If only you were ask concerned with the neo-cons as you seem to be with the moonbats... alas.

posted this on Kevin Drum's site, cross-posting it here:

Beinart's piece did make think a bit. And I had no idea Move-On opposed the War in Afghanistan, something which makes me think less of the organization. However, ultimately I remain unconvinced of the morality of "purging" members of your base who may hold more extreme views than you do. Michael Moore does hold some unwise & immoral political views, but that does not mean the right response is to "purge" him in some way, or to repudiate the much good work he has done. Ronald Reagan once said "When someone endorses me, I am not endorsing their agenda. They are endorsing mine" I think that's absolutely right. The GOP did not become the majority party by "purging" the extremists in their ranks. Quite the contrary. Focus on getting your own views right, and giving voters big, concrete moral and material reasons why they will be better off if our guys get the keys to the car. Don't waste time "purging" people to your left, or fall into the trap of legitimising the right's guilt by association tactics.

And it is worth mentioning that even in the Cold War context overzealous Anti-Communism was just as big a problem historically as underzealous Anti-Communism. The ADA may have made possible Kennedy's victory in 1960 & the Great Society, but they are also responsible for the fanatical, irrational Anti-Communist mindset that led to the f***-ups in Vietnam & Cuba.

The people to Beinart's left should ponder whether they are modern-day apologists for Henry Wallace. But Beinart himself should ponder whether he is a modern day apologist for Robert Macnamara.

In my judgement, he should be pondering that pretty damn hard.

I would add that Michael Moore has just published a book of letters sent to him by troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moore doesn't speak for me, but he does a speak for a subset of soldiers and working-class people. You may not respect Moore personally, but you should respect the people he speaks for.

The GOP did not become the majority party by "purging" the extremists in their ranks.

Buchanan is a crank. Random sample of one Republican (me).

A.L.

I put up a piece on my site about this.
"I'm a Liberal Not a Leftist"http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2004/12/im-liberal-not-leftist.html

Feel free to use any or all of it if you like.

Here is a quote:

...... "I'm a liberal, not a leftist". As a liberal I support Bush on the war against fascists and in his economic initiatives. I intend to fight him tooth and nail on what I call his Republican Socialism. His attempt to force his religion down our throats. His anti-gay initiatives. His drug war. His idea that sex education ought to be based on faith. I will support him on the war against fascism and the Opportunity Society. At this point in the transition in American politics I'd have to say that two out of three ain't bad. In time the middle will re-assert itself and Republican Socialism will decline. I trust America.

Damn I left out a colon in the link.

I hate non-standard html.

Let me try again.

I'm a Liberal Not a Leftist

The Democrats did not endorse Michael Moore.

The fact that he sat next to Jimmy Carter during the convention was a complete accident.

No endorsement implied. Just an accident in the seating chart. M is right next to C in the alphabet. It could happen to any one.

==

Is David Duke still supported by the Republican Party?

==

The Democrats ought to consider recruiting Osama. I hear he could bring in a lot of Muslim votes. If not Osama perhaps Yasser Arafat, who, despite reportrs to the contrary is still not dead. He has just gone into hiding in a hole in the ground. Kinda like Saddam before he was discovered.

==

A Democrat Big Tent.

The bigger the better.

Never purge the extremists from your party. They often have the loudest voices. Where the Democrats went wrong in the election was that they didn't have a loud enough voice.

If the SWP had been given more leeway the Democrats might have won. After all Stalinism could make a come back. They could have exploited Kim Jong-Il's popularity in America to gain an election sweep.

==

LOL

==

Democrats - the dust bin of History Awaits.

Don't be late.

BTW the troops that MM quotes. Do they represent 90% of the troops? 10%? 1%? .1%?

In any group of 130,000 what are the odds of finding 100 serious gripers? How many did MM quote?

Do the gripers represent noise or reality?

Only history will tell for sure.

If the only word you got of WW2 was "Catch 22" (which I enjoyed immensely) would you think we won or lost the war? Would you think we were the good guys or the bad guys?

Which is not to say that stuff like Catch 22 didn't happen. What I want to point out is that it was not the big picture.

My guess is that neither is MM.

A.L.,

The Democrats will not survive intact 4 more years of this crap.

Joe Lieberman is out in the wilderness.

Best to help push the Dems over the cliff and try to rearrange the pieces after the break-up.

At least that is my theory.

