The War for Liberalism
EDITORIAL The War for Liberalism We've learned at least two things in the first nine days of the Second Gulf War. The American people are fine. American liberalism is not. Here's the good news...
...It's not really doing any damage—except to the media...
...Our pro-war friends who are concerned about the mainstream media's idiocy can relax...
...The other group includes the Teddy Kennedy wing of the Senate Democrats, the Nancy Pelosi faction of the House Democrats, a large majority of Democratic grassroots activists, the bulk of liberal columnists, the New York Times editorial page, and Hollywood...
...Now, the hawkish Scoop Jackson faction found itself on the losing side...
...But this wing of the GOP and conservatism lost in an intra-party and intra-movement struggle, and has now been marginalized—Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican, and his magazine these days makes common cause with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal...
...It would be misleading to call this group the Joe Lieberman liberals, because he was already too much of a hawk to be representative, but the group certainly includes Lieberman...
...Luckily, the split turned out to be overwhelmingly one-sided, and American liberalism more or less ejected the Henry Wallace faction from its ranks...
...It is in the process of undergoing one of its once-in-a-generation splits...
...They know that totalitarian regimes do not fall easily...
...They hate Don Rumsfeld so much they can't bear to see his military strategy vindicated...
...It also includes Hillary Rodham Clinton, probably a majority of Senate Democrats, less than half of the House Democrats, Democratic foreign policy experts at places like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a smaller number of liberal commentators and opinion leaders— most notably the Washington Post editorial page...
...As long as the Bush administration continues to focus all its attention on winning the war, it will have the support of the American people...
...The Gephardt liberals are patriots...
...Parts of the Republican party, and of the conservative movement, fell into a similar trap in the late 1990s, hating Bill Clinton more than Slobodan Milosevic...
...Cold War liberals became an ever smaller minority through the 1970s, eventually departing the Democratic party and the ranks of modern liberalism...
...They hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory...
...The fight over the future of liberalism is not one conservatives can really join...
...In 1948, the American left divided between Harry Truman's anti-Communists and Henry Wallace's fellow travelers...
...What of American liberalism...
...Here's the good news about the American people: They're not affected by the silly mood swings of much of the media...
...Americans outside newsrooms and TV studios understand that wars are often difficult and usually unpredictable...
...Every poll shows the American people are resolute, convinced the war is necessary and just, and determined to see it through to the end...
...They grasp the fact that lots of military decisions are judgment calls, and that there's not much point paying attention to instant second-guessing...
...Today, three decades later, after a Clintonian interregnum which papered over ideological differences, American liberalism is in the process of dividing again, into the Dick Gephardt liberals and the Dominique de Villepin left...
...They hate John Ashcroft so much they relish the thought of his Justice Department flubbing the war on terrorism...
...Twenty-four years later, a Wallace supporter, George McGovern, captured the Democratic nomination for president...
...And they believe that the events of the war so far—the Baathist war crimes, the care in the use of force by the American military—confirm the depravity of Saddam's regime, and the justice of America's cause...
...They supported the president in the run-up to this war, and strongly support the war now that it has begun...
...These liberals—better, leftists—hate George W. Bush so much they can barely bring themselves to hope America wins the war to which, in their view, the president has illegitimately committed the nation...
...William Kristol...
...But we can wholeheartedly cheer from the sidelines for the Gephardt liberals against their anti-American leftist rivals, hoping that they succeed in saving the (mostly) good name of liberalism...
...It would be bad for America if this wing of American liberalism were to prevail...
Vol. 8 • April 2003 • No. 29
