Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Americans for Democratic Action

Having mentioned Peter Beinart’s "Fighting Faith" article the other day, I noted that Beinart makes clear that the founding of the Americans for Democratic Action was based on opposition to Communism. The Atlantic Blog notes, unhappily, that today’s ADA does not resemble the ADA of 1947. He notes that the ADA misrepresents its own founding and the current president of ADA is Jim McDermott.

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Pathetic. If the ADA were still a fighting remnant dedicated to opposing the spirit of 68 (and perhaps under the leadership of someone like Joe Lieberman), Beinart’s argument might have some purchase in reality.

But as it is, the spirit of 47 has not only lost to the spirit of 68, but has seen the flagship of liberal antitotalitarianism actually "assimilate to the borg" and become part of the problem.

From Reinhold Niebuhr to Baghdad Jim McDermott--what a sad, sad story is told by the passage from the former to the latter.

Not long after 9/11, Norman Podhoretz predicted that the habitual "anti-anti-communism" of the post-68 Left would carry over in kneejerk fashion into anti-Americanism and endless whining and defeatist cavilling in the new struggle against Islamist totalitarianism (btw, why do permissive Western leftists have such a bent for excusing or even worshipping totalitarians? Is it b/c the leftists, lacking much spirit themselves except that which is channeled into resentment against their own societies, instinctively worship the harshest and steeliest opponents of those socieities? I truly believe there’s a topic for a student of abnormal psychology there).

Regrettably, Podhoretz was prophetic, and let’s face it, the defeatists in our own ranks are a strategic soft spot at which the terrorists aim. It’s up to citizen-intellectuals who grasp the present danger to wage nonviolent war against this neo-Copperhead defeatist front whose minions are in thrall to the pernicious spirit of 68.

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