A.L,

I said this in a comment on Winds Sept 6, 2003. I see nothing that has changed my opinion since:

"The Democratic party of Wilson and FDR is dead.

The Democrats of today haven't been a real broad based American political party for a generation. They are merely a series of special interest groups dedicated to their various domestic government-client relationships.

Nothing outside their government-client nexis is real to them save as competitors for the same federal resources. Anything outside those government-client relationships is an evil Republican plot to steal food from the mouths of the needy -- i.e. Democratic interest groups.

If you want a quick thumbnail sketch, the Democrats are the party of government. The Republicans are the party of government subsidies. The former requires large government bureaucracies. The latter only requires someone to write a check.

For various reasons relating to world trade, religion and nativist xenophobia in the various Republican factions, the outside world is real to Republicans in a way it is not for Democrats.

The Military for Democrats is a source of pork and a means of doing "meals on wheels" to undeserving foreigners when those foreigners have bought or are related to a Democratic interest group.

The Military for Republicans is also a source of pork, but it is also used to protect trade and kill bad guys "outside the American tribe."

That is why only the Republicans can be trusted with Federal executive power in this war."

What it takes to change a party is a Presidential candidate. Clinton did it for a time for Democrats.

You need someone who is strong on national security and by that I mean to the Right of Bush on finding and killing America's enemies.

If your primary system won't elect one, then your party is dead and damned and deserves to be.

As it is, your Party's reflexive anti-war impulses are going to hand the Republicans at least a net gain of two seats in 2006 because we are going to invade and conquer Iran before then.

BTW Goldwater represented core American values.

Socialism does not.

Which is why the Republicans came back and the Democrats will not.

Trent,

I might mention my Death of Socialism article on this site as well as republished on my own. It comes to a similar conclusion.

Agree on Iran.

Bush is laying the political groundwork.

To be of advantage in 2006 he has to do it in the next 6 months. To give it time to post war stabilize.

Odds are high that Israel will do Syria at the same time.

Assad is begging for talks. No pre-conditions. (as opposed to their rant for years of "no talks without return of the Golan"). Sharon is not interested. Heh.

Cough

We are in a period of political realignment. This is due not only to the attack from abroad but to the passing of the "Greatest Generation" and the entry of the millenials who have already won two wars. Their different experiences and educations mean they hold different political positions .

This change is the most dificult for those, like AL, whose position is receeding from a dominant majority to an impotent minority. It is also difficult for the majority as it was the impotent minority so long that after 10 years it is still unsure that it can wield the power of the majority.

This is not meant to be snide. AL is providing us a vivid example of the political survivor whose home is destroyed due to lack of maintenance and who must find a new one that reminds him at least a bit of the old one. Let's hope the back-ups last long enough for some future historian to be able to trace his journey from the old homestead to whatever his new destination may be.

Bottom line: (at least as things stand now)

The Republicans "get it" and even though there are some pretty whacko fringes within the party, they aren't in the drivers seat, and the party plays little more than lip service to their interests. More than anything, the Republicans give us [the image of] leadership, and that is something the public desperately needs.

The Democrats don't get it... they so much want to have a utopian society where everyone is protected, and everyone gets along, that they cowtow to each and every special (liberal) interest group. There is little leadership that comes from this quarter. It's all to often... "Oh my gosh... What do the polls say? How should we respond?"

If the Democrats can ever again figure out how to address mainstream concerns, ignore (or at least give only lip service to) liberal fringe rants, and to actually do some real leadership, then there is hope for them (and though I am a Republican, we truly believe we need the balance of a sane opposition party). If they can't, they are irrelevant, and the sooner they are replaced by another "liberal" party, the better.

I like Trent's analysis. I have been putting it like this:

The current Democratic Party is using the old Chinese saying "Teach a man to fish, and he will be independent for life; promise him four fish a day, and then tell him he can only have two because of some evil enemies, and he will be your voting slave for life."

"Our model is that of the Goldwaterites. They did not change. They fought and eventually they prevailed."

And roublen vesseau: The GOP did not become the majority party by "purging" the extremists in their ranks.

Barry Goldwater, patron saint of unreconstructed leftists?

A few things happened on the way from Goldwater to Reagan. There was indeed a purge of extremists - have you any idea what kind of right extremists were running around the country in those days? People who thought Eisenhower was a foreign agent, that Jews controlled the money supply and Communists controlled the weather, and that the whole world was run by Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and the Trilateral Commission. People whose thinking was so rotten with conspiracy theory that they could barely be called loyal Americans, believing as they did that their government and the society they lived in was completely evil. In other words, they looked a lot like the left extremists we have now.

