Illustration by Dale Stephanos

In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last week, Scott Simon -- the smooth, urbane host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition -- revealed himself to be the very personification of the antiwar liberal. A convert to Quakerism who revered Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Simon wrote that "pacifism seemed to offer a chance for survival to a generation that had been stunted by the fear of nuclear extinction."

Simon, though, had come not to extol pacifism but to describe its limits. In covering the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he wrote, he had learned "the logical flaw (or perhaps I should say the fatal flaw) of nonviolent resistance: All the best people can be killed by all the worst ones." And he was baffled by his former allies' inability to learn that lesson -- even in the aftermath of September 11.

"Many of the activists I have seen trying to rouse opposition to today's war against terrorism remind me of a Halloween parade," he wrote. "They put on old, familiar-looking protest masks -- against American imperialism, oppression and violence -- that bear no resemblance to the real demons haunting us now."

Most liberals, of course, are neither Quakers nor pacifists. Still, Simon's philosophical journey is similar to that taken by an entire generation of liberals for whom antiwar sentiments -- forged in the dark insanity of the Vietnam era -- had been central to a sense of political self.

Much of that journey took place during the last decade, from liberals' measured opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 to their support for humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the mid to late '90s. The presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were a time for liberals to question and modify their previous unbending opposition to the use of military force.

Then came September 11. For the first time since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964, which widened the Vietnam War from an unfortunate mistake to an irredeemable tragedy, congressional liberals rallied around the flag and the president. By a unanimous vote in the Senate, and with only one dissenter in the House, Congress approved sweeping war powers for George W. Bush -- the closest thing to a declaration of war since 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Massachusetts's senators, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, both of whom had voted against the Gulf War resolution a decade earlier, expressed strong support for the president, with Kerry going so far as to call publicly for international terrorist Osama bin Laden to be tracked down and killed.

Nothing good came out of September 11. But it is surely good for the country that liberals have reclaimed their internationalist credentials. For decades, US foreign policy had been dominated by a conservative view of the world: narrow, bullying, and arrogant. What is needed now, more than anything, is a liberal foreign policy: one that combines protection of our self-interest with respect for human rights and the right to self-determination, dedication to equality for women and minority ethnic and religious groups, and commitment to civil liberties at home and freedom abroad. Liberals, after all, led the fight against fascism and Nazism, and rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II, thus denying Soviet communism the breeding ground it needed to fulfill its expansionist aims. And it is liberal values that will be vital to winning the war on terrorism.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a close observer of liberal internationalism for more than half a century. "I think most liberals understand that you have to do something," he told the Phoenix. "You can't stand aside and turn the other cheek when 6000 people are killed. This is quite unlike the Vietnam War, and much more like the emotion of the Second World War."

Schlesinger, though, cautions that the war on terrorism cannot be guided by the desire for blind retribution. Rather, he cites one of his deepest influences -- liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- in describing his hopes of how this war will be fought.

"Niebuhr really had a tragic sense of history and the conflict of values," Schlesinger says. "If he were alive today, I think he would take more or less the position of realistic liberals that something has to be done, but we shouldn't carry it too far. We shouldn't become like the enemy and have a counter-jihad to counter their jihad."

The latest scare -- anthrax -- shows just how insidious this jihad against us is likely to get. Like the planes of September 11, the envelopes containing mysterious, and possibly deadly, powder take perfect advantage of our openness. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of copycats will no doubt send harmless powder to their enemies, inspired by hatred, warped political agendas, and mental illness. Liberal values have never been more threatened, or more necessary.

FOR MANY liberals, September 11 has had a clarifying effect. They now know that many people on the far left -- people they had considered allies, at least on some issues -- in fact have nothing in common with them.

Leftist scholars and writers such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Susan Sontag have responded to the terrorist attacks mainly to decry American aggression abroad, and to suggest that it's more important to acknowledge our own misdeeds than to punish those of the terrorists.

