Tough liberalism

The New Republic's Peter Beinart calls for a revival of the proud tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism:

There are important forces on the left today in the Democratic Party…They do not fundamentally see the post-9/11 world through the prism of anti-totalitarianism. They see it largely the way that Henry Wallace saw it in the years after the beginning of the Cold War. They see it through the prism of anti-imperialism. They believe that the fundamentally right way of understanding what has happened in the world since 9/11 is that America has an empire, and that empire is blowing back upon us, because we are producing the hatred that is now spilling back into our shores.

The fundamental divide is whether you believe that jihadist totalitarianism is produced by a lack of freedom and opportunity, or whether you believe that jihadist totalitarianism is created by American and Western imperialism. The Democratic Party has not fundamentally, internally decided about which of those it believes.

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The recent death of Penn Kemble, who championed what Pat Moynihan called the Party of Liberty, drew tributes from, among others, Ben Wattenberg * R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. * The NY Sun * The New Republic (fifth item) * The London Times * OxBlog

The Weekly Standard wrote:

[I]f any single event was formative in his life it was probably the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. That was the year the Democratic party deliberately severed its connection to its historic grass roots, and for which it has been paying the price ever since.

As a founder, along with Senators Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Penn Kemble spent the subsequent decades urging his fellow Democrats to reacquaint themselves with the values of their party's blue-collar past, and embrace the "muscular" foreign policy that had served FDR, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy so well. It was a lonely battle, fought at times in company with conservatives who shared his active support for freedom in the Soviet Union and Central America. And it was a battle that he steadfastly fought within his own party's ranks, with mixed success; but always gallantly, and with great good humor.

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Mrs. P's ruminations on NeoCons (here and here) inspired the posting of the fine pic above of Ambassador Moynihan, whom The Economist colorfully recalled thus:

A POLYMATH in a profession of intellectual pygmies; a free thinker in a world of crushing orthodoxies; and a cheerful imbiber in a country that has turned, once again, to Puritanism—Daniel Patrick Moynihan really was one of the most remarkable American politicians of his generation.

A search on Moynihan and neoconservatism turns up a number of articles mentioning his place, at least early on, in that school's fundament, including these pieces by Nicholas Lemann * Jacob Heilbrunn * Nathan Glazer * David Brooks * Michael Lind