At the beginning of the Cold War, liberals had a national security problem. As the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote in 1946, liberals "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: The Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, the Alsops warned, "it is the right -- the very extreme right -- which is most likely to gain victory."

Over the following three years, it did change. Anti-communism, a minority view among liberals in 1946, was by 1949 a cornerstone of liberal belief. Much of the credit goes to Harry Truman, who rallied liberals and other Americans behind containment and the Marshall Plan. But Truman didn't do it alone. At the Democratic grass roots, organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) put the struggle against communism at the heart of a new liberal worldview. When former vice president Henry Wallace tried to ally liberals and communists in 1948, the ADA helped defeat his third-party candidacy. And after Republicans took back the White House in 1952, the ADA helped ensure that anti-communism never became an exclusively conservative faith.

Today liberals have a national security problem again. The current "great political reality" is the threat from al Qaeda and totalitarian Islam. And in the shadow of that threat, the right -- including the extreme right -- has won two straight elections, partly because Americans don't trust Democrats to keep them safe.

The problem is deeper than John Kerry. Since Sept. 11 liberals have not created institutions, like the ADA, that make the fight against America's totalitarian enemy central to their mission. To the contrary, key organizations, echoing Wallace, see liberalism's enemies almost exclusively on the right. The result is a lack of liberal passion for winning the war on terrorism -- a lack of passion that has cost Democrats dearly at the polls. ...