Meanwhile, on the left

We conservatives will be having some interesting and difficult debates over the next four years particularly, I suspect, during the back-end of that period. However, the most interesting intra-ideology debate is likely to be among liberals and it will concern how to respond to Islamofascism (or maybe whether to recognize the phenomenon at all). To follow this debate, one will have to read liberal blogs, and an excellent candidate is David Schraub’s The Debate Link. David is on the right side of this debate, and his December 2 entry “Left Hook” has an excellent distillation of a piece on the subject by kindred spirit Peter Beinart and a link to a worthwhile piece by Kevin Drum.
UPDATE: I should probably add that the above-mentioned debate on the left may or may not extend beyond blogs and political journals into the realm of actual politics. In this political year, what Beinart calls the “hard wing” of liberalism wasn’t much in evidence. Whether this will change depends mainly on world events. If things go very well on the terrorism front, the issue may recede in the public’s mind, leaving little incentive for the Democrats to take the hard wing’s strong medicine. If things go very badly in Iraq, again the Democrats may feel they can regain power by virtue of bad news alone. Hillary Cllnton will probably be the first to master this calculus, and should serve as quite the weathervane.