Hear Hear

In response to Peter Beinart's call to expunge the non-anti-totalitarians from the Democratic party---which reads a lot like a prescriptive version of Michael Walzer's classic "Can There Be A Decent Left?"---one of Andrew Sullivan's readers expresses my own thoughts, more or less exactly:

If liberals are determined to play the role of Taft Republicans during the 1930s and 1940s, denying the threat posed by European fascism and Japanese nationalism, obsessing about freedoms lost at home during wartime, and as such remaining in the political wilderness for most of the next three decades, who am I to stop them? In fact as far as I can tell Democrats would *rather* watch the New Deal and Great Society pissed down the drain, and a hard right Supreme Court roll back the 1960s, than stepping up to the plate and committing themselves to the realization of liberty and democracy in the Muslim world. The peaceniks were allowed to destroy the party once before in the late 60s and early 70s. Will they be allowed to do it again? So far it looks like the answer is yes.