In the post-war years, the Republican party, by virtue of its "southern strategy," was successful in gaining a powerful position among the electorate. At the same time, their strategy, with its implicit (and sometimes explicit) appeal to racist instincts, tarred the party as the province of reactionary and divisive policies. This perception persisted despite the Republican's historical standing in favor of equal rights for minorities and the Democratic party's traditional appeal to racist instincts among its members. It is no coincidence that the elder statesman of the Democratic party, Robert Byrd, is a former leader of the KKK.
The struggle against racial discrimination was the defining moral and ethical struggle of the post-war generation. It became conflated with opposition to the Vietnam War, which was initially fueled by the far left (SDS, Troksyites, Socialist Workers, et al) and eventually adopted as part of the progressive agenda. The relative control of the media by those who were raised and educated in the post-war progressive tradition (and their offspring) has protected the Democrats and the liberal progressives from being identified and associated with the murderous excesses and failures of the far left, including the tragedy that befell Vietnam (and Cambodia) when the United States, under Democratic leadership, insisted on defeat in Vietnam.
It seems that all of our politics is now focused on the 2008 election. Democrats are jockeying for position, in order to appeal to the base and their rapid insistence on retreat from Iraq, while taking care not to alienate the middle, which has a long standing aversion to American defeat anywhere in the world. All indications are that the uncertainty around the Iraq war has left large portions of the American electorate anxious about the future and looking for a politician who can offer some prospects of extricating our forces from what has been successfully depicted as a quagmire. At the moment, the Democrats and much of their media supporters, are committed to a depiction of the Iraq war as almost exclusively a Sunni-Shia civil war; they are either ignorant or cynically manipulative in denying al Qaeda's involvement in the war our enemies proclaim as the center of global Jihad.
Either unwittingly or with conscious malice, the Democrats have allied themselves with the far left and this is going to have longstanding repercussions. Steven Salinsky documents the types of people whose agenda is being advanced by the anti-war Democrats:
Islamist-Left Alliance A Growing Force
Over the past year, multiple international conferences have featured leaders of the anti-global left and Islamist groups working together. Go to any anti-war or anti-globalization demonstration in the West and chances are you will see the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas waved by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. And at some of these meetings, members of such radical Islamist groups as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have enjoyed starring roles.
The roster of Islamist-left alliances quietly grows every day: Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky praises Hamas and denounces America on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television. London Mayor Ken Livingstone invites a leading Islamist, Sheikh Yosef Al-Qaradawi, who is known for supporting suicide attacks, to visit his city. Iranian President Ahmadinejad calls for a world without America even as he plays host to a Tehran peace conference attended by American Mennonites, Quakers, Episcopalians, Methodists, and leaders of the National Council of Churches.
The Democrats are currently doing quite well in the polls but run two very significant risks, either of which could consign them to the political wilderness for a generation.
The first risk is rather obvious. If Iraq calms and the various contending Iraqi groups come to an accommodation with each other, the Democrats will be labeled as a party willing to surrender prematurely. Since it is unlikely that the world in 2008 will suddenly contain fewer enemies than we have now, this is a troublesome label to append to oneself.
The second risk is more subtle. If Iraq remains in turmoil and our troops remain in harm's way as the election approaches, it is quite likely that the Democratic candidate can win the election, which means that the Democrats would be handed the responsibility for resolving the war in Iraq. Since it will have long been obvious that a surge cannot work, the Democrats, trapped by their own rhetorical depiction of the reality in Iraq, will be forced to withdraw, perhaps to Kurdistan, Kuwait, and various bases in the neighborhood. (Okinawa, perhaps?) There are none save the occasional Democratic pundit of the order of John Murtha who doubt that such an outcome would lead inexorably to a strengthening of Islamic fascism and its attendant curse of Islamic terrorism. By abandoning the field of battle, we will be assured of losing valuable intelligence on our enemies, our friends will be slaughtered, and our allies of convenience will quite easily become enemies of convenience.
At that point, the media, who continue to see their role as gate-keepers of information erode at an accelerating pace, will not be able to protect the Democrats from the public awareness of the cost of our betrayal. Where it served the interest of the Communists in Southeast Asia and the Western Media to ignore the death and torment of millions, it will be very much in the interest of al Qaeda and the Shia extremists to make public as much as possible the results of their handiwork in Iraq. The Islamists have relied on just such publicity to enlarge their numbers and fuel the passions of their followers.
And, when the inevitable occurs, terrorist attacks which arise from al Qaeda in Iraq, the American people will know who to credit with the worsening position of the West in terms of Islamic fascism.
This is a nightmare scenario for the Democratic party from which they would likely never recover.
In the 1990s, the Republicans repudiated the worst of the authoritarian right. Their current group of Presidential contenders, whether you care for them or not, offer ample evidence that orthodoxy is not a prerequisite for Republican politicians. The Democrats have not only neglected to repudiate the worst of the authoritarian left but have embraced them and given them a position of honor in the center of their party. They can hide the nature of the anti-war, objectively pro-Islamist left in their party, but "framing" can only hide reality temporarily, and reality has a habit of asserting itself before long.
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