Ayn Rand once described altruism as a code of "moral cannibalism." In occasional outbursts like that rally, the far left embraces the same conclusion, describing their morality of envy explicitly in terms of devouring their fellow man.

I was reminded of this incident, oddly, while listening to the standard campaign "stump speech" of the cheerful, boyish North Carolina Senator John Edwards, the last major candidate to withdraw from the contest against presumptive winner John Kerry. Edwards's theme was that there are "two Americas—one for the privileged few and another for everybody else." He expands on this theme:

You and I can build an America, one America, where we don't have two health care systems, one for families that can afford the best health care money can buy...and one for everybody else, rationed out by insurance companies, drug companies.... We shouldn't have two public school systems in America, one for the most affluent communities, one for everybody else. We shouldn't have two tax systems, one for the special interests, the big corporations, many of whom pay no taxes at all, and one for all those families who work hard every year and pay their taxes and carry the tax burden in America. We shouldn't have two economies in America, one for all those families who struggle every single day to get by...and the other [for] families who never have to worry about a thing.

In reality, we do have two tax systems in America—but it is the corporations and the wealthiest two percent of the population, the targets of Edwards's rhetoric, who actually carry the majority of the tax burden. Yet in Edwards's view, these individuals are a vicious band of oppressors engaged in a vast economic conspiracy against the rest of the population. Bush's America, Edwards declares, is "the country where the Washington lobbyists, special interests, and his CEO friends get what they want, when they want it."

The essence of this speech is a pure appeal to the morality of envy—to the same class-warfare, "eat the rich" mentality shouted by the campus socialists I saw sixteen years ago.

But there was a crucial difference: Edwards's demeanor, which is universally described as positive, upbeat, and "sunny." The "Two Americas" speech typically begins with a description of Edwards's campaign theme as a "positive, uplifting vision of hope." Edwards is, as New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it, "The Happy Populist": "The crowds go crazy, but they are not only applauding; they are applauding and smiling at the same time, a result that was not generated by all the other candidates who have used the Two Americas theme over the years." Edwards describes his approach this way: "All my life, America has smiled at me, and today I am smiling right back."

The message of the Two Americas speech may seem like the tirade of a rabble-rousing, bomb-throwing socialist revolutionary—but Edwards's smiling delivery and unusually youthful appearance makes him seem like such a nice young man.

Edwards eventually withdrew from the Democratic race—but the success he achieved, launching himself from relative obscurity to a prominent position on the national stage, indicates the nature of the choice Democratic voters made in this year's primary. The Democrats want a candidate who represents the morality of envy, hatred of achievement, worship of sacrifice—but they want a representative who will present that morality with an attractive, wholesome, appealing face.

At about the same time as the "eat the rich" campus socialist rally, a rock-and-roll group briefly soared to popularity under the name Fine Young Cannibals. (Readers in the right age range might remember their 1989 hit "She Drives Me Crazy.") The group's name was meant to be ironic: how can you be a "fine young man" while being a cannibal? Yet that is precisely what the Democrats are attempting to put over: to present the American public with the equivalent of a "fine young cannibal" as their candidate for president.

To understand the message of the Democratic primary, we have to understand why the Democratic field was narrowed down to John Edwards and John Kerry. The candidates offered to Democratic voters fell between two antipodes: Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean.

Lieberman was, by Democratic Party standards, an economic moderate and a foreign-policy hawk who criticized his rivals for vowing to repeal all of the Bush tax cuts and for being too critical of the war in Iraq. His candidacy never got off the ground. The writing was on the wall as early as April 9, 2003, at one of the earliest Democratic campaign events, when Lieberman was the only candidate to laud the famous toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad. Lieberman went so far as to proclaim "V-I Day," celebrating "Victory in Iraq." The reaction, according to a Los Angeles Times report: "Lieberman's cry of triumph received only the faintest flicker of applause." The base voters of the Democratic Party are not interested either in accommodating capitalism or in the assertion of American military power abroad.

At that same event, Howard Dean proclaimed that he "supposed" it was a good thing that Saddam Hussein had been ousted, but went on to attack the war on the grounds that it "opens up a new, dangerous pre-emptive doctrine."

