Walter to The Dude: “Pacifism is not something to hide behind, Dude.”
For my fellow fans of “The Big Lebowski,” that’s a funny line for throwing around at parties. For my fellow liberals, it’s some serious advice for where our party needs to go.
We’ve lost two elections in a row and we still think we can manufacture easy fall guys without looking at ourselves. “Oh, it’s those rednecks running to their Bibles and Karl Rove because the gays are coming!”
The fact is we’ve lost because moderates — yes, moderates — in Ohio, Florida and a host of reddish states don’t trust us to fight the war on terrorism.
In 2003 John Kerry got swept away in the wave of anti-war outrage and voted against funding a war he authorized, hoping to pick off some Howard Dean voters and to unite the party. The entire episode fed into the flip-flopper image President Bush and Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth” spun. And it worked.
You may say: Wait a second, smartass. What about all those “values voters” everyone is talking about? They made the difference.
Not really. Exit polls revealed that “moral values” was the issue a plurality of voters cited when asked what was most important to them, suggesting an increase of social conservatives at the polls. But pollsters asked about Iraq and terrorism separately, splitting foreign policy voters. Taken together, foreign policy outpolled morality by a long shot.
This isn’t to suggest that liberals need to hold hands with warmongering neoconservatives, or abandon international institutions and turn a blind eye to world opinion. That’s being Republican Lite.
What liberals need to realize is that America and our generation have a new calling: the struggle against radical Islam. Millions of people are misusing faith to attack very liberal ideals — things like women’s rights, free speech and religious tolerance.
Even Dennis Kucinich voted to authorize action against the Taliban. But too many liberals at the grassroots now let their anger over Iraq drown out tougher talk on al-Qaida. Military action of any kind is seen as the Bushies’ attempt for “endless war.” We’d all be better served, they say, by pulling out of Iraq and using foreign aid money to build schools in America, not Baghdad. That’s the same kind of isolationist talk that Jesse Helms used to block AIDS relief. That’s not Harry Truman’s Democratic Party.
Democrats are the party of the Marshall Plan and NATO. It doesn’t matter that Kerry talked endlessly about his service in Vietnam. His rhetoric matched neither his record nor the sentiment of his base.
Liberals will never win until they end the love affair with Michael Moore and the Looney Left. In a December article in the liberal-leaning The New Republic, Peter Beinart correctly asserts that the Democratic Party needs to remake itself much like when it adopted ardent anti-communism in the 1940s. John Kerry is no terrorist sympathizer. But when Moore opposes military action against the Taliban (read that again in case you think it’s a typo), and then gets a box seat at the Democratic National Convention, is it any wonder why many moderates vote with the GOP?
Liberal ideals do not mean much unless we are willing to fight for them. Defending openness and tolerance are not imperial aims — and need not always come about through military action. But we must back our diplomacy with force. Reasonable people can disagree about the Iraq war. But those who opposed the war because it detracted from the greater war on terror were pushed aside by the doves — and so too were liberals’ chances at winning.
The time has come to quit pandering to the pacifists in the name of party unity. We need to be the party of Harry Truman, not Michael Moore. Voters still trust liberals on domestic policy — but security trumps those issues in a post-Sept. 11 world. If we don’t shape up, the strong Democrats of old will continue to fade into memory and Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority will become all too real.
Forum Editor Christopher Kenny is a Communication senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
