"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
To mark the famously non-consecutive president's White House nuptials on this day in 1886, a decade before his political career was ended by the wild-eyed element of his party, we hearken to a theme he would have found congenial: the restoration of sanity to the Democrats.
[T]heir message to the party could not have been clearer: Democrats must reclaim the aggressive foreign policy heritage of FDR, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy if they want to reclaim power.
An excerpt from Beinart describes the reception Hubert Humphrey, then the young mayor of Minneapolis, got at a 1946 Democratic-Farmer-Labor convention packed by the Henry Wallace progressives, i.e., Reds:
In June, Communists and their allies had packed the state DFL convention in Saint Paul, choosing their own slate to run the party, and passing resolutions excoriating Truman's new hard line toward Moscow. When Humphrey rose to speak, the crowd greeted him with cries of "fascist" and "warmonger." He persevered, until a security guard growled, "Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I'll knock you down." And so, without finishing his remarks, Humphrey did.
Sounds a lot like the YearlyKos Convention. Today's "McGovernites with modems," as the Bull Moose calls them, are heirs to the fellow travelers of the Old (and New) Left, not to Harry Truman.
"I want to challenge their notion of what liberalism is," Beinart says. "I want MoveOn to embrace antitotalitarianism. I want MoveOn to say they were wrong to oppose the Afghan war, to state that liberalism is not an ideology only defined in opposition to the right. You cannot simply say the best way for us to fight jihadism is to oppose George W. Bush. Defeating totalitarianism by spreading democracy and economic opportunity is liberalism's destiny based on its history. Give up that idea, and you're ideologically cut off from your own best traditions."
In England, the Euston Manifesto has struck a similar chord with its call to reinvigorate the pro-democratic and anti-totalitarian traditions on the Left.
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