The “Last” Word In Mock Sympathy

I just shook my head when I read Jonathan Last’s column in The Inquirer yesterday; it defined the meaning of the phrase “concern troll” to me (I’ll say more on that later – hence the reason why I included the picture with this post).

One Last Thing - Helpful advice for wayward liberals
By Jonathan Last

The Vegas odds on Democrats doing well in the next two elections are fairly sunny. (At most of the casinos I've consulted, Hillary Clinton is about a 3-1 favorite to win the White House in 2008.) But as an ideological matter, liberalism, the intellectual backbone of the Democratic Party, is in a good deal of trouble.

God forbid that Last would produce anything resembling a basis for that claim, though if he were to mention the friction between the netroots and the beltway DLC establishment that has done nothing but lose elections, he’d be correct to a point. However, Last didn’t bother to say that; I just did.

And of course, let’s spread the popular fiction that Hillary Clinton is the pre-ordained, presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008. This is a trap for at least one reason; if HLC were dumb enough to say “Oh, all right, you found me out. My re-election is only a formality. I REALLY want to be president.” – and somehow, I seriously doubt that she would ever do that – that would give the Repugs a reason to say, “A-HA! See there, voters of New York State! All you are to her is a stepping stone!,” thus giving a boost to Clinton’s opposition, who I guess at this moment is either John Spencer or K.T. McFarland (based on this Wikipedia article, the Repugs will have a primary in September to decide the nominee).

Today there are two books on radically different topics by radically different authors - the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and the New Republic's Peter Beinart - that, taken together, could help liberal intellectuals (and the Democratic Party) figure their way out of the blind alleys that most hobble it: "life issues" and foreign affairs.

“Life issues” being code for “moral values” which is code for “hating the gays,” OK? Let’s be honest and up front about this.

Also, let’s explode the myth once and for all that Repugs actually want to “help” liberals, which is the definition of a concern troll. They want to “help” liberals by “helping” them TO BECOME CONSERVATIVES (in the same way that our dear friend Joe Klein resurrected Michael Kinsley’s comment recently that conservatives want to embrace you while liberals make you take a litmus test – I could explode that a few different ways, but that’s the subject of a whole other post.)

The first is Ponnuru's The Party of Death. It's the rare conservative book constructed not as a balm to make Republicans feel good about themselves, and not as a hammer to bludgeon liberals, but as an argument that seeks to convert.

Last is honest enough to validate what I just said – I’ll give him that much.

Ponnuru's subject is the broad range of life issues, from abortion to stem-cell research to infanticide and euthanasia.

I’m not going to waste one second of my life reading a book written by someone from The National Review. Besides, Ponnuru had an opportunity to plug this on an episode of “Real Time With Bill Maher” earlier this year, and he said virtually nothing.

Liberals may or may not be open to persuasion on these topics individually, but Ponnuru's grand argument is entirely persuasive: The intellectual foundation of life issues connects them and leads in unsavory directions.

So, as far as Last is concerned, I guess we’re supposed to hate the gays also, I guess. And I’m open to a bit of persuasion and an intelligent argument, not freeper boilerplate.

The political problem with being for abortion isn't being for abortion, per se. It's that this support easily slides toward assisted suicide and then euthanasia.

No it doesn’t. That’s one of the biggest freeper lies out there, and it doesn’t have a shred of truth (I know this is also the position of the Catholic Church, and with due deference, I must say that they're wrong on this also).

There are extremely difficult, real-world-based reasons why a woman would have an abortion, hopefully with a support network so she isn’t totally alone in the ordeal. And based on our experiences with other couples, it is because something has gone horrifically, catastrophically wrong with the pregnancy. However, I will acknowledge that my experience in this may be peculiar to someone else’s, but I have a feeling it isn’t.

You could also argue about the inconsistency of conservatives who oppose abortion but favor the death penalty (I very reluctantly support the right to both).

If left unattended, an unquestioning devotion to abortion rights can lead toward a utilitarianism so cold and merciless that it would make FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton jump back with fright.

Someone’s going to have to explain that sentence to me. I’m lost.

