Democrats Should Purge

Apologies for the sparcity of posts in the last week--I have been working extremely hard to finish my thesis before Christmas. But there have been a few things I wanted to comment on:

The whole blogosphere has been abuzz with talk about The New Republic's editor Peter Beinart's cover-story last week, "A Fighting Faith".

Beinart presents a call for the moderate to hawkish wing of the Democratic Party to take back control from the liberal wing, arguing that it is not only the sole way the Dems will win a Presidential election any time soon, but it is also good for the country. He begins by drawing an analogy between the present situation and the early days of the Cold War, when Truman was challenged from the left by former VP Henry Wallace. Back then it was about how the party should react to the communist threat; today, the threat is from another totalitarian force, radical Islamicism. Today, as in the late-1940s, the Democratic Party is split:

the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage.

The tension is between a small group of foreign policy specialists and national security intellectuals, who tend to lean towards hawkishness, and a populist movement, fostered by Michael Moore and MoveOn.org and embodied, for a short time, by Governor Howard Dean. When Dean eventually lost the nomination to Senator John Kerry, the hawks gathered behind the nominee and tried to steer him to towards being, or at least appearing to be, strong, perhaps stronger than Bush, on terrorism.

These advisors were largely veterans of the Clinton years, and as Beinart argues, the Clinton administration was far more hawkish than most Democrats seem to remember:

The Democratic foreign policy establishment that counseled the leading presidential candidates during the primaries--and coalesced behind Kerry after he won the nomination--was the product of a decade-long evolution. Bill Clinton had come into office with little passion for foreign policy, except as it affected the U.S. economy. But, over time, his administration grew more concerned with international affairs and more hawkish. ...

For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that embraced U.S. power. And September 11 validated the transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally felt it didn't go far enough--urging a larger nato force capable of securing the entire country.

And, while disturbed by the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, they agreed that Saddam Hussein was a threat and, more generally, supported aggressive efforts to democratize the Muslim world. As National Journal's Paul Starobin noted in a September 2004 profile, "Kerry and his foreign-policy advisers are not doves. They are liberal war hawks who would be unafraid to use American power to promote their values."

Beinart argues that the Democratic Party must purge itself of the liberal anti-war left, the Michael Moore-wing, and embrace a more old-style, Henry Jackson-style neoconservative Democrat position:

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.

I could not agree more with Beinart, on both the political necessity for the Dems to move more towards the centre, and on the general ideological premise of his argument. Liberals, that is, people who believe in the liberal values of intellectual, religious, social liberty, in human and civil rights, in a free press, then it is, on occasion, necessary to fight for it. It is even sometimes necessary to force a culture to become more liberal. I understand that this sounds like a paradox, but either we believe that these liberal values are universal, that they apply to everyone, or we do not. And occasionally we must force our values upon a culture against its will for its good.

The Democratic Party is the party of the Marshall Plan, of strong anti-totalitarianism, of the Peace Corps. Our hope is for a free, secure world. To make one, we will need to eliminate those who do not believe in freedom and security.