We've recently taken to describing ourselves as "militant progressives", which elicits laughs from our liberal friends right up until we declare that it's because "sometimes, you have to bomb countries out of the Stone Age" - and that we're serious. This morning's OneJerusalem Conference Call was with Will Marshall, who describes himself as a "progressive internationalist" - close enough to be both suggestive and interesting. And since the Republicans have become the Party of James Baker, new voices are both welcome and needed. Allen Roth (One Jerusalem) was as always running the call, and Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues) was also on the line. The audio will be on the One Jerusalem frontpage later today or tomorrow.

Will Marshall is the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, and he's the Editor at Large of the new Democratic magazine Blueprint. Blueprint seems to be a kind of center-left The New Republic, focusing specifically on foreign policy security initiatives. The PPI just published With All Of Our Might, a collection of essays by some of the leading intellectual lights of the center-left. The goal is to articulate a positive vision for a reinvigoration of what used to be called Truman Democrats.

We'll give away the ending: we're sympathetic but quite unhopeful about the prospects of a robust, American liberal opposition to political Islam. At stake, we submit to you, are two fundamental questions. But before we get to them, we do want to emphasize again how overwhelmingly critical it is to foreground our sympathy and support - more than our disagreement - with what the PPI is trying to accomplish. Most importantly, there is the fundamental issue that everyone's on the same side in the fundamental battle of the next hundred years. Perhaps just as significantly, however, we really do seem to be approaching a political situation in which there will be no mainstream support for Israel keeping up its fight against the genocidal opponents that threaten it - there's more than a little reason to hope that making a compelling case to the center-left could serve as the foundation for new tactical alliances.

(1) As a domestic political matter, are there any prospects for a broad revival of liberal internationalism?

We've made no secret that we view the Congressional flip as more or less a classic, mouth-frothing plebian revolt: an explosion of destructive resentment in the form of a revolution that will very quickly consume its children.

Every party and ideology has its populists and ideologues. Certainly the Republican party is not immune from crazy. The difference is - and we don't understand why this isn't an obvious, argument-ending observation - that the Republican base is quite content to confine its policy demands to a limited set of domestic policies. As long as national Republicans are willing to toe the line on abortion, immigration, gay rights, and judges, the Republican base remains more or less content.

That's not the case with the Democratic base, which literally brags about having bought the Democratic party (there's a separate essay to be written, incidentally, about liberals' projection of their own worst traits - deliberative ugliness, secret machinations, buying candidates, etc). Furthermore, the liberal base not only thinks it's in control - it actually is in control - Harry Reid made an election-day video for the DKos Denizens all but acknowledging their control of the party. We've seen nothing since then that contradicts the idea that top party leaders feel indebted to the netroots.

And that's a problem, because the netroots are totally batshit crazy:

Will Marshall's solution to delineate between the Congressional and the Presidential wings of the Democratic party, observing that Congress always ends up being more ideological than the President. Fair enough, but Rick Richman put the problem bluntly: can a Truman-style Democrat (assuming that this is a meaningful phrase) get out of the Democratic primaries? Marshall seemed pretty confident that one could, but we remain unsure as to exactly why he thinks that (although that could be - and we're not being sarcastic here - because our stupid cell phone 2-in-1 handsfree went out for 10 seconds - we'll have to review the transcript). It seems that he thinks that Pelosi losing the Murtha thing means that it's not all about the Iraq War.

Which is fair - but precisely not the issue. The issue has to do with liberal fascination with and feting of the most ruthless, genocidal maniacs on the planet. The liberal fascination with Ahmadinejad is just one example - it's not just the netroots who love this guy. The CFR - not unrepresented in PPI publications and in the book - is also enamoured with the idea of this powerful, anti-Western populist. Forget the whole "genocide" thing. And that's the intellectuals at CFR - that's before we even get to the "Ahmadinejad has a pretty sweet hipster style" bloggers.

The contemporary control of the Democratic Party by netroots activists is not, however, terminal. The netroots will fizzle out just like every populist surge fizzles out - no matter how well organized it is. If nothing else, their parents will eventually shut off the electricty and force them to get a job. We're more concerned about what a reinvigorated liberal internationalist would look like. More than whether one is possible...

(2) Intellectually and institutionally, is broad revival of liberal internationalism desirable?

