Neoconservatives today are mourning the recent loss of one of the architects of their movement, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who passed away Thursday. Kirkpatrick was seen as an American Thatcher who greatly shaped foreign policy in America, particularly as United States Ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan years (the first woman to hold the position). She authored the Kirkpatrick Doctrine as a means to deal with communism and totalitarian regimes. She more recently called on the United States to declare war on the entire Islamic terrorist network following the September 11 attacks. Perhaps most notably, she described Democrats as they were in 1984 and as they still are: “San Francisco Democrats” who “blame America first.”

In many ways, Kirkpatrick was a pioneer in the field of foreign policy, especially given the prominent school of thought at the time. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter embraced “détente” with the Soviet Union, just wanting to co-exist and get along. Ronald Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, on the other hand, saw things as they were, not as beltway insiders or eastern establishment intellectuals would have liked them to have been. They called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was. They sought to undermine communism where it existed and repel it where it did not. They didn’t want to just get along with Soviet communism, they wanted to defeat it, and through their resolve and determination, they succeeded. Perhaps more remarkably, they succeeded in spite of the best efforts of a Democrat Congress who opposed every move they made and threw every conceivable obstacle in their way.

At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Kirkpatrick called out her fellow lifelong Democrats on their recent foreign policy follies and their fundamental shift from the ideals of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Indeed, her views on foreign policy and liberalism ring true today. Foreign policy matters- in her time the Soviet Union, in 2006 Islamic terrorism- are central to the freedom, prosperity, and yes, the survival of the United States. Today, just as they were in 1984, Democrats are offering the wrong policies. Democrats wanted détente, nuclear freeze, and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Today, they want an immediate pullout from Iraq (a strategy even the recently commissioned Iraq Study Group has debunked) and negotiations with Iran, Syria, and North Korea. By the way, Iran is that country that recently convened a conference to determine whether or not the Holocaust occurred. Kirkpatrick described Democrats not as behaving like hawks or even doves but like ostriches, thinking they would be safe from the world’s problems by simply hiding their heads in the sand.

Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the first influential neoconservatives along with Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Irving Kristol who bolted from their ideological backgrounds and put American interests ahead of partisan ones. She in fact held something in common with the President she worked for: the Democratic Party left them, not vice-versa. Maybe what the Democrats need are more conservative (or at least clear-thinking) members who realize that fundamentalist, blood-thirsty Muslim terrorists are America’s enemy, not George Bush. Maybe they need more Zell Millers who vote for the interests of Americans fearful of additional terrorist attacks instead of unionized federal airport screeners concerned a 40 hour work week might be too strenuous. How appropriate that Kirkpatrick should have called this new batch of loony liberals “San Francisco Democrats.” Now we get to see what happens when we make one of them Speaker.