I'm not sure how many other people realize that this election is just the continuation of a battle between two major paradigms, particularly in the area of foreign policy. It extends outside this country. It isn't just the current Democratic Party (to distinguish it from the Democratic Party of, say, 1960). It's the United Nations, the European Union, and others lining up on that side.

The war in Iraq is, right now, a test case. A repeat, in many ways, of Vietnam. If it is lost, the Left is vindicated, as it felt it was after Vietnam. If Iraq succeeds in becoming a democracy, the Left loses. Big time. Somehow, it seems to me that Afghanistan has been lost in the noise.

Don't know if success in Iraq will wreck the Left as a movement. It has survived massive blows, way back to the revelations of Stalinism, and most recently, the fall of the Soviet Union, without releasing its death grip on the fantasy of a collectivist paradise. Fidel Castro can still count on a lot of Americans coming down and praising all the good he has done.

The bad news for our political system is that at each of these revelations on the nature of collectivism's core, more and more reasonable people have left the movement, and the result has been an evolutionary selection for the most fanatical supporters, immune by definition to new facts and reason.

I believe, (no real data) that the latter now occupy a larger segment of the Left than ever before. Meanwhile, reasonable liberals are wondering what the hell Michael Moore was doing in the presidential box, and why every word out of some leftists seems to be in defense of our enemies, but they are still unwilling to abandon their party.

Certainly the right also has its share of crackpots, but so far, they aren't in the driver's seat.