October 22, 2005

Richard Penn Kemble died last weekend at age 64 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. For 40 years he cut a unique figure in American political life. The side of politics that animated him was not elections and governance but rather ideas and causes. He worked for peace, racial equality, human rights and global democracy, but the overarching ideal to which he devoted his life was social democracy.

Social democracy is a popular idea in Europe but obscure to most Americans. Since the roots of this philosophy go back to Marx, it would seem to lie on the left of mainstream U.S. politics. But Mr. Kemble was scarcely a man of the left fringe. On the contrary, he was a centrist, and spent a large part of his energies battling against left-liberalism.

The explanation for this seeming anomaly is twofold. First, social democracy as Mr. Kemble interpreted it focused above all on the material and spiritual well-being of the common man. He believed that American liberalism went off the rails in the '60s and '70s when it came to be dominated by Vietnam War protesters and the student left. Apart from the war, the concerns of this "new liberalism," as it was then called, revolved around issues of lifestyle -- women's lib, sexual freedom, readily available abortions, and lenient drug laws. These excited the so-called "new class" of college-educated professionals, but left the average working man cold.

The second part of the explanation was the war itself -- or rather the bigger issue behind it. Mr. Kemble was a moderate dove on Vietnam. (Among the many significant cause groups he dreamed up was Negotiation Now!, which pressed for a compromise peace.) But he remained a passionate anti-communist. Social democrats have a mixed record on communism: Germany's Willy Brandt, for example, was an appeaser, but Britain's Ernest Bevin (a Labour foreign minister) was the man who invented NATO to thwart Soviet imperialism. Mr. Kemble was four-square in Bevin's tradition. He was a co-founder of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which counteracted communist apologists in mainline Protestant church groups. And he brought upon himself the full wrath of the left -- in the form of calumnies and bogus legal threats -- for organizing Democrats to support the Nicaraguan "Contras."

Mr. Kemble was the driving force behind the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), the organization of "Scoop" Jackson Democrats that battled the "new liberal" McGovernites for control of the party. The CDM-ers lost more rounds than they won, and under Reagan most shifted to the Republican camp. But Mr. Kemble did not, and he rejected the badge "neoconservative" that many of us who had worked with him came to wear with pride.

Why? I think he doubted that Republicans and conservatives could constitute a reliable base for the kind of internationalist and idealist foreign policy he espoused. He applauded President Bush's speeches about the need for democratization in the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism. But he doubted that the president's party was temperamentally suited to see such a policy through. Whether he was right remains to be seen. But the danger that Mr. Bush's administration will fail to match words with action has grown greater now that Penn Kemble is no longer around to hold its feet to the fire.

Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a veteran of many of the organizations Penn Kemble created.