Seeker Blog

As a great Democratic Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, once warned “no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” This is a lesson that today’s Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

The dinner was May 18, the lecture by Senator Joseph Lieberman — on the true history of the Democratic Party. Good stuff, and accurate so far as I know. In these excerpts you’ll see that Sen. Joe doesn’t pull any punches:

…From its patriotic principles, COMMENTARY has consistently summoned the courage to draw the moral distinctions that matter most. It is a magazine that has always understood the difference between freedom and slavery, democracy and dictatorship, and good and evil, and it has never been seduced by a moral equivalency that confuses the two.

That is why Norman Podhoretz broke with the Democratic Party nearly forty years ago when he saw too many of his colleagues on the Left unwilling or unable to draw these distinctions.

Unfortunately, today, I see some of that same confusion in the Democratic Party, on the most important questions of foreign policy and national security.

…And this was also the party of COMMENTARY, which from the very dawn of the Cold War provided intellectual artillery for those on the frontlines of the fight against Communist totalitarianism. The magazine was unmistakably a star in the constellation of American liberalism. And it was precisely because of its commitment to liberalism that it saw so clearly the evil of communism and was so determined to combat it. As early as 1946, in fact, COMMENTARY warned that the Soviet Union was “the greatest challenge democracy has ever confronted.”

This worldview—the policies of the Cold War Democrats who guided American foreign policy under President Truman and President Kennedy, and who created COMMENTARY—began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party.

Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the Communist world, including the one in South Vietnam, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor—a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy, they said, because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

This was the ideology that Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a brilliant piece in COMMENTARY in 1979, skewered and indicted as a “conception of national interest [that] borders on double think” because it “finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s ‘true interests.’”

Norman Podhoretz witnessed firsthand the seizure of the Democratic Party by the advocates of this ideology. “Never,” he wrote in National Review thirty years later, “will I get over my amazement at the speed with which this point of view spread from the margin to the mainstream. Within five years, the radical perspective had become the conventional wisdom.” Today, I regret to say I have the same sense of amazement about the speed with which similar ideas have again spread to the Democratic mainstream.

…The Clinton administration, he wrote then, “has at last long done what those who founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority more than a quarter-of-a-century ago were unable to bring about: He has all but de-McGovernized the Democratic Party.”

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America’s moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent—and, to the dismay of the Democratic Left, made sure that the Party’s platform endorsed a national missile defense.

…If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

But instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to President Bush. I was at the center of it in my unsuccessful Presidential campaign of 2004, and my tumultuous but ultimately successful campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006.

I felt strongly that we Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. It was our party’s legacy from Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton.

…But when total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price began to assert themselves at the grassroots of the Democratic Party. Despite all of the successful efforts of New Democrats during the 1990s to rebuild a strong centrist Democratic Party, the pillars of our achievement were soon falling like dominoes.

And so the pacifist, protectionist, and isolationist sentiments that President Bill Clinton and we New Democrats worked so hard to banish from the mainstream of the Democratic Party are today back with a vengeance. They are a galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base, and a major part of the Democratic Party’s platform.

By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy—not Bin Laden, but Bush—these activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last twenty years.

Instead of challenging their opinions, far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to them. And that, not surprisingly, includes my Senate colleague Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party’s left-wing on a single significant issue in this campaign, nor for that matter has he worked with Republicans in the Senate during his three and a half years there to forge the tough, bipartisan compromises that produce results for the American people.

In this, Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it, to take on the status quo in our government when it is not working, and to reach across party lines to get things done for our country.

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately—and that is the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.

Now, there are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments, times when it is in our interest as well as theirs, and there is some prospect of progress. But what Senator Obama has proposed is not such selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as President, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American rogue regimes on the planet.

Senator Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

If a President ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies. In some critical regions of the world, Senator Obama already seems to be doing that.