When the neocons started crafting their positive vision of their own ideology, they referenced old Wilsonian internationalism minus a single crucial element: the belief in multinational institutions and treaties. The idea is that you can have as many good intentions as you want, but none of that matters if you provide a forum that levels the playing field between the US and despots, dictators, and tyrants. Bilateral treaties and alliances among friends of similar ideology are all to the better - but having to go to the United Nations to win over cynical thugs - whether through coercion or bribes - makes progressive internationalism impossible.

You could look at this as a broader issue of commitments and sensibilities: it's grounded in the left's refusal to give up on the pretenses of negotiating with people who don't respect negotiations, from the United Nations down to the Palestinians. It's diplomatic fetishism, where the appearance of negotiations substitutes for what negotiations ought to represent - a willingness to come to the table (rather than a footdragging maneuver to buy time to rearm or go nuclear). So in With All Our Might, there are chapters devoted to reinvigorating democracy promotion by Larry Diamond (awesome idea - let's try it in Egypt!) and to restoring the UN by Anne-Marie Slaughter (super - how about giving Venezuela an expanded role!). In Will Marshall's terms:

Same old same old. But Larry Diamond or Anne-Marie Slaughter are not nobody bloggers: these are some very, very big brains. So it's not enough (and it's frankly inaccurate) to say that they're not "just wrong". Quite the opposite - they're wrong in all kinds of complicated, tangled ways, produced by an interplay of institutional inertia, disciplinary assumptions, and personal sensibilities. But fundamentally wrong they are, and you can tell that this is true because on the whole they embrace silly notions like the idea that if we explain our lifestyle more to an Arab world that hates it, that Arab world will like us more.

The reason that the neocons wanted to give up on these pretenses is because - practically, materially, as a matter of effects - they end up in the same place as realism does. You end up having to balance the lesser of some pretty significant evils just to get a little peace and quiet. Stability becomes the default, desperately talking and pretending nothing's wrong becomes the method.

There is no tangible, material difference between James Baker pressuring Israel from the Right and State Department-DLC sophisticates pressuring Israel from the left. Will Marshall was stunningly revelatory - almost to the point of Clinton-era caricature - on this question: "there's no partner with the Israelis to negotiate with but... we need to be actively engaged in other sorts of diplomacy". Which is exactly how you end up with John Kerry - who Will Marshall proudly held up as a supporter of the broader War on Terror - suggesting that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to send Jimmy "Israel Is An Apartheid State" Carter to Israel. Because who's better at getting Muslim and Arab radicals to uselessly talk than Jimmy Carter?

Underneath this new liberal internationalism is a cluster of mistaken assumptions, entrenched by page after page and article after article in leading foreign policy journals: the idea that the Bush administration has been hands off in Israel ()not really), the idea that the Bush administration has been unilateral (insulting), and the idea that there are allies out there just waiting to join us in the global war against Muslim extremism (demographically problematic for them, to say the least). It's an ideologically and institutionally myopic.

But - and here's the crucial point - Will Marshall thinks there's tons of daylight between liberal internationalism and neo-Realism ala James Baker. He thinks that organizing a coalition is significantly different from Bush style unilateralism. But the point is that he's wrong, and he's wrong because the starting assumptions are wrong - there is no difference between failing to get the Palestinians to genuinely make peace and never starting in the first place. Or actually, there is a difference - but it doesn't end up positively for the people who brought Arafat to the White House.

But Allen Roth and David Goder are quite right in bringing center-right pro-Western bloggers into dialogue with people like Will Marshall. The stakes in the war against political Islam are too high to let partisanship get in the way either of fruitful intellectual dialogue or of contingent political alliances. But, again, more importantly: Will Marshall and his allies on the center-left are fighting the good fight against isolationists and neo-Realists of all stripes. They're frighteningly wrong in some respects, but they remain critical to constructing a centrist coalition dedicated to protecting the West against the threat of jihadism.

When there's a real interest in moving forward through dialogue - not the fake, foot-dragging style of international diplomacy – then there's a chance for genuine sharpening of argument. There are not many conservatives who could go more than a couple rounds with the folks that the PPI has mobilized in their publications, and that's reason enough to encourage conservatives to engage those authors and publications. And if the center-left arguments can't be addressed and answered (and we want to be very clear on this - we think they can be) - then they should be adopted. Because that's how useful strategies and political visions are formed.

Previously: In Just Seven Short Paragraphs, Jimmy Carter Tells 2 Lies, Makes 2 Incoherent Arguments, Takes an Anti-Israel Stance that the State Department Mocks, and Just Generally Annoys the Hell Out of Us, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Mark Steyn, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Yehudit Barsky on Salah Choudhury