Liberal Insecurity

I stumbled upon a little back-and-forth argument by four liberal bloggers: Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Peter Beinart, and Atrios.

Beinhart began the debate by calling for the Democrats to distance themselves from people like Michael Moore and MoveOn, who "do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world." In other words, Dems need to show they're tough guys, too. After this, Yglesias, Drum and Atrios jump in and a little debate over Afghanistan shows up.

Here's the annoying thing: only Atrios will even grant that opposition to the war in Afghanistan may have been justified. He doesn't even say opposition was justified, just that it wasn't a crazy position to take. The others take the position, in Drums words, that

If the Taliban's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 wasn't enough to justify military action, I'm not sure what is — and I think it's fair to say that anyone who loudly opposed the Afghanistan war is just flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all.

While Atrios correctly points out that this is poor logic, this whole debate is a disheartening example of liberal tough-guy complex.

Scared to death of being branded "pacifists," they fight, fight, fight to distance themselves from those who dare to challenge a very questionable war with devastating consesquences. In doing so, to link up to my previous posting on framing, they're forced to adopt a foreign policy frame consistent with the conservative worldview, not a liberal one. Instead of valuing human life around the world, cooperation with other nations and peoples and the rule of law to solve problems, they promote a Wild West view of the world where there are good guys and bad guys and the job of the good guys is to blow up the bad guys to keep them in line. The problem with this (beyond the obvious destruction of life that results) is that when they later try to articulate progressive policies, they can't do so because they don't resonate with the foreign policy frames that, thanks to their compliance, dominate the discourse.