The US, of course, has committed terrible mistakes in the Middle East and elsewhere: propping up repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, imposing sanctions on Iraq that starve children without touching Saddam Hussein, and supporting the Afghan guerrillas who later became the Taliban. Those mistakes should be revisited and rectified -- and surely it is liberals, rather than conservatives, who are more likely to take up that task. (Of course, the policy that enrages Islamic fundamentalists more than any other is our unstinting support for Israel, and that policy is surely no mistake.) But liberals, and some leftists, understand that we were attacked not because of any specific policy stands, but because fundamentalist Islamic terrorists have declared war against us in order to bring the entire Muslim world under their sway.

Sontag's short piece in the New Yorker of September 24 has attracted withering criticism. But she appeared to say more than she actually did; she offered mainly rage and questions. "The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy," she wrote, adding: "A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what happened, and what may continue to happen." In an interview with Salon this past Tuesday, Sontag attempts to clarify, saying she thinks the Taliban must go, but that she opposes the US bombing campaign. In fairness, her views turn out to be more measured than the tone of her New Yorker piece would suggest, although they are also muddled and contradictory.

Chomsky, on the other hand, has gone so far as to declare the attacks of September 11 to be comparable to the US raid on Sudan in 1998 -- a raid that Bill Clinton described as an attack on bin Laden's chemical-weapons factory, but which turned out to hit a pharmaceutical plant. Such a comparison is not only morally obtuse, but absurd in its implicit suggestion that the attacks of September 11 should be seen as retaliation for some specific US action. As leftist journalist Christopher Hitchens -- who's been debating Chomsky at
TheNation.com -- has written, "This is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life."

Conservative Michael Barone, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report and author of The Almanac of American Politics (National Journal Group), told me, "Liberals who had thought Noam Chomsky was just an ally who was a little bit far out on the left are now realizing what the truth is. There is a huge gap between America and the putrid corners and backwaters of universities, where you see lots of professors taking positions that Democratic politicians don't take in a million years."

Well, now. That's putting it a bit strongly. But to see the anti-globalization protests of the past several years morph into antiwar demonstrations is sobering, given that the terrorists have already declared war on us. As conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in OpinionJournal.com, "Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very long while, many liberals are reassessing -- quietly for the most part -- their alliance with the anti-American, anticapitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or supported." I think Sullivan is wrong when he says that these forces are or were "powerful." But it's true that whatever romance there was between mainstream liberals and the dreadlocked kids who marched for Mumia Abu-Jamal and against Starbucks is now over.

Not that there was necessarily all that much of a romance to begin with. Conservatives such as Barone, Sullivan, and Noemie Emery (who inveighed in the Weekly Standard against the "chattering asses" of the left) may be enjoying the supposed divergence of liberals from leftists. But it's hard to see what even the most left-leaning members of Congress -- a group that includes several members of the Massachusetts delegation, such as Ted Kennedy and Representative Barney Frank -- ever had in common with, say, Howard Zinn.

"I'm not sure this one is breaking down on traditional ideology," says journalist and author David Halberstam, whose new book, War in a Time of Peace (Simon & Schuster), traces the trajectory of American interventionism in the '90s. Halberstam flatly rejects the notion that the war on terrorism has somehow altered the role of liberalism. "This is a very interesting time. One phase of history ends, another begins. The challenge is enormously complicated. I wouldn't jump to those definitions before we are there."

In a recent piece for the New York Times' Week in Review section, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin -- himself a New Left activist in the 1960s -- laments that the terrorist attacks have destroyed "the prospects of a unified left," with liberals and labor leaders signing up for the war on terrorism even as "radical foes of global capital on college campuses and the streets talk of peace."

But that alliance was never more than an idle dream, born of peace and prosperity. Neither of those preconditions now exists.

FOR THOSE whose knowledge of history starts with the Vietnam War, it must be startling to see liberals align themselves with the president and against the antiwar elements of the left. In fact, what we may be witnessing is a return, at long last, to the natural order of the political world -- an order that arose during the second decade of the last century, as World War I was drawing to a close.

