IN HIS END-OF-THE-YEAR COLUMN, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne included this message from an irate conservative reader: “Most liberals and some Democrats hate this president and will do anything to bring him down, including siding with terrorists against the president.” Noting that the same sentiment was expressed in different forms by many readers, Dionne lamented that “when big chunks of the country begin to view their political adversaries as something close to traitors, we have arrived at a very dangerous time.”

But is it baseless to suspect that the left-liberal ethos impels some adherents towards ambivalence about the struggle against terrorism? History suggests that the issue is worth investigating. After all, the old American left felt ambivalent–or worse–when it came to the foreign policy struggles of its day. Chunks of the left opposed American involvement in the struggle against fascism until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. And even after becoming disillusioned with Communism, elements of the old left failed to buy into the Cold War. Many adopted the posture of the influential literary critic Edmund Wilson. As Joseph Epstein has pointed out, Wilson described our conduct towards the Soviet Union as “panicky pugnacity” borne not of our virtue but of “the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.”