Six Years Later

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Republican and Democrat members of Congress marched to the steps of the Capitol and sang "God Bless America" as a demonstration of national unity.

Anyone who had been around the block in a political sense knew that sort bipartisanship would be fleeting, but even under a skeptical eye, the Democrat left's conduct has been flabbergasting in the first six years of the Global War On Terror.

In today's Opinion Journal, former leftist Norman Podhoretz details how closely the anti-war movement resembles the Vietnam War protesters 35 years earlier, and how it was inevitable that the bipartisanship would soon crumble.

Having broken ranks with the left in the late '60s precisely because I was repelled by the "negative faith in America the ugly" that had come to pervade it, I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. It seemed to me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.

But I could not fully share the heady confidence of my younger political friends that the change was permanent, and that nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same again. As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

Sadly, in the information age, politics no longer ends at our nation's borders. Certain liberal elected officials no longer even operate under the pretense that they are for America anymore.