These weren't the people who dug in and eventually won. Conservatism grew up when these people were made to shut up. A lot of things contributed to making that happen, but I think an important beginning was made when William F. Buckley (more or less the Conservative Pope in those days) and National Review led an attack on right-wing anti-Semitism.

Reagan delivered the death blow to the old right fringe. With the arrival of Reagan, it was no longer possible to seriously believe that the world was run by a conspiracy of traitors and fluoride-dispensing Communists.

In the meantime, large numbers of Democrats - many of them horrified by the "counter-culture" and the New Left - had become Republicans. In the Democratic Party, history was moving in the opposite direction.

I agree with Glen Wishard points Re: AuH2O, WFB Jr., and the Gipper but I would like to add one additional point. Contrary to Beinhart�s assertion there is nothing �positive� about the Democrat�s policy agenda domestic or foreign which was largely paternalistic consisting of �you need more government handouts because you cannot possibly do things on your own because there are Two Americas and it�s all Bush�s fault.�

In contrast the conservatism exposed by Reagan and to an extent Goldwater largely consisted of an innate belief in the power of the individual to achieve great things with government playing a role in protecting your rights from criminals and foreign enemies (communists then, today islamacists) with a safety net for the deserving needy. Bush pretty much embraces that as well with his talk about an ownership society, letting people keep more of their own income, unleashing entrepreneurship, health savings accounts, personal retirement accounts for Social Security, and the oft-maligned �faith based� initiatives all of which are designed to empower the individual rather than encourage dependency on government.

Simply put, Republicans are winning because they�ve embraced a conservatism that believes in America and the ability of the common person to achieve great things. Democrats are losing because their philosophy and policies are directly antagonistic to both.

If Democrats want to win in the future, they had better being to rethink their party�s reliance on dependency on government as the foundation for their party. In Beinhart�s essay he suggests strengthening that dependency and the intra-party institutions that propagate it. He is simply too wedded to delusions of his party�s past glory to really rethink the structural and philosophical changes that need to be made to his party and unfortunately for the Democrats, no one else in their party seems to be up to the task either.

I might add that Goldwater had a lot of bad things to say about the Religious Right.

My kind of Republican.

Too bad I was a hard core Democrat at the time.

Thorley,

I think Lieberman is in the right place even if he came by it naturally.

The Dems are ignoring him.

A.L.

Cudos for a very intuitive article and interesting discussion.

Identifying the problems with the democratic party is only half the battle. I would also agree the rifts within the party as pointed out by Peter Bienert are very real and not imagined.

Peter does point out some very interesting things concerning the leadership and financial backing with the party. What Peter doesn't point out is if in fact the majority of the party versus the minority believe in principles he and others espouse. (You may be singing harmony for a long time A.L.)

When you get statements like these

"I would not vote for Joe Lieberman or any Iraq-war supporting Democrat (that includes Hillary, by the way). People like me are the mirror images of the Republican right. We would rather lose than sacrifice our principles."

"Never purge the extremists from your party. They often have the loudest voices. Where the Democrats went wrong in the election was that they didn't have a loud enough voice."

"Focus on getting your own views right, and giving voters big, concrete moral and material reasons why they will be better off if our guys get the keys to the car."

The control of the party rests in its' majority and the financial backing of that majority. Given the way things are playing out it's apparent to me that the majority is not the one with Peter's beliefs and principles. It also seems to me that the majority is not going let those that believe differently drive the car either. Not even for a test spin.

On another note I think it might do well for Peter to read the recent blog on values / morals. IMO Peter seems to fall into the same trap that I perceive is the bigger issue. He does bring up a more appropriate word principles (1st definition - one I have been searching for).

To achieve what Goldwater did you need a: (a) gifted politician and (b) strong communicator who is also (c ) committed to a non-extreme set of principles.

Lieberman is (a) and (c ) but not (b).
Clinton is (a) and (b) but not (c ).
Kerry is none of the above,
Edwards is just (b),
Etc...

The underlying problem is that the left has been running its own anti-moderate jihad within the party for so long, Democrats don't have a 'deep bench' available now, when they so desperately need it.

