Candidate for
United States Representative; District 53

"The democratic Left must help finish the creation of the world" wrote Michael Harrington, then America's leading democratic socialist writer, in 1968. Harrington also argued, in words that are likely to fall on incredulous ears among those who regard themselves as leftists in America today, that "this country could take the lead in making democratic revolution - in finishing the creation of the world in a human fashion."

Although America has indeed been imperialist, it need not continue to be. Harrington chided the Left's assumption of America's "inherent evil" overseas as being just as "naïve as the patriotic faith in its goodness."

Our current President loves to point out that America's enemies hate us because we are free. No, our enemies, and even many of our long time friends, hate us because of our hypocrisy. Our pretensions of upholding global standards of justice expounded on the eve of World War II were shattered by America's own actions and inactions. It is understandable that the American Left based so much of its just war rhetoric on arguments about the evil of interventions in sovereign nations. These arguments represented an extremely convenient weapon against the particular unjust war that inaugurated most contemporary American political thought on foreign and security policy, the Vietnam War. However, in the wake of our recent interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq and our conspicuous unwillingness to intervene in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Congo, replacing foreign policy pf unilateralism and preemption with a foreign policy of isolationism is not sufficient. We must empower rather than to continue to impede the international community's ability to credibly respond to genocide and global injustice. America must participate internationally as a partner with humility rather than lead with arrogance.