This belligerent anti-war message was the reason Dean generated the greatest early enthusiasm among the Democratic base. Dean's message was the unabashed, unrestrained voice of what some conservative columnists have dubbed the "Angry Left." This phrase, promoted over the past year by conservative commentators like James Taranto, is a non-essential description: it designates the far left by its emotions, not by its ideas. But the term has caught on because it names a prominent characteristic of today's left. The leftist establishment, under the influence of the New Left, has dispensed with the pretense that it is a movement based on intellectualism—that it seeks "scientific socialism" based on a study of the inevitable trends of history (the terms in which the Marxist Old Left presented itself). This intellectualist left has largely been replaced by an emotionalist left. Sometimes this takes the form of maudlin emotional appeals to the plight of the poor and the sick-but the dominant emotions of today's left are anger and hatred.

Dean was the voice of this leftist emotionalism.

The style of Dean's campaign was amplified by a speech in which former Vice President Al Gore gave Dean his endorsement. Once a representative of Bill Clinton's relatively mainstream, "centrist" liberalism, Gore has since come out into the open as a spokesman for the New Left outlook, expressed with a seething anger presumably fueled by his loss in the 2000 election. His eyes wild, his lips twisted in rage—a performance in which the famously stilted Gore was nearly unrecognizable—he denounced the Bush administration in terms that set a new record for political hyperbole. After declaring Iraq to be a "quagmire," Gore concluded: "My friends, this nation has never in our two centuries and more made a worse foreign policy mistake." This includes, presumably, the 10-year disaster of the Vietnam War, in which 50,000 American soldiers died.

It was this very emotionalism, the source of Dean's appeal, that ultimately brought down his campaign. The problems began with a series of obvious gaffes followed by hurried retractions, such as his infamous advice to the politically correct Democratic party that it must appeal to southern whites "with Confederate flags in the backs of their pickup trucks." These statements were symptoms of a candidate who is accustomed to speaking first and thinking through the consequences later. The crucial moment came a week before the January 19 caucus in Iowa. It was the first actual contest, the point at which the leading candidates had to demonstrate a real base of support-and opinion polls indicated that Dean was favored to win. At a Dean campaign event, a 67-year-old retiree named Dale Ungerer took Dean to task for his angry rhetoric. "Please tone down the garbage, the mean-mouthing, the tearing down of your neighbor and being so pompous. You should help your neighbor and not tear him down." Dean snapped back, "George Bush is not my neighbor." Then when Ungerer tried to reply, Dean told him, "You sit down. You've had your say, and now I'm going to have my say."

Culturally, the Midwest—and especially the rural Midwest—places a special value on politeness. Any glaring breach of this "neighborliness," as Mr. Ungerer would probably put it, can be fatal to a politician's aspirations. (In 2002, for example, when Democrats turned a non-partisan memorial service for Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone into a crass political rally for his replacement, they succeeded only in driving the state's voters toward the Republican candidate.) Dean's bullying of Ungerer, as it was widely judged, was partly responsible for sinking him to third place in Iowa, driving voters toward the previously fading John Kerry and the previously obscure John Edwards.

Dean's collapse was completed by a speech he gave to supporters that evening, declaring defiantly that he would carry on the fight to New Hampshire and a list of other states, a tirade capped off by a kind of war-whoop generally transcribed in the conservative press as "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!!" This incident by itself was blown out of proportion—it was merely a forced, overly theatrical effort to energize his disappointed campaign workers—but it was magnified precisely because it symbolized a character trait Dean had already established in the public mind. Within a week, after another poor showing in the New Hampshire primary, the Dean campaign had exhausted its money and momentum, and his candidacy was all but dead.

It is possible that Dean's success was exaggerated from the beginning, the product of a new Internet-based campaign that allowed Dean to build a deceptively large organization on what was actually a small base of support. But his rise and fall offers a more important lesson. The caucus that caused the Dean campaign to unravel also gave a surprise second-place finish to the little-known Edwards. At the same time that Iowa voters rejected the Angry Populist, they embraced the Happy Populist.