President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and a liberal internationalist, pushed for American membership in the League of Nations. Wilson was opposed by Senate Republicans, especially Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. US membership in the League was defeated in the Senate, with Wilson, weakened by a massive stroke, unable to campaign for it effectively. This postwar withdrawal from the world hardened into isolationism, which -- even if it was not necessarily responsible for Hitler's rise to power and Japan's depredations in East Asia -- nevertheless allowed those two phenomena to proceed unchecked. During the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt and other liberal Democrats agitated against isolationism, but the Republicans -- with the help of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a fascist sympathizer -- refused to engage with the world. That is, until December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor.

During the war, Roosevelt pointed the way to a new American internationalism based largely on liberal principles. It was Roosevelt, more than anyone, who promoted the United Nations, a successor to Wilson's League of Nations. And after his death, another liberal, Harry Truman, vigorously pursued Roosevelt's vision, rebuilding Europe and Japan as a bulwark against communism. Indeed, the Cold War itself, though bipartisan, was prosecuted most enthusiastically by liberal Democratic presidents -- Harry Truman and, later, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This represented a significant break from the 1930s, when many liberals openly admired Soviet-style communism. As the truth about Stalin's reign of terror became known, liberals split with leftists, just as they are doing today.

What put an end to Cold War liberalism was Vietnam. As the moral and human cost of our misguided intervention in a civil war became clear, what had begun as a liberal venture ended up alienating liberals. Johnson decided not to seek another term in 1968 after an antiwar Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, ran up a stunningly high vote in the New Hampshire primary. Liberal disgust culminated in 1972, when George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for president, only to lose to the incumbent, Richard Nixon, in a landslide. McGovern, a World War II fighter pilot and one of the most thoroughly decent men ever to win a presidential nomination, suffered the misfortune of being associated with a whole range of perceived liberal failures: not only an antiwar movement whose radical fringe had turned violent and revolutionary, but also skyrocketing crime, racial unrest, and an economic slide.

"The Vietnam War obviously changed everything," says Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. "With that came a disillusion with the Cold War itself. I think the Democratic Party began to have difficulties in the '70s because it became associated with a whole range of things that had suddenly become unpopular, whether justly or not."

For years, the most effective political tactic any Republican could use was to label his opponent a "liberal." The only Democrat to win the presidency during this period, one-termer Jimmy Carter, was a quasi-conservative on domestic issues who was painted with the liberal brush for his disastrous handling of the hostage crisis in Iran. (Carter's post-presidency has been defined by his work as a peace activist, thus turning him into the liberal he wasn't when he was in the White House.) During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, liberals -- and leftists -- continued to oppose American interventionism, as the Republicans, blinded by their anti-communist zeal, pursued an unconscionable policy of supporting murderous right-wing movements in Central America.

Liberals began moving back the other way when Iraq invaded Kuwait, in August 1990. Most liberal members of Congress, troubled by the notion of fighting to protect Western oil interests, voted against the resolution that gave the first President Bush the power to do so. Nevertheless, the debate was restrained and civil, and the war's rapid and successful conclusion kept it that way. The liberal journey back to internationalism had begun.

If the Gulf War set the stage for the transformation of liberalism, it was Bill Clinton who took the next step. Clinton, convinced that opposition to the Gulf War had been a mistake, chose Senator Al Gore as his running mate and Representative Les Aspin as his first defense secretary -- two of the few Democrats who had voted in favor of the war resolution. And after several notable failures -- a mission gone drastically wrong in Somalia, a humiliating retreat in Haiti, a genocide deliberately ignored in Rwanda -- the Clinton administration finally seemed to find its footing in the former Yugoslavia, where it intervened in both Bosnia and Kosovo to stop renegade Serbs from carrying out their campaign of "ethnic cleansing."

It was a curious sort of intervention -- planes dropping bombs from on high, with American forces safely out of reach. But it did, nevertheless, signal that the Democratic Party, the political home of mainstream liberals, was no longer unalterably opposed to the use of military force. And in a role reversal that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier, it was primarily conservative Republicans who opposed the use of force, arguing that no American interests were at stake.

The liberal counterargument was that preventing a human-rights catastrophe is an American interest, no matter where such horrors take place. It was an audacious assertion, one we will almost certainly not be able to live up to in every instance. But by casting military intervention in moral terms, liberals had reclaimed their rightful place in the political culture.

