<http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-heilbrunn28may28,1,1780223.story>http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-heilbrunn28may28,1,1780223.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Neocons in the Democratic Party
Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to beef up the military
and won't run from a fight.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn, a former Times editorial writer, is writing a book on
neoconservatism.
May 28, 2006
DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback and not among
the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party.
A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the
party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman
to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the
title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."
The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places such as the
Progressive Policy Institute, whose president, Will Marshall, has just
released a volume of doctrine called "With All Our Might: A Progressive
Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty." Beinart's book is
subtitled "Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror and
Make America Great Again." Their political champions include Connecticut
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and such likely presidential candidates as former
Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the
Democratic Leadership Council.
This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against
terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe
while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of the Bush
administration. They support a U.S. government that would seek multilateral
consensus before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to use force
when necessary.
These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the squishes who have led
the party to defeat in the past. Interestingly, that's how the early
neocons saw themselves too: as liberals fighting to reclaim their party's
true heritage before they decamped to the GOP in the 1980s.
Indeed, the credo of the new Democratic hawks is eerily reminiscent of the
neocons of the 1970s, who ran a full-page ad in the New York Times called
"Come Home, Democrats" after George McGovern's crushing defeat, in a play
on his campaign slogan "Come Home, America." In it, early neocons such as
Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz called for a return to the
principles of you guessed it Truman and President Kennedy.
They lamented the fact that their party had been taken over by the forces
backing McGovern's run for the presidency in 1972 and wanted to purge the
party of the McGovernites. They didn't want self-abasement about U.S. sins
abroad but a vigorous fighting faith that promoted the American creed of
liberty and human rights abroad and at home.
Now, a generation later, as the crusading Republican neoconservatism
espoused by Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and others lies in the
smoking rubble of Baghdad, a new generation of Democrats wants to dust off
and rehabilitate those traditional Democratic principles, which they
believe were hijacked by the Bush administration.
They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the
neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War
liberals such as Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic war, of course. Just
as Republicans are being riven by debates between realists and Bush
administration idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness its
own battle.
Just as the old neocons wanted to expel the McGovernites, so the new ones
want to rid the party of the Moveon.org types and move it to the right. As
Beinart puts it, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that
America's enemies need to be fought."
In "With All Our Might," scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul both
Democrats outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For
example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the 1975 Helsinki
accords, which insisted upon human rights monitoring in the former Warsaw
Pact nations, to the Middle East. "Freedom," they exhort, "is the
fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror and oppression."
Other Democrats, who call themselves the "Sept. 11 generation," have formed
what is known as the Truman National Security Project, whose avowed aim is
to revive the "strong security, strong values of the Democratic Party for
Democrats of all ages."
Does this simply sound like Bush-lite? To the right and the left, it
probably will, but the main opposition facing the would-be Truman
successors will come from the latter. The battle will come from the
generation of Democrats who came of age during the 1960s and who were
instrumental in finishing off "Cold War liberalism" because of its failures
in the jungles of Vietnam.
Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative, war, undertaken by
warrior intellectuals who were liberal at home but saw falling dominoes
everywhere around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the Bush
administration, which has been trying to depict a global kind of Islamic
totalitarianism, when the foe, as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse
and less of a monolith than American leaders are prepared to believe.)
The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the
moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they the populist
left are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the
McGovern era.
The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s,
represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if
they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply
evoke the ghost of Truman and Co.
Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists
are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's
being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.