This indicates an important truth about how the American people choose a presidential candidate, first in the primaries and especially in the general election. They do not look only at a candidate's ideas, policies, or arguments. They judge him first and foremost on what he projects about his personal character and sense of life.

The main mass of voters—and especially the "swing voters" who usually decide presidential elections—are ideologically uncommitted. Most Americans have mixed premises, accepting some elements of egoism and some elements of altruism. That is why, for example, they typically approve of tax cuts but disapprove of cuts in government largesse—the chronic contradiction at the root of America's budget deficits. Because these voters lack explicit philosophical moorings, any articulate speaker can sway them one way or another. And since few politicians reach the national stage without being capable speakers, backed by professional speechwriters, most elections are not decided by a contest of eloquence. They are decided by a contest of trust: which candidate does the American people trust—on the sense-of-life level—to be a morally decent man who will make sound decisions?

This is why, for example, a middle-aged Midwestern woman once confessed to me that she chooses presidential candidates based on which candidate's wife she likes best. This seems like a nonsensical criterion—yet when evaluating a man's character, absent the explicit guidance of philosophical principles, many Americans look to his family life as a key indicator and thus will be swayed by the character and personality of his spouse.

Or consider the effect of a key October 2000 debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Viewed from an intellectual perspective, the debate was a clear win for Gore, who was more articulate and in command of his material, while Bush failed to counter important claims and gave ground on many issues. Yet this was widely regarded as the debate that lost Gore the election. Why? Gore showed his intellectual confidence by sighing and rolling his eyes at Bush's inadequate arguments—mannerisms that came across (correctly) as the traits of a pompous, self-important intellectual elitist who looks down on regular folks. The result: Gore was parodied on such popular shows as Saturday Night Live as a kind of arrogant teacher's pet, a high-school debate team champion who takes a juvenile delight in using big words and lording it over his less-eloquent rivals. In the contest of character, Gore lost, and thus he lost the lead he would have enjoyed as the heir to an incumbent president in a time of apparent peace and prosperity.

This is also why Dean lost in 2004—and why the Democrats turned to Edwards and Kerry.

Lee Harris, a columnist for Tech Central Station, best expressed the process that occurs in these early primaries. The purpose of the "super- ficially bizarre rituals of an American election," he writes, is to subject candidates to a "series of artificially induced crises."

The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires-we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterwards, and that is why the American people tend to respond so harshly to those candidates who fail to make the grade during this our period of national candidate testing. Iowa was Dean's first crisis-and he blew it...; he lost the reputation as a man who could be trusted to act calmly and rationally in the midst of adversity.

If Dean did not have the character traits to be trusted with leadership, how were the Democrats to select a candidate who did have those traits? They could have chosen a candidate who had distinguished himself by different ideas and policy choices. Instead, they looked for a man with precisely the same agenda as Dean, presented in a more acceptable style. The word that sums up this approach is that Democratic voters looked for a candidate who would be "electable."

This was the role of Senator Edwards, who dressed up class-warfare cannibalism in a benevolent demeanor—but more important, it is the key to the success of John Kerry.

Kerry does not present himself with a sunny, smiling exterior, but with an appearance better calculated to win the job of president. While Edwards is cheerful, Kerry is grave; while Edwards is fair-haired and boyish, Kerry appears grey-haired and mature; while Edwards is smiling, Kerry adopts a sloped-eyebrowed, sad Basset-hound expression intended to make him appear thoughtful, dignified, senatorial—and, he hopes, presidential.

While Edwards's sunny disposition is calculated to put a nice face on the class-warfare cannibalism of his economic agenda, Kerry's appearance is meant to cover up the most important feature of his campaign—and the one issue on which the Democrats most need the protective façade of a gravely serious demeanor: an agenda of foreign-policy surrender.

Just as the conservative press successfully pushed the story of Dean as a loose cannon, so they are now attempting, with some justification, to push the story of Kerry as a political waffler who has repeatedly shifted his positions on key issues. Thus, the Bush campaign unveiled its strategy against Kerry in an oblique mention by the president during a fund-raising speech.

