This started as a post about religious fundamentalism and shifted into something else. I'll come back to the fundamentalism stuff in a different post when I get the chance, but since I'm celebrating Veteran's Day with marathon paper-writing (like Trickster the past week has been extremely busy for me on the school and Habitat fronts, hence the skimming and lurking on my part) it may have to wait a while. In any case, here's the something else part:

Praktike has just recently registered the domain Liberals Against Terrorism, in what I think is probably a long-overdue step. He says he's not sure what to do with it yet, though I suspect he has something in mind... but I'll toss in my idea on the subject anyhow.

The fact that "liberals" broadly speaking, spend less of their time commenting on the serious threats that radical fundamentalism poses to the secular, pluralistic liberal society that we cherish — as seen in the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for his controversial statements on Islam's treatment of women, among other offenses — than we do the many failings of the Bush administration's attempts at tackling this threat has in effect ceded the initiative in the debate. Rather than being the first ones to say "this is awful" and explain why from the liberal perspective, we end up being the ones adding "yes, but.." This isn't good from a political standpoint and probably not for our sense of perspective either.

As much as I don't like to admit it, there are members of the political left (and a few of them are even Democrats) who really do consider the U.S. a bigger threat to world peace than what they see as the comparatively minor threat of terrorism. I do think they are a minority within the Democratic community, but that the relative silence of the middle -- not at all helped by a media that rewards sensationalism over substance -- has allowed them a larger share of our collective voice than they deserve. This colors the rest of us in a negative light.

That the U.S. has and will continue to make mistakes in its policies I won't dispute, and that there are many important issues out there besides terrorism to be concerned over is something I think is important to establish. But we need to recognize the importance of terrorism right now and come up with a real concerted response to it beyond "Bush is doing it wrong". Oscar's comment there was tongue-in-cheek, but as long as the perception persists that "liberals don't have much to say about terrorists", it's going to be nearly impossible to move the ball any further.

The fact that Democrats have been effectively marginalized from power has made this difficult. On all the definitional fronts, the administration has the head start, making it difficult to respond without at least tacitly accepting the administration's framing. Case in point: the phrase, widely accepted but poorly defined, "Global War on Terror". I don't think that's what the Democrats want. It's a very misleading phrase and not at all helpful in dealing with the problem of terrorism or radical fundamentalism. Yet as long as that's what people think is needed in order to protect us, Democrats will continue to lose.

It is therefore imperative to come up with our own paradigm for the security of the United States. I believe Matt Yglesias (I'll dig up a link to his post on this at some point, but I've been skimming and lurking a lot lately and have only followed that discussion subconciously until just now) has phrased this as a question of obstructionism versus opposition. The former being to contest the administration's vision with the means available to us; the latter to use our energies to publicly set forth an alternate policy that shows that we take these threats seriously and have a plan for confronting them once the American people trust us with their votes to implement them.

Pace my Prof, I agree with prak that this must, if for no other reason than the current political climate — though I think there is a good argument for its value if implemented well — be a strategy that emphasizes, at least to some extent, the Wilsonian idealism and rhetoric of democracy that's informed much of our foreign policy debate. But I would like us to be slightly more precise and realistic about our goals than the neocons to the extent possible.

I think the past four years of the Bush administration have, by and large, been concerned with efforts to obstruct policies of the Bush Administration we oppose. In the wake of the election, it seems like that wasn't enough. Having started to buildup a movement infrastructure to oppose Bush, I hope we can now turn that infrastructure to formulating our own independent vision in opposition. That means publicizing the problem, from our perspective. I was going to expand more on that view of the problem with my look at how fundamentalist ideologies are in opposition to a lot of the principles like secularism, equal rights, a pluralist democracy, etc, that I at least associate with liberalism. That it's gonna have to wait for the next break in paper-writing to be rounded out fully.

And before we leap to criticize the Administration's response, come up with one of our own that uses America's full range of powers to solve it.