The death last week of Daniel Patrick Moynihan throws into sad
relief the state of partisan politics today. Steven F. Hayward,
writing on National
Review Online, mourned the death of “old liberalism,” too.
He quoted Moynihan, perhaps the most thoughtful of modern liberals,
as saying, “Liberalism faltered when it turned out it could not
cope with truth.” Moynihan himself paid the price for truthfulness
years later, in the fight over Hillarycare. “He’s not one of
us…We’ll roll right over him,” Hayward quotes Time
magazine as reporting at the time, quoting an anonymous Clinton
official.
But in truth, liberalism does not “falter” — would that it were
so kind. Instead, confronted with failure, it lashes out. In the
first week alone of the war on Iraq, ordinary perusal of the news
would turn up:
• A San Francisco protest sign: “We support our troops
when they SHOOT their officers.”
• A destroyed 9/11 memorial, including a hundred or more
defaced American flags, in Hayward, California.
• A report from Moscow, Idaho (March 26, AP), of a
pro-American demonstrator falling ill after being giving a cup of
cocoa by partisans of the other side.
• A story (March 27, AP) of teenagers throwing rocks at a
uniformed National Guard sergeant (female!) in Montpelier, Vermont,
then continuing to harass the Sergeant as she tried to shop
later.
• And a Columbia University associate professor, Nicholas
de Genova, calling for “a million Mogadishus” and for the defeat of
the United States in Iraq. De Genova made his remarks — explicit
calls for slaughter — at a “teach-in” (that’s a revival meeting
for leftists) first described by Long Island Newsday March
28.
This isn’t new, unfortunately. Here’s a previously unpublished
story, which I’ll have to disguise a bit because it was told to me
in confidence. In the early years of the Reagan administration
(every bit the irritant to the left as today’s Bush actions in
Iraq), there was a man, an academic, closely identified with
Reagan’s ideas. This man lived with his family on a ranch in the
desert Southwest, and they kept a menagerie: giraffe, eland, goose,
pheasant, peacock, deer, goats, and so forth. He returned from a
trip to find his animals slaughtered — throats cut — and dumped
on his front porch.
This viciousness stains every bit of the so-called “progressive”
movement. Yes, there are right-wing crazies around, too; see the
cover
story in the latest National Review for a dissection
of the “paleoconservatives.” But the day-to-day advocacy of death
to Americans, unrenounced by the mainstream Democratic Party, is
characteristic only of the left. And it’s gone so far now that it
must be considered on its own, as a distinct threat to Western
civilization, particularly as the Bush administration moves ahead
in its courageous attempt to re-shape the world according to
peaceful and democratic ideals.
What is we’re fighting, exactly? In The Game of Nations: The
Amorality of Power Politics, by Miles Copeland (out of print),
Copeland, a former CIA operative, told about one analyst’s
inspiration: Let’s imagine, he said, that the Soviet Union were
trying to isolate world supplies of strategic metals. What would
the USSR be doing? And the game turned out to be true. Soviet
“client-state” wars of the 1950s and 1960s tracked very closely
with world sources of those strategic metals.
In other words, if it looks a whole lot like something is being
directed for some purpose, it probably is.
We can see, in the script followed by protesters in the streets,
by commentators of a certain stripe, and by the spin of the news
media, a certain organized consistency. They are trying out
messages, seeing how they work, trying, by the power of propaganda,
to achieve a certain aim: the defeat of the United States.
New York Post columnist John Podhoretz took part in a
panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journalism last week.
There, he heard Kevin Buckley, a contributing editor from
Playboy, say that George W. Bush planned to cancel the
2004 elections. And Podhoretz drolly reported that Katrina van den
Heuvel, the commie editor of the Nation, seconded that
notion: “I heard that in Moscow last week!”
I guess she thought she was among friends, giving the game away
like that.
