Land That I Love

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Subject: Land That I Love

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Thank You

A link to

"Land That I Love"

has been emailed to your friends.

Most E-mailed articles:

What follows is the text of the 2008 Podhoretz Lecture, which is delivered annually at the Commentary Fund Dinner in New York City. This year’s dinner took place on May 18. The lecturer was Senator Joseph Lieberman.

I am honored to be asked to give this lecture named for Norman Podhoretz, a great American intellectual and a great American patriot. In the three and a half decades Norman spent at the helm of COMMENTARY, he made it one of America’s most important and influential magazines, and transformed the way a lot of people think about the world.

It is not difficult to find the perfect words to explain the enduring motivation for COMMENTARY—because Norman has already written them: a “love affair with America.” That is what has moved this extraordinary magazine—an unabashed, unapologetic love for what Podhoretz has rightly called “one of the most extraordinary countries that has ever existed.”

The first editor of COMMENTARY, Elliot Cohen, wrote in its inaugural issue that the magazine was “an act of faith in our possibilities in America.” This is the patriotism that has inspired COMMENTARY since its inception—a patriotism rooted not in arbitrary attachment to our country’s land or its borders, but in a recognition that the values that were present at the creation of America and animate it still—the values of freedom and justice and opportunity—are not just our own national values; they are universal and eternal values, which are right and true not only for us in our own time, but for all people in every time. That was the great mission our founders, in their Declaration of Independence, gave each succeeding generation of Americans. It is a mission that COMMENTARY has accepted and fulfilled magnificently.

From its patriotic principles, COMMENTARY has consistently summoned the courage to draw the moral distinctions that matter most. It is a magazine that has always understood the difference between freedom and slavery, democracy and dictatorship, and good and evil, and it has never been seduced by a moral equivalency that confuses the two.

That is why Norman Podhoretz broke with the Democratic Party nearly forty years ago when he saw too many of his colleagues on the Left unwilling or unable to draw these distinctions.

Unfortunately, today, I see some of that same confusion in the Democratic Party, on the most important questions of foreign policy and national security.

This evening I’d like to speak about how the Democratic Party got here—how the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy—the party that the founders of COMMENTARY considered their natural ally in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism—has drifted so far from the principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose. This lecture will be part history, part political science, and part self-administered psychotherapy.

In September of 1999, National Review ran a cover story by Norman Podhoretz about then-President Bill Clinton. Although I don’t need to remind you that neither Norman nor the editors of National Review were our forty-second President’s biggest admirers, the article was not an attack. On the contrary, Norman declared at the outset, “I come not to bury Bill Clinton, but to praise him.”

The reason for this praise was clear—and I believe correct. By 1999, Bill Clinton had reconnected the Democratic Party to some of the better parts of its modern history.

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, and strong. And it was successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in—a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders, a party that grasped the link between the survival of freedom at home and the survival of freedom abroad, and a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters around the world against the forces of totalitarianism, or we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who movingly promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.”

And this was also the party of COMMENTARY, which from the very dawn of the Cold War provided intellectual artillery for those on the frontlines of the fight against Communist totalitarianism. The magazine was unmistakably a star in the constellation of American liberalism. And it was precisely because of its commitment to liberalism that it saw so clearly the evil of communism and was so determined to combat it. As early as 1946, in fact, COMMENTARY warned that the Soviet Union was “the greatest challenge democracy has ever confronted.”

This worldview—the policies of the Cold War Democrats who guided American foreign policy under President Truman and President Kennedy, and who created COMMENTARY—began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party.

Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the Communist world, including the one in South Vietnam, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor—a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy, they said, because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

This was the ideology that Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a brilliant piece in COMMENTARY in 1979, skewered and indicted as a “conception of national interest [that] borders on double think” because it “finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s ‘true interests.’”

Norman Podhoretz witnessed firsthand the seizure of the Democratic Party by the advocates of this ideology. “Never,” he wrote in National Review thirty years later, “will I get over my amazement at the speed with which this point of view spread from the margin to the mainstream. Within five years, the radical perspective had become the conventional wisdom.” Today, I regret to say I have the same sense of amazement about the speed with which similar ideas have again spread to the Democratic mainstream.

Of course the earlier leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson and organizations like the Coalition for a Democratic Majority fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy.

Then, beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments and reclaim our party’s lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. We were aided in this push by historic events—first the collapse of the Soviet Union and then America’s lightning victory in the Gulf War—which made a strong, self-confident foreign policy look increasingly correct.

Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected, and a big shift took place in the foreign policy of the Democratic Party. In the Balkans, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

This transformation was the reason Norman Podhoretz took to the pages of National Review in 1999 in praise of Bill Clinton.

The Clinton administration, he wrote then, “has at last long done what those who founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority more than a quarter-of-a-century ago were unable to bring about: He has all but de-McGovernized the Democratic Party.”

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America’s moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent—and, to the dismay of the Democratic Left, made sure that the Party’s platform endorsed a national missile defense.

Oh, and incidentally, he chose a hawkish Democratic senator from Connecticut as his Vice Presidential running mate.

By contrast, in 2000, Governor Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and criticized America’s peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. One of his top foreign policy advisers opined that “America’s armed forces are not a global police force”—a line that another prominent Republican said was “closer to the spirit of George McGovern than Ronald Reagan.”

This was a reality that Norman also noted in his 1999 article in National Review, and which he lamented. “It pains me to admit this,” he wrote, “but I would estimate that there is now more isolationist sentiment in Republican than in Democratic ranks.”

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. And though it pains me to admit this, I would estimate that there is now more isolationist sentiment in Democratic than in Republican ranks.

The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on.