Re Kirk's silliness about Buchanan being a Republican in good standing... has Kirk been under a rock for 10 years or something?

Pat has been under serious and sustained fire from conservatives for years. Only half of them think he's a nut, true, but that's because most of the others prefer the term "traitor to the party." From RealChange.org, some folks whpo pick door #1:

"Flirting with fascism" is how William Bennett described Buchanan. Both William F. Buckley, Joshua Muravchik (a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) and William Safire (Pat's fellow speech writer on the Nixon staff) have all concluded that Buchanan showed consistent (if carefully worded) hostility toward Jews throughout his public statements."

It's a challenge to piss of the neocons and traditional conservatives all at once, but Pat loves a challenge. Re: the other label...

Pat ran as a fringe candidate in the 90s, fared not very well even among Republicans, and was more or less exiled from any position of influence in the party. He retired to an inexplicably lucrative talk show circuit because his counterpart liberal talking heads had known him for so many years that they felt comfortable keeping him around. He then ran for President under the banner of the self-destructing Reform Party in 2000, an act that surely endeared him to loyal Republicans everywhere and his opponent George W. Bush in particular. This may have kept his visibility alive and helped him keep his talking head role, but now even that is fading. His saving grace on the media circuit these days is that he still reliably bashes Bush and advocates withdrawl from the war, so he's always fun to bring on as a 'Republican' sock-puppet if you're a liberal media member who also wants to bash Bush and advocate withdrawl from the war.

Other than this, his political standing among Republicans is just peachy.

The day Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are given the same status among Democrats as Buchanan has among Republicans, is the day they'll be on their way back to power.

Re: #23

Pat Buchanan is a prime example of the sort of thing that Buckley-style conservatives - as well as neoconservatives [creepy organ music, screams] - successfully exorcised from the conservative movement. It took Buchanan a while to get there.

He now belongs to the malcontented group that includes notables like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Sobran (also dumped by National Review).

They have in common: Hatred of Israel; hatred of pro-Israel conservatives, especially neoconservatives [scream]; admiration for Islamic extremism (Buchanan actually endorsed the death threat against Rushdie); and a tendency to rub elbows with Holocaust deniers and worse folk, like Chomsky's friend Robert Faurisson. Thus is the Moronic Convergence made complete.

It's no accident that these people are mixed up with both the far left and the far right. If Pat Buchanan ran the Republican Party, rest assured there would be no war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein wouldn't even have to bribe the French. The Israeli ambassador would be sent packing, and Paul Wolfowitz [scream] would get deported along with him. The people at Indymedia would think they were in Utopia.

I don't want to flog a dead anti-Semite, but Pat Buchanan was never repudiated by the GOP because of any of his extremist views (David Duke, yes, though La. Governor Mike Foster was able to make profitable use of David Duke's mailing list). Buchanan was excommunicated because he won the freaking NH primary in 1996, and it went to the poor thing's head. He imagined himself getting elected as a Ross Perot independent, and so he took a chance in 2000 running as the Reform party candidate, and so of course destroyed his standing forever with the GOP.

So I maintain my assertion that the GOP, in transforming itself from a minority to a majority, never bothered to "repudiate" the Right in the way you all are calling on the Democrats to "repudiate" the Left. A lot of Birchers were enthusiastic supporters of Reagan. And President Bush did not say one word in favor the Alabama initiative striking racist language from the constitution, nor did he "repudiate" the people who opposed the initiative.

Now I have no problem denouncing, in the strongest terms, specific positions and rhetoric which people like Michael Moore or Move-On may hold. But I think it is simply wrong to excommunicate people as a whole and to label them bad people (well, as long as they've never murdered anyone). There is a lot of good as well as some bad in the Michael Moore films I have seen (Roger& Me, The Big One, and Bowling for Columbine), and I have no problem regarding Michael Moore as a conditional ally rather than a sworn enemy.

I don't particularly wish to doubt anyone's sincerity, but my suspicion is that "Michael Moore sat next to Jimmy Carter!" is a rationalization for why people voted for Bush, rather than a real reason. And the way to win people over to liberalism & the Democratic party in the long run is not to make a big spectacle of "repudiating" the left, but simply to figure out what you want to do, substantively and policy-wise, and then to constructively, truthfully & relentlessly make the case to voters why their family, community & country will be better off if the Democrats have the keys to the car. It's the way Clinton did it, and despite his flaws, on the whole he succeeded.

