Pardon my optimism. I know the wave of change sweeping the Middle East can still go bad. But you have to be thrilled at the way the train began moving this winter. Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine -- even Egypt and Saudi Arabia are leaning toward democratization. These are historic moments, and the big question for Democrats is how we avoid landing on the wrong side of history. Because of the loudness, bitterness, and short-sightedness of our party's absolutist antiwar wing, we've gotten ourselves behind the curve -- and way behind the Republican Party.
Consider this: If the Iraq project succeeds -- war, transformation, democratization -- guess who will get all the credit? George W. Bush and the Republican Party. They
don't deserve it all. Many Democrats -- elected ones and others who opine for a living -- supported the war. And Bush merits criticism for mismanagement of war preparations
and the occupation. Still, if Iraqis pull through the last bloody phase of the insurgency and create the first working Arab democracy, and inspire other nations to follow
suit, Bush will get all the roses. His errors and even the missing weapons of mass destruction will be forgotten. This war, this transformation project, this Middle East revolution may forever be remembered as a Republican undertaking.
But it shouldn't be. The transformation project could have been a Democratic undertaking as well. What's holding us back? Our past leaders had no trouble grasping the direction of history. Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and even Clinton proved again and again that Democrats were the party of internationalism and security while Republicans were still beating their isolationist drums. Yet today's left-wing Democrats are frozen in the headlights of a president who has outflanked them on Wilsonian idealism; they are paralyzed by their own fixations on past errors. For many, this comes down to one word: Vietnam.
Nowhere is activist liberalism more glued to its past than on foreign policy, and on the use of force. Some Democrats are still so traumatized by the Vietnam experience
that they can't update their inner paradigm for a changed world, one in which we face a global threat not unlike fascism and communism. Osama bin Laden may have no divisions and no armadas, but that doesn't make his movement less of a threat to us. One bioweapon, alas, may be what it takes to convince loud and influential doubters on the left.
It's time for liberalism in Democratic politics to take a good hard look at itself. Those in what writer Todd Gitlin has called "the cosmopolitan class" -- educated, upper-middle-class people who make their livings in academe, culture, or politics by using mainly
their brains -- must finally grasp that they are minority members of a minority party. Liberals on the Democratic Party's left today are mainly fighting rearguard actions to hold onto the glory days. Bill Clinton successfully shifted the paradigm for fighting poverty, for example, with policies that promoted a booming economy, not a Great Society. The liberal left hates that. It offends the religion of liberalism as codified during the great battles of yesteryear.
Liberals also need to shelve their Bush hatred. It subverts clear thinking. The great issues facing the nation are not about Bush; they are about policy. In the Middle East, that means they are all about the Iraqis -- and the Lebanese, Egyptians, Palestinians, Israelis, and others. Instead of obsessing on Bush, liberals should be asking: What are our policies doing, or not doing, for people on the ground in the regions we're trying to help? Do the Iraqis really care if Bush mangles his English? Bush's words grate horribly on my dainty ears, but listen to what an architect in Beirut, educated in Paris, and a liberal by American standards, emailed to me at the height of Lebanon's recent crisis: "It was so cool of President Bush to support the liberation of Lebanon. He saved the day!" This young Arab doesn't know or care that readers in every Starbucks in Cambridge and Berkeley will recoil at any line that calls Bush cool; she cares about the future of her country. We should too.
It's time for Democrats to begin asking themselves the question: What if this thing works out? Where will we be then? Whether they originally backed the war or not, Democrats now need to give more than grudging support to developments in the Middle East and acknowledge that, whatever the original reasons for the invasion, its secondary effect may be a very positive one.
If there was ever a crossroads moment in modern liberalism, it is now. The world is changing at a blistering pace. The old-time religion is falling farther and farther behind. There may be a lot more grief in the Middle East before it's all over. But a big train of transformation is leaving the station -- Democrats can get on it or be left behind.
