A few days ago Instapundit linked up this New Republic essay which, since it required registration, I didn't read until just now. Big mistake. This is possibly the most brilliant dissection of exactly why the Democrats lost the last election, and why they will keep losing them, I have ever read. More importantly, instead of simply criticising, it provides a proven path out of the wilderness. If you voted for Kerry or if you were stunned that he lost, you must register and read this. Excerpts don't completely do it justice, but:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism.
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By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man."
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Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a "historical re-education" has indeed occurred--replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda.
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Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

I don't expect the banner-wavers in our Yellow-Dog peanut gallery will agree with everything in the essay. I think some of them won't agree with anything in the essay (this reply to the essay [second entry], sounds so much like one of our more extreme readers it's scary.) However, by not reading it at all you'll be doing yourself a great disservice.

Because this is why you lost. Not because of morality, not because of greed, not because of stupidity, but because of this. You will continue to lose, and lose badly, until these issues are confronted and overcome. Liberal attitudes toward communism and American power had to change once the cold steel hell that the Soviet Union had become actually threatened our country. Liberal attitudes toward third world "traditions" and American power must change now that they are threatening our country.

What I fear greatly is that, by refusing to confront the reality that the world changed on that September day, that the rules got jumbled and re-sorted, my Democratic adversaries have set themselves on the road to dissolution. I don't know if, this time around, they have the will and the way to change things. I can only hope they do. We are better for having each other's gadflies picking apart our ideas, countering us, challenging us. It would be sad to think that through a failure of nerve the oldest political party in America would implode under pressures it had already faced and overcome fifty years before.

Update: Bigwig goes even further:

The proper liberal critique for the war on Iraq isn't that we shouldn't be there--or even that we should never have gone. The proper liberal critique should be that we should have invaded Iraq sooner, and that we aren't doing enough there now. True liberals would have spent their time prior to the invasion recruiting Peace Corps-like volunteers for post-war Iraq rather than human shields for a brutal dictatorship.