For Democrats and liberals, The Party of Death is a call to wake up and see where the logic of abortion-at-all-costs is taking them. If the Democratic Party is to regain vitality, it needn't become antiabortion - although many of us would like it to - but, as both a moral and political imperative, it must erect bulwarks against going the way of liberal theorists Ronald Dworkin and Peter Singer.

I don’t have the time to sit down and familiarize myself with the work of these two authors, so I have no comment on them. But “regain vitality”? Gee, I would say that Dr. Dean and a vast network of Democratic, grass-roots volunteers is making the party pretty “vital” right now; it has been in the recent past, it is so now, and it will be that way even more in the future with all of us working together (freepers excepted, of course).

The second book is Beinart's excellent foreign-policy corrective, The Good Fight. For a combination of reasons having to do with Vietnam, multiculturalism, and a distaste for George W. Bush, many Democrats and liberals have allowed themselves to become mired in a belief system based on the distrust of American power.

This is a clever way for conservatives to take the fact that Bushco has horrifically mismanaged the illegal Iraq War and personalize this as an issue of “liberals hating Bush, and therefore, hating our military also.” This is typical clownish freeper obfuscation - it's not that we distrust American military power per se; we just don't trust this administration with it because they abuse it.

And by the way, Peter Beinart has recently been embraced by some on the left because he has apaprently come to the realization that the Iraq War was wrong and is issuing some mea culpas over it. I have two words for Beinart on this, and I’ll give you a hint: they’re not “happy birthday.” Beinart should tell his fellow freepers to stop demonizing anyone who opposes them as he once did and maybe I'd take him seriously.

"From Henry Wallace in the late 1940s to Michael Moore after September 11, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world," Beinart writes. If "we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good."

What a loap of crap! At what point has Michael Moore ever “argued inaction”? What does that mean? Is that Beinart’s way of saying that Moore has said we should not have done anything after 9/11? Any proof on that? And we must “shed our moral innocence”?

This country has never been “innocent.” However, there was a time when the leaders of this country labored strenuously (with this country’s military, which has been steadfast throughout) to do the right thing, acknowledging its place as the leader of the free world. But I suppose Beinart’s cowardly phrase “sheding its moral innocence” means that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are OK since they happened under Our Great Father Of War George Dubya Bush.

Beinart understands that this impulse, so prevalent on the left, causes liberals to see enemies only on the right. Instead, he argues, antitotalitarianism (which in its current guise means the struggle against Islamist terrorism) should sit at the heart of the liberal project. "If today's liberals cannot rouse as much passion for fighting a movement that flings acid at unveiled women as they do for taking back the Senate in 2006," he says, "they have strayed far from liberalism's best traditions."

As you can see, Beinart is still pushing emotional buttons for effect, and probably always will be. I could find plenty of incidents of young conservatives not rousing passion for Dubya’s Iraq War (see “Operation Yellow Elephant”), assuming that that’s also true of young liberals, which I don’t believe of course. Besides, has it occurred to Beinart that there are many returning Iraq veterans who are running for Congress AS DEMOCRATS? How can that be if the Democratic cause cannot rouse passion to fight radical Islam, as Beinart alleges? And if someone can figure out what “the liberal project” is, I’d appreciate it if I could be enlightened on that.

For a model, Beinart looks to the dawn of the Cold War, to Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Truman. It was the Democratic Party and liberals who first hardened America's stance against communism and founded the policy of containment, successfully practiced by two generations of Democratic and Republican leaders.

Beinart argues that a hawkish liberalism must necessarily include liberal domestic ideology, and here, too, he points to Truman, who explicitly linked the struggle against Communism to the fight for civil rights. Liberals might effectively do the same today, perhaps with Islamism and gay marriage, if only they could overcome the impulse to believe that all cultures are of equal moral worth. Highlighting the importance of gay rights would necessitate pointing out that cultures which treat homosexuals as criminals are inferior. For many liberals, making such judgments part of their politics would be distasteful.

Again, we’re returning to “hating the gays” as the supposed central issue of our time – it certainly is for the radical right – though how that could possibly be associated with radical Islam is a mystery to me.

