Democratic neocons?

That’s how Jacob Heilbrunn refers to “a host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the party [who] are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror.”

Among those he cites are Peter Beinart, author of the new book The Good Fight; Governor Mark Warner (whose disastrous cover photo on the New York Times Magazine I made fun of here), and the crew at the Progressive Policy Institute, which I wrote about approvingly here.

I referred to them as “engaged progressives with foreign-policy ideas.” Heilbrunn calls them “neocons.” Hmmm. Oh well.

This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of the Bush administration. They support a U.S. government that would seek multilateral consensus before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to use force when necessary.

These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the squishes who have led the party to defeat in the past.

And, of course, Heilbrunn predicts a big fight between this “fledgling” group and the “establishment”:

The battle will come from the generation of Democrats who came of age during the 1960s and who were instrumental in finishing off “Cold War liberalism” because of its failures in the jungles of Vietnam.

Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative, war, undertaken by warrior intellectuals who were liberal at home but saw falling dominoes everywhere around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the Bush administration, which has been trying to depict a global kind of Islamic totalitarianism, when the foe, as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse and less of a monolith than American leaders are prepared to believe.)

The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left — are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the McGovern era.

The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment.

Excellent. The Democratic Party needs to have this fight. I look forward to it. Let the best arguments win. But let there be argument.