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.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.