>Buchanan was excommunicated because he won the
>freaking NH primary in 1996, and it went to the
>poor thing's head. He imagined himself getting
>elected as a Ross Perot independent, and so he
>took a chance in 2000 running as the Reform
>party candidate, and so of course destroyed his
>standing forever with the GOP.

I take it you don't bother to read National Review or use Google?

Republicans used Buchanan to help exercise David Duke from the party. Then they pitched Buchanan when he went xenophobic, visibly anti-Semetic and anti-establishment Republican.

Living in Texas, I was well aware that Gov Bush of Texas was thwacking both Buchanan, and Gov. Pete Wilson of California both, over the California anti-immigrant initiative.

Buchanan was also excoriated by Republicans for being against the Kosovo war that both Dole and Gov. Bush were in favor of and for remaining pro-Serb afterwards.

No, it wasn't limited to New Hampshire 1996, Buchanan was given the full "bell, book and candle" excommunication by Republicans for a whole range of reasons.

That you don't want to believe so is a matter of your "political-religious faith," not objective fact.

I've been struggling to figure out the correspondences between the contemporary Democrats and the Whigs of the pre-Civil War period. If one considers the election immediately preceding the Civil War the situations are not quite symmetric. Because of the slavery issue there were a different set of main candidates in the South and the North. Lincoln was not in contention. The Whig candidate in the South (whose name I can't recall) was a moderate. The Democratic candidate was a firebrand pro-slavery secessionist named Breckenridge. Later, during the election of 1864, the war was nearly lost by the political machinations of the peace wing of the Democratic Party, famously called the Copperheads.

So the problem I have with applying that history directly to our current situation in some meaningful way, and to the conclusion that the Democrats are headed for a big realignment (something I've discussed at length with Dan Darling) is that the 1860s Democrats were far more harmful to the anti-slavery movement than were the Whigs, yet the Democrats survived while the Whigs didn't. Why is that?

I suspect the key had to do with the class struggle, and the fact that the Democrats had no rivals for their historical role as the party of the working class as the Industrial Revolution hit full stride. In the South the very working class counties that had voted overwhelmingly for the radical secessionist, Breckenridge, almost all voted against secession just a few months later. The fact is that, slavery or not, the Whigs were probably on their way out... because they represented an agrarian kind of commercial class, whereas the Republicans represented a more industrialized entrepreneurial class. The former was fading while the latter ascended. And it just happened that this new class of entrepreneurs were anti-slavery, not so much because they believed passionately in human rights, but because slavery represented an inefficient and backward form of production. Slavery displeased them intellectually and aesthetically, if not morally.

So the question one must ask in relation to the current crop of Copperheads is whether there's a function for them, and a constituency, that's relevant to these issues of class and economic distribution. And that really, to a large extent, depends on what the Republicans do.

If Republicans get behind the notion of a comprehensive tax reform of the sort that some have recommended... that would enhance capital formation for the "working class," then the Democrats will be in a pretty tough spot. They simply have no new ideas that could compete with a genuine program promoting an "ownership society." If, however, the Republicans are less than sincere about that agenda, Democrats may have the oppotunity to pick up the fight... eventually.

I think Democrats could probably manage to be entirely wrong, and even almost traitorous, in the War on Terror and still manage to survive as a Party in opposition if they perform a function that well represents the interests of their traditional constituency. They won't be a majority for a long long time, because there is a price to pay for being on the wrong side of history. As I recall, there were only two Democratic Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt (altough one was elected twice to nonconsecutive terms). Nor did they control Congress. But, they survived.

If, however, the Republicans manage to steal some of the Democratic constituency through genuinely expanding entrepreneurship, then the Democrats may well be on their last legs... and they'll go the way of the Whigs.

So I guess I disagree somewhat with Beinart's thesis that the War on Terror is as important to partisan politics as it is to the nation. And what would really worry me if I were still a Democrat is whether, like the Whigs, my party had simply identified itself too closely with the economy of a bygone era, and with an economic class and set of interests that are shrinking.

Anyway, it's probably important to remember that a one-party system was not the consequence of the Civil War realignment. In fact the party that became extinct was replaced by its closest ideological neighbor, rather than by its opposite.

Joe,

You can have your leg back. Yes, I left out the big, huge, blinking <sarcasm> tags. Just goes to show that you can never guess when your tone says it all, and when it doesn't. :-(