Is Beinart the Left's Buckley?

George Will on the Democratic Left's quandary:

Beinart aspires to change the Democratic base so that it will accept a presidential candidate who espouses 1947 liberalism -- someone for whom anti-totalitarianism is the organizing imperative of politics.

But how do you begin reforming a base polluted by the Michael Moore-MoveOn.org faction? Moore says "there is no terrorist threat" -- that terrorism is a threat no greater than traffic accidents. MoveOn says that "large portions of the Bill of Rights" have been "nullified" -- presumably, then, the federal judiciary also has been nullified.

When Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the 2004 Democratic convention, voters drew conclusions about the party's sobriety. Liberalism's problem with the Moore-MoveOn faction is similar to conservatism's 1960s embarrassment from the claimed kinship of the John Birch Society, whose leader called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a Kremlin agent.

The reason that Moore is hostile to U.S. power is that he despises the American people from whom the power arises. Moore's assertion that America "is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe" is a corollary of Kuttnerism, the doctrine that "middle America" is viciously ignorant.

Beinart is bravely trying to do for liberalism what another magazine editor -- the National Review's William Buckley -- did for conservatism by excommunicating the Birchers from the conservative movement.

But Buckley's task was easier than Beinart's will be because the Birchers were never remotely as central to the Republican base as the Moore-MoveOn faction is to the Democratic base.