Stan – I read Chait’s piece too and I thought it was pretty good (though I have not read the Eberstadt book yet). But I agree there are some problems with Chait’s complaint. A lot of liberals complain that liberals shouldn’t be tarred with the Left’s whackiness. And if I were a moderate liberal, I would make that complaint all the time. But, liberals don’t offer such complaints all the time. Rather, they only offer them rarely when it seems like the hard left might be politically inconvenient to some short term liberal agenda (Ward Churchill’s buffoonery, for example).

It’s a bit like the old liberal anti-anti-Communism. Today’s Chaitian liberals aren’t radical leftists, to be sure, but they’re far more offended by conservatives who make a big deal about radical leftists than they are by the radical leftists themselves. They don’t seem to mind that the academy is overrun by leftwingers. Indeed, they seem to think that while the Marxists and the critical race theorists go too far, at the end of the day they’re on the side of the angels. The radicals’ only crime is “caring too much.”

The liberals treat the hard leftist icons — say Saul Alinsky — reverentially and with warm nostalgia. They welcome former radicals into the ranks of respectable liberalism with open arms, very rarely offering a hint of concern that they once cheered the Black Panthers or some such. I’ve heard Peter Beinart say many times that the role of the liberal in American politics is to cool radical passions, to mitigate and regulate revolutionary ardor so the country progresses in a leftward direction, just more slowly and peacefully. When I hear liberals like Chait complain about the more leftwing elements of the Democratic Party, the complaints are usually (though certainly not always) voiced in pragmatic terms — don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, etc. Implicit in there is the idea that liberals and leftists agree on ends, broadly understood, but disagree on means.

Chait’s TRB is very well written, but hearing him criticize leftwingers as a way toward demonstrating that rightwingers are fools, is not quite the same thing as taking a principled stand against his enemies to the left, assuming he really has any.

Update: A reader adds:

Jonah,
I haven’t read Chait or Eberstadt, but only your post. But perhaps there’s one more point to add to your argument (or maybe it’s your same argument in different words). When righties hear radical leftists, we ask ourselves why they think that way. I think the differences between the radicals and the leftists with the day jobs starts to disappear when answering that question. Likewise, a lot of righties don’t like guns, but ask a strong second amendment defender why he’s such a proponent and you’ll find that what separates him from the metroconservative withers.