The View From 1776

Daniel Henninger’s editorial page article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “Can the Democrats Beat Bush’s Beliefs With Poll Politics?” captures the unreality that has become the Democrat’s policy position on foreign affairs. 

Mr. Henninger writes: “Democrats want voters to view the November election through the fogged and bloody prism of the war in Iraq.... It is difficult to imagine that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq would regard the political debate back home as measuring up to the seriousness of what they do every day. How would you like to roll out of your bunk in al Anbar province, Mosul or Baghdad on a Sunday morning and read across the top of the local U.S. paper that everything you’ve done in Iraq for three years has merely made the terrorism threat worse? You just might lose heart a notch, a dangerous thing when fighting a war. 

“But at this late stage of the campaign, Iraq-as-failure has become the central narrative in the Democrats’ strategy.  A memo sent out to Democrats last week by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a strategy group led by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, discusses Mr. Bush’s ‘failure in Iraq, which energized Democrats and dispirited Republicans.’ It urges Democrats: ‘On Iraq, stress Bush/GOP ‘mismanagement’ and need for a ‘new direction.’ “

Advertisers of consumer products often structure advertisements to associate their products with a mood or a sense of pleasure, often without providing specifics about the product.  Advertisers appear to believe that image, at least in the Baby Boomer world, is everything.

Basing their campaign strategy on the sort of focus-group polling employed by consumer-goods advertisers, Democrats just want voters to associate their party with peace and opposition to anything that might require our military forces to enter dangerous combat.  The declared intent of Islamic jihadists to subjugate or destroy all non-Muslim societies must be ignored, as it would conflict with the nebulous image that fighting back is the root cause of terrorism.  Appeasement, aka “negotiating” via the UN, is the Democrat’s Ned-Lamont socialist answer.

Such was the fantasy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when he met with Adolph Hitler in Munich to sanction National Socialist Germany’s seizure of Czechslovakia’s Sudetenland.  Mr. Chamberlain happily returned to England, on the eve of World War II, proclaiming, “Peace in our time.”

Democrats have convinced themselves that dealing with terrorists is the same as stopping ordinary criminals, with arrests after the fact, public trials, and rehabilitation programs. 

This follows from another liberal-socialist doctrine: crime and war are the result of unequal distribution of income, which creates aggressive behavior among those deprived of their “constitutional rights” to the same level of income as everyone else.

The Democrats, the party of John Dewey’s socialistic pragmatism, resolutely oppose the data of real-life experience and cling to the Darwinian doctrine that the world is a matter of chance, producing a process of social evolution.  Yesterday’s “truth” (of course, with the exception of socialism and pragmatism) will not be today’s or tomorrow’s “truth.” With everything in a continuous state of flux, according to that theory, there is no truth, merely valid or invalid propositions.  If an action works to your advantage, regardless of what happens to others, it is “valid.”

If their campaign to destroy President Bush succeeds, no matter what happens to our troops around the world or to our nation in the future, the necessary actions are, by Democrats’ pragmatic lights, “valid.”

Given liberal-socialist control of most of the opinion-forming media – newspapers, magazines, TV, movies – Democrats may win on image without substance.  After three quarters of a century of educational indoctrination in the religion of socialism, too few Americans have been given the historical knowledge necessary to distinguish fact from fiction.

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