The Hawk's Left Wing

Good piece by Joshua Micah Marshall on the recent effort by the Social Democrats, USA, a party of pro-war left intellectuals, to make themselves a more prominent political factor. The Social Democrats are actually descended from Eugene Debs' movement; the group split from anti-war socialists during Vietnam. Now, the debate over the response to Islamist terror is reinvigorating the movement.

In Marshall's paraphrase of the group's view, "the just-completed invasion of Iraq was not only compatible with a revived democratic and internationalist center-left, but … any opposition to it was in fact a cardinal error." At a recent DC gathering, for example, one leftist academic criticized Germany's antiwar left for a "lack of complete understanding of armed antifascism." The centerpiece of that gathering was a debate over Paul Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism. Berman (who was there) argues "that the twin 'Muslim totalitarianisms' of radical Islamism and Baathism are not only similar in form but also share a common history" with earlier totalitarianisms.

Social Democrats are not seeking to become a mass movement so much as to exert influence, neocon-style, on Democrats. Marshall speculates that "this could be a movement with as much of a future as a past."