WITH LIBERALS now firmly back in the mainstream, the chief beneficiary may be President Bush -- not just because it gives him, at least momentarily, a unified Congress with which to work, but also because liberals may prove to be his most reliable allies. Bush, like liberals, has shown since September 11 that he understands that the world has changed, and that he's prepared to deal with the horrendous new realities now before us. It is his conservative and right-wing supporters, both in and out of Congress, who may give him the most trouble.

For instance, within days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson's television show, The 700 Club, and proceeded to blame those events on our alleged failure to get right with God -- specifically, on our indulgence of the ACLU, feminists, and lesbians and gay men. Robertson agreed. (Falwell subsequently apologized for his timing, though not for his analysis. Robertson also issued a statement that can be summarized, I must have spaced out. Not likely.) Now, neither Falwell nor Robertson enjoys the sort of clout he had some years back. But Bush might not have won the South Carolina primary against John McCain -- which was crucial to his winning the presidency -- without Robertson's assistance. Bush ran an ugly campaign in South Carolina, but he's no hater, and he quickly distanced himself last month from both Falwell and Robertson.

Then, when officials began studying the idea of federalizing airport security, some conservative Republicans opposed it, voicing the suddenly archaic position that it went against their decentralized, free-market ideology. "To me as a conservative, I look at a problem and ask, is this a federal function?" said Representative Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia who was one of Bill Clinton's chief tormenters in the impeachment fiasco. Fumed New York Times columnist (and Princeton University economist) Paul Krugman: "What's now clear, in case you had any doubts, is that America's hard right is simply fanatical -- there is literally nothing that will persuade these people to accept the need for federal spending. And we're not talking about some isolated fringe; we're talking about the men who control the Congressional Republican Party -- and seem, once again, to be in control of the White House."

Krugman may or may not be right about the Bushies, but he's surely right about Congress. Bush may fear that he won't be able to govern without the right-wing Republicans who were his biggest supporters before September 11. But as we move into a new era, he may well find himself relying instead on a coalition of moderate Republicans and moderate and liberal Democrats. The causes that he may be compelled to embrace -- repeal of some of his cherished tax cuts, a greater role for government, respect for Arab-Americans and Muslims (a mattter on which he has been exceptional), and restraint in pursuing the war on terrorism both abroad and at home -- may also force him to walk away from his conservative base.

"Overall, I think liberals will be strengthened by these events if only because the extreme right will be discredited," says Alan Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Life at Boston College. "It depends, of course, on what liberals do, but this is the end of the L-word. Because President Bush is desperately going to need Democrats."

Long-time progressive journalist Harold Meyerson, the executive editor of the American Prospect, agrees with Wolfe, noting that "the current crisis actually changes the ideological climate on things like the role of government in liberals' direction." He adds: "Public confidence in government is currently at pre-Lyndon Johnson levels. This is quite a sea change." The Boston Globe's David Shribman wrote on Tuesday that "this seems like the remarkable emergence of at least a brief era of good feelings toward government."

In 1988, the symbol of Michael Dukakis's hapless campaign against President Bush's father was his ill-fated ride in a tank. Political observers of every stripe agreed that Dukakis had made an enormous mistake by allowing himself to be photographed in military mode. The unspoken message: liberals are wimps, and when they try to look tough, they come off as pathetic.

In retrospect, Dukakis had the right idea, even if his timing was terrible. Liberals had been alienated from the mainstream of political life for far too long, and they would never be taken seriously unless they could put their post-Vietnam angst behind them.

That they largely succeeded in doing so during the past 10 years is what enables them to be credible partners in the war on terrorism today. Liberals are exactly what President Bush needs: a loyal opposition, ready to support him when warranted, to argue with him when necessary, to push him, to question him, and to challenge him.

Not to put too much of a smiley face on a difficult, frightening moment, but it would appear that our political system is a lot healthier than it looked when they were counting (or not counting) the ballots in Florida, or when Democrats and Republicans were fighting over whose accounting tricks to use in totaling up the Social Security surplus.

Good thing.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: October 19 - 25, 2001