Fight?
Cold War Lessons for Reclaiming Trust on National Security
By Peter Beinart

Thursday, December 9, 2004; Page A33

At the beginning of the Cold War, liberals had a national security problem. As the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote in 1946, liberals "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: The Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, the Alsops warned, "it is the right -- the very extreme right -- which is most likely to gain victory."

Over the following three years, it did change. Anti-communism, a minority view among liberals in 1946, was by 1949 a cornerstone of liberal belief. Much of the credit goes to Harry Truman, who rallied liberals and other Americans behind containment and the Marshall Plan. But Truman didn't do it alone. At the Democratic grass roots, organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) put the struggle against communism at the heart of a new liberal worldview. When former vice president Henry Wallace tried to ally liberals and communists in 1948, the ADA helped defeat his third-party candidacy. And after Republicans took back the White House in 1952, the ADA helped ensure that anti-communism never became an exclusively conservative faith.

Today liberals have a national security problem again. The current "great political reality" is the threat from al Qaeda and totalitarian Islam. And in the shadow of that threat, the right -- including the extreme right -- has won two straight elections, partly because Americans don't trust Democrats to keep them safe.

<snip>

Consider MoveOn.org, which the online journal Salon has called "the most important political advocacy group in Democratic circles." MoveOn was founded in the late 1990s to oppose Bill Clinton's impeachment. But it responded to Sept. 11 by opposing the war against the Taliban. In 2002 it incorporated 9-11peace.org, which also opposed the Afghan war, and questioned the need for greater CIA funding. In the years since, MoveOn has depicted the war on terrorism in overwhelmingly negative terms -- as a menace to civil liberties and a distraction from domestic concerns. Like Michael Moore, it has minimized the al Qaeda threat.

<snip>

The obvious answer to Peter Beinart's leading question, "Can The Democrats Fight?" (WP Op-ed, 12/09/04) is: yes, among themselves. That is exactly what would happen if the Party followed his advise and turned further to the Right.

His proposed "cure" for the Dem's inability to recapture the White House and Congress is the Democrats become a war party. Beinart urges Democrats to embrace a sort of new Truman Doctrine, a global crusade against what he calls "totalitarian Islam", which is currently the Republican policy.

Doesn't that war also entail the Patriot Act, the War In Iraq, and the abuses that go along with them? Mr. Beinart seems to forget that McCarthyism and the Korean War started under the Truman Administration.

Cold War domestic politics demonstrated something he seems to forget: war parties turn into machines for domestic political purges. Does he want the Democratic Party and America torn apart again along ideological lines? Who would that really benefit?

Mark G. Levey

[KurtNYC]

1. Too many flaws in that synopsis of history

About as wrong as he can be.

We should never rely on the opposition's propaganda to tell us how to fix the DNC.

[leveymg]

2. Beinart's Synopsis or Mine?

Hi, Kurt -

Your comment can be taken either way. How so flawed?

- Mark

[KurtNYC]

4. His comments

I think your objections are on target.

The current "great political reality" is the threat from al Qaeda and totalitarian Islam That isn't what exit polls said. They said in general that people were concerned about the war in Iraq, the economy and gay marriage.

in the shadow of that threat, the right -- including the extreme right -- has won two straight elections

The popular vote in 2000 went to Gore. This year was either a close win for Bush or another steal. But they didn't run on extreme rightwing issues -- that was played up AFTER November 2nd.

So the adjustments he advocates (which are terrible btw) are in order to answer to conditions which he has inaccurately assessed.

[IrateCitizen]

3. Beinart's a fool, IMHO...

IIRC, he supported the invasion of Iraq as well. I wonder how that's working out for him....

Personally, I trace back much of the failure of liberalism to the virulent anti-communism adopted under Truman. While I certainly agree that the Soviet Union -- especially under a tyrant like Stalin -- needed to be opposed, the anti-communism embraced by liberals proved to be the undoing of liberalism. It started and perpetuated an insane arms race, for one. Second, it helped justify US intervention to overturn popular governments under the mantle of "anti-communism". Third, it helped the right wing to demonize everything that liberals stood for domestically as being tied to "socialism", and therefore, everything that the right embraced about market fundamentalism could be tied to "anti-communism".

Beinart IS right about one thing -- the Democrats DO have an enemy within. But he's wrong about who it is. The real enemy within is those who seek to solidify aggressive warmaking and interventionism under the false mantle of "national security" as the touchstone of foreign policy within the Democratic Party. Strangely enough, most of those who advocate this continuation of military interventionism are the same folks who want to drift domestic policy toward the idea of the Free Market as God, and embrace the excesses of corporate power.

He can go piss up a rope, as far as I am concerned.

