It’s lonely out here, sometimes.

Suppose there’s a party that you’ve always longed to go to. The Vanity Fair Oscar Party. An Inaugural Ball. A Coronation. You can’t believe that you are really there. You’ve got on the fanciest dress you’ve ever owned and hired someone to do your makeup. You actually bought the tux and the shoes and a bow tie that really ties. It’s all you can do to maintain some dignity and not do a stupid little happy dance every three minutes.

You get out of the limo, try to pretend you belong on a red carpet, walk in through a door and—

You hate everyone there. No, not hate. Fear. Loathe. Have a visceral horrifying reaction to. These aren’t even people, some of them. They are wormy, tentacled demons, dripping slime that sizzles when it hits the marble tiles and that excited, goosepimply tingle you felt a moment ago is now the sensation of your skin trying to crawl right off.

Welcome to my world, politically speaking.

I am a pro-war liberal.

I don’t think that there was ever any credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. I think the reported ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida border on fictional. I think George W. Bush took office—illegitimately—with every intent of going to war with Iraq the first damn minute he had an opportunity. While we’re on the subject, I think the president is a dunce that’s far too sure of himself and that the advisors he relies so heavily upon are criminals who are destroying both this country and their own party.

I also believe that the world will never be safe from terrorism until people are free. I’ve got lots of fuzzy hippie notions about how all souls are beautiful flowers that should be free to bloom fully in the garden of life, but underlying that I’ve got a practical streak and some common sense. It’s tragic, yes, to think of the brilliant painters, poets, teachers, philosophers, and just plain good people who are starving the Sudan right now, or who are rotting in a Chinese prison. But we’ve got a lot of potential poets moldering in our own inner cities, too, so why should we spend our time mopping up the mess that is the rest of world?

Because those hungry, desperate, messy parts of the world are the breeding grounds of terrorism. They are the incubators of blind hate and violence. When people are desperate, when they are oppressed and without hope, they will latch onto something that seems insane because when you live in a world where your father can be taken from your home at night and never seen again there is no sanity. If you’ve been living in a refugee camp for three generations with no hope of ever getting out, if your little cousin was shot in the head for throwing rocks, if someone comes along and tells you that there’s a reason for it all, that there is a bogeyman enemy who is behind all the suffering you see everywhere you turn and that you can do something about it, something that will make a difference and lead you to a paradise beyond your wildest imaginings—why not strap explosives to your chest and get on a bus?

In a high school history class, our teacher handed out twigs and asked us all to break them in half in the middle. Then she asked us to try and break off the smallest piece of the end. Then she asked which one was harder. Then she taught a lesson on Germany between the world wars.

The extremes don’t break. They don’t bend and they don’t waver. There will always be fanatics and because they are fanatics they will never listen to reason and never doubt their own truth. But they are just shouting in the dark until you take away the reason of the rest of a society. A society under a dictatorship is by definition an insane society. It operates under no reason but the whims of one man.

Universal freedom, security and opportunity for all—aren’t these liberal ideas? For the past twenty years, haven’t I heard lefties bitching about the U.S. supporting brutal dictators and not doing enough to help the downtrodden of the world? We’re finally—finally—stepping up and bringing freedom and democracy to a country that’s been savaged by a lunatic despot and I’m here at the hors d’oevres table trying not to make eye contact with John friggin’ Ashcroft?

I hate these guys. I hate their lying. I hate their religious extremism. I hate their ties to massive industry. I hate their secrecy. I hate their ill-concealed disdain for the poor, for minorities, for gays, for civil rights, for the environment, for anyone one not white-rich-born again.

I hate the fact that my people, the ones who support every single other thing I believe in, are on the other side of the velvet rope waving signs and shouting slogans. I hate that they are letting their own fury at a stolen election allow them to betray the best thing about the left: it’s insistence on freedom for everyone, always.

I hate that there’s no one here to talk to. I hate that I’m standing in a corner, muttering “it’s a civil contract between consenting adults, what’s the big deal?” and staring at my shoes. I hate that well-meaning types try to extrapolate my support for the war over to “he’s really not such a bad guy after all.” He is, and how one can not see that is beyond me. How one can say that the Iraqi people aren’t better off than if we’d never come is also beyond me.

So I’m here, humming the Waltz of the Wallflowers and nursing a G&T. I’ve seen a lot of people I can sort of agree with. Andrew Sullivan is coming around, slowly and sort of. Michael Totten’s mostly right, but sometimes I think he went too far. Christopher Hitchens is always right about everything, but he’s too cool for me anyway. I’m daydreaming about what this party should be, about debating with Howard Dean whether to give Saudi Arabia twenty minutes or only fifteen to cough up the crazy uncles in the basement and get their daughters into law school, when I overhear a bit of conversation from the other side of the potted palm.

“It's simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I've always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended . . . I think it's always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it's very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently. I think it's very dangerous to use foreign policy to achieve goals in internal policy. But, still, I think that the decision to overthrow Hussein was right and just.”

And I feel a little less alone.