> I gather Max said something of the sort in a post I missed.
... From his blog:
"Leo is trying to cast a political difference as a moral one. (All I said is that the petition was a political mistake.) This moralistic attack carries zero weight with me. A moral appeal has meaning coming from someone of high moral reputation, either as a public figure, or as someone familiar as a moral exemplar. Leo is neither of these; to me he is no better or worse than any other email address on the Internet. This goes double for anonymous posters. It's fine for anonymous posters and bloggers to issue moral statements about whatever. But if you want to get in somebody's face and make a direct, personal accusation, for it to mean something you have to be somebody out of the ordinary. (NOTE: This paragraph has been edited to reflect my apology to Leo Casey, found in the comments under this entry.)
Fortunately the 'democratic left' does not have a monopoly franchise on democratic values or activism among the broad, diverse U.S. left. There are clearly anti-democratic lefts, and they are bad bad bad. They are also few. The terminology is often employed to stigmatize for political purposes, not to classify in an honest manner. The purpose of the stigmatization is to distract from the weak critical posture in regard to the 800 pound gorilla in the living room -- U.S. foreign policy. The selective invocation of democratic criteria is of course the device of imperial aggression."
-- Luke