[leveymg]

5. Agreed, particularly with your last line

Beinart's prescription, taken to its ultimate conclusion, would only move the Democrats from being a minority party to being an outlawed party. In his interview, Adam Werbach offers few workable, concrete ideas, but I agree with him that we must fight for every inch of what we have left.

Those, accommodationists, like Beinart and the rest of the TNR-DLC-Lieberman crowd might reconsider which party really represents their thinking. They may very well be more comfortable as the rational wing of the GOP.

I wonder what would have happened if the Dixiecrats had been exorcised from the Dems in '48 instead of the Henry Wallace Progressives? We might well have never seen the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. The Republicans took control in '52 anyway, so what would the Democratic Left have lost by standing firm?

My gut tells me we should do everything we can to avoid the breakup of the Democratic Party -- everything short of allowing the Right to take total control over it, that is. We should certainly avoid the temptation to just run away shrieking into the Green Party, or whatever.

- Mark

[IrateCitizen]

6. Yeah, I've always loved that "metapher", as Zell Miller would say...

Speaking of Werbach, have you seen this thread? You might want to weigh in with your thoughts.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=90761&mesg_id=90761

Going back to Beinart and the DLCers, I don't think that their actions would result in the Democrats being outlawed in any way. What I DO think they want to ensure is that there remains no left, or even center-left party in the United States. It seems that their vision is a country in which there is only a right-wing and a center-right party, both beholden to corporate interests and military adventurism, differentiated primarily by their stances on social issues.

Where Beinart, Lieberman, and the TNR/DLC crowd exist actually used to be within the realm of Republicanism. Especially the DLC. When one looks at the positions of the more liberal wing of the Republican Party of 30 years ago -- Nelson Rockefeller and even Richard Nixon -- I think that an argument could be made that the DLC exists to the RIGHT of them. The DLC is the result of the disintegration of the New Deal coalition, when the blue-collar workers exited the Democratic tent in droves over cultural issues (along with Democrats becoming out-of-touch) -- and militaristic economic conservatives who were liberal on social issues alone came in to take their place. This is why the traditional home of Republicanism throughout the better part of the 20th century -- the Northeast particularly -- has turned staunchly Democratic, while much of the Midwest, which used to be a bastion not only of Democratic voters, but of radicalism, is now firmly in the Republican camp.

[starroute]

8. I agree totally

Every time I try to trace back where things started to go wrong in this country -- and I've done it along several different lines of assumption -- I wind up at that crucial transitional period between 1946 and 1948.

Those years immediately after the war were a period of great hope mingled with great anxiety. But the emotional ambivalences of the period were all resolved in a hard-right direction -- the Cold War, the CIA, McCarthyism, the national security state.

It was that rightward shift that enabled Bush family pals, like Harriman and the Dulles brothers -- who should have been branded as traitors for their dealings with the Nazis before the war -- to move into positions of great power in the federal government and set the direction of US foreign policy.

I don't know yet what tipped the balance so heavily towards the right, though I'm trying to find out. Part of it was no doubt just post-war desire for reassurance -- which may be why the Republicans took control of Congress in 1946. But a lot of it had to do with conservative control of the media -- and with the clamor set up by people like the Alsops for right-wing solutions.

[regnaD kciN]

7. The Republican-Wannabe Noise Machine..

...is now fully operational. :grr:

Note the prevailing talking point of today, throughout the media: We've got Beinart, in both the Washington Post and the New Republic, urging a purge of the left (specifically, MoveOn, Michael Moore, and all who support them) in order to re-invent the Democrats as the anti-Islam(ist) party. Over in the Wall Street Journal, Al From and Bruce Reed are at it again, with more Democratic LOSERship Council "move to the center" boilerplate.

I don't think it's an accident that we're getting this wave of Republican-wannabe propaganda at this specific date. With the gathering of the party leadership in Orlando this weekend, in the run-up to the election of the new DNC Chair in February, it seems like the DLC crew is hitting the message in as many prominent places simultaneously as they can, hoping to make it seem like there's a groundswell of their "purge the left" sentiment across the board, and to turn it into a new meme.

I predicted that, should Kerry lose, the very forces who were pushing him as the "moderate" alternative to Howard Dean would quickly turn on him and blame the liberals for all the party's ills (yet again). Thus they would continue the usual Democratic LOSERship Council strategy of fighting the Republicans three months out of every four years, and liberal Democrats the remaining forty-five months.

Those of us on the left (which I think would include most here at DU) need to fight back, now. For this may be a decisive moment -- if the Al Froms and the Peter Beinarts of this world manage to install a business-as-usual, move-to-the-right hack like Leo Hindrey, you could expect a genuine purge of the Party, leaving us little choice but a generation of pure irrelevancy (in both senses of the phrase) with the Greens.