Here’s what’s going on; Beinart and Ponnuru want liberals to argue with conservatives about gay marriage/civil unions and abortion at the expense of everything else, and this is a win-win-win for the Repug base, which will NEVER CEDE ANY GROUND WHATSOEVER ON THIS ISSUE. Cutting through all of the theoretical and high-minded jibberish in this column, this is truly the heart of the matter.

Therein lies the problem. In the 1940s, liberalism excommunicated Communism, and along with it men such as Henry Wallace, who had once been heroes to the movement, but who refused to condemn Communism. If contemporary liberalism is to bloom again, it will have to do the same painful pruning of those unwilling to put aside cultural relativism.

“Cultural relativism” is another code phrase for supporting gay marriage/civil unions and abortion rights (and despite all of this, “Roe v. Wade” is still the law of the land, though I’m not sure how much longer that will be the case). As Atrios says, a woman’s uterus should not be community property, and I entirely agree.

If liberalism is to become, once again, one of our great governing philosophies and Democrats are to have a serious political future, the two institutions must find their way to change. Beinart and Ponnuru have given them a map.

As I said earlier, Beinart and Ponnuru have given them a “How To” book for becoming a Repug and establishing a one-party state, which would suit Last just fine.

I would really like to hear what Last thinks, by the way, of the latest bit of conservative bile floating around online having to do with the freeper war on the New York Times (as Hunter over at The Daily Kos has posted on with totally unsparing language, which I applaud). This is the very heart of right-wing, jackbooted Repug neo-conservatism as far as I’m concerned; vicious, hateful, and ignorant adherence to a worldview that is dying an inexorable death under the weight of untold tragedy it has authored primarily in this country and Iraq.

And Last, Beinart and Ponnuru each are guilty of bringing it to life and thus sustaining it to this moment (that line about "overcom(ing) the impulse to believe that all cultures are of equal moral worth" just hit me a minute ago...as far as I'm concerned, that could only come from people who are soulless monsters).

Update 7/7: I read an excellent review of Beinart's book earlier today by George Packer in The New Yorker, and I've been reconsidering the book a bit more based on that.

I think a point can be made that the Democrats should state more forcefully that they support movements towards democracy in the Middle East; I'll be honest and say that I haven't found them doing that (maybe they are, and I've just missed it). Just because Dubya and the Repugs have so thoroughly botched the Iraq War doesn't mean that we should become totally isolationist under the next administration (make it the Democrats, please God, and help them get their act together to make it happen). And of course, I'd like to see ALL of the Dems embrace something like John Kerry's position on pulling everyone out by the end of the year (the last "next six months" that there is). Mrs. Clinton would do well to get on board with that, especially since Joe Lieberman, the Dem she was closest to on this, is being politically destroyed at this very moment (though, if he runs as an independent, he may take down Ned Lamont with him and hand the Connecticut Senate seat to a Repug, which would be Lieberman's final ignominy as far as I'm concerned).

From what Packer said, Beinart said today's Democrats have to embrace "the war on terror" the way Harry Truman and Democrats of his generation embraced anti-Communism. Packer disagreed with Beinart based on the fact that anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries manifests itself in all kinds of ways that are radically different from the "us vs. them" mentality of the Cold War years, basically saying that Beinart can't draw a one-to-one correlation between the two (tribal/ethnic/regional fanaticism vs. nation/state gamesmanship). Also, the fact that Beinart apparently ignores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict severely undercuts whatever validity some of his arguments may have.

Finally, let's keep this in mind; the Democrats need to work on this issue, sure, but guess what? As we know, they have been OUT OF POWER AND WITHOUT A MAJORITY IN ANY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT SINCE JANUARY 2001 (despite the Jeffords switch to Independent which forestalled what was inevitable in the Senate, unfortunately). The MAIN ISSUE is the INCOMPREHENSIBLE ARROGANCE AND INCOMPETENCE OF THE REPUGS that has put us in this terrible mess! In light of that, I don't see that some inter-party quibbling disqualifies the Democrats from calling the shots once more on this or ANY OTHER issue.