Democratic Politicians and the Angry Left

Conservatives are waking up this week to the possibility that our Democratic friends
may indeed be nailing their colors to the mast of “Bush Lied!” and that they are
prepared to face the American people on the proposition that the current administration
tricked the American people into an illegal and immoral war on Iraq. This
would represent a political polarization worse than the Vietnam War.

Yet it comes at a moment when it must be clear to anyone not hiding in a bunker
that there really is a war going on between radical Islam and the west. There are bombs
in Britain, riots in the Paris suburbs, bombs in Bali, murders of Christian schoolgirls
in Indonesia, genocide in Darfur and, last but not least, the insurgency in Iraq.
The military historian Victor Davis Hanson wonders how Democrats could be
so blind. The columnist
Jonah Goldberg complains that the partisan Democrats just don’t care.

The frisson of worry and of exasperation issues, of course, from the realization that
we are coming up for a fight. With the Democrats turning sharply away from the war and
anything to do with it, for whatever reason, the next two elections culminating in the
presidential election of 2008 are shaping up as divisive as the elections of 2000 and
2004.

It is clear that the national Democratic elected politicians are throwing in their
lot with the Angry Left base symbolized by the left-wing web sites MoveOn.org and
dailyknos.com. This is confusing to Republicans, because for us they represent the left-wing
equivalent of making the John Birch Society the center of the Republican Party. Republicans,
led by William F. Buckley, Jr., read the radical right out of the conservative movement in
the formative stage of the movement, and cannot understand why the Democrats would embrace
their extremists.

In fact, of course, there really are a lot of Angry Lefties. The system
encourages them and condones their extremism. The “no enemies on the
left” tradition in liberal circles and the radicalization of education in the
universitymeans that extreme
left-wing ideas do not get filtered out of the national political discourse.

Recent demographic studies such as
The Politics of Polarization argue that it is folly for the Democrats
to adopt the politics of division because the Republican conservative base
is bigger than the Democratic liberal base.

But you never know.