The other party's nomination battle is still playing out. The candidates are an interesting group, with diverse opinions: for tax cuts, and against them; for NAFTA, and against NAFTA; for the Patriot Act, and opposed to it; in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts.

But this is not the fundamental story. There is a consistent theme that binds together Kerry's public statements and voting record. Waffling is not the essence of Kerry's career; instead, his dissembling is merely a smokescreen to keep voters from detecting the cause to which he has shown a lifelong ideological commitment: anti-Americanism.

The Kerry campaign has made much of their candidate's military service in Vietnam, and they have explained his foreign policy views as a bitter reaction to his experience in that war. But the evidence suggests otherwise. It indicates that Kerry's philosophy was well-formed before he left for Vietnam—that he emerged from his Ivy League education exactly the same as many other young men from wealthy families (such as Howard Dean): thoroughly and unthinkingly steeped in the philosophy of the left, with its profound contempt for American society and its prejudice that America is guilty in any and every conflict.

As a 1966 student commencement speaker at Yale, where he was chairman of the Political Union, Kerry "urged the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and to scale down foreign military operations," according to an admiring 1970 profile in the Harvard Crimson. The same report indicates that Kerry volunteered to fight in a war he opposed only after "he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris" and was refused.

Soon after his discharge from the Navy in 1970, Kerry became a leader of the leftist organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). One of the VVAW events Kerry participated in was a 1971 protest in which decorated veterans threw their medals at the US Capitol building—an obscene gesture of contempt for the government of the United States. During the same series of protests, Kerry was invited by anti-war senators to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His fawning hosts gave him a great deal of freedom to expand on his views, and the resulting testimony is a revealing look at Kerry's world view.

Kerry began his testimony by repeating the VVAW's portrayal of American soldiers as war criminals, describing how American servicemen had allegedly "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." He described this as "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Kerry's testimony was not just a condemnation of excessive or uncontrolled use of force in a war against Communism. It was an expression of the leftist view that America—not the belligerent Soviet empire—was the real threat to the world. America, Kerry declared, was "more guilty than any other body of violations of [the] Geneva Conventions"—this, while American POWs were being systematically tortured in North Vietnamese prisons. As for the need to defend the United States against the Soviet Union, Kerry opined that it was America's "crimes [that] threaten the country, not reds." He described the Cold War as a "mystical war against Communism" caused by "paranoia about the Russians"—as if the threat of world enslavement was merely an illusion. Indeed, he sneered, "There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take over our McDonald's hamburger stands."

Kerry advocated a complete American surrender in Vietnam, demanding that the US withdraw "immediately and unilaterally," then expiate our guilt by offering "extensive reparations to the people of Indochina."

At its deepest, most disturbing level, Kerry's testimony was an assault on American society and on the American outlook on life. The blame for the war, Kerry told the Senators, "lies in large part with this country, which allows a young child before he reaches the age of 14 to see 12,500 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting man comic books...." He saw the anti-war protests as an attempt to fundamentally alter and redeem the nature of American society. The protesters' goal, he asserted, was "to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, and so...30 years from now...we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead a place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."

In Kerry's view, the American belief in the righteous use of force against evil—the sense of life represented by John Wayne—is the expression of a society twisted by hatred and the glorification of brutality, a society that had to be humbled by forcing an American surrender in Vietnam.

The record of Kerry's subsequent political career shows that this anti-American agenda was not a youthful aberration but rather a lifelong crusade. Joshua Muravchik, writing in the Washington Post, describes Kerry's record as "more dovish than that of any Democratic nominee since McGovern."

When he won election to the Senate in 1984, Kerry said that the "issue of war and peace" remained his "passion." As a first major foreign policy cause, he championed the "nuclear freeze." Later Kerry battled Sen. Sam Nunn, a hawkish Democrat who chaired the Armed Services Committee, over the funding of research into missile defense, which Kerry wanted to slash.

The litany of weapons systems that Kerry opposed included conventional as well as nuclear equipment: the B-1 bomber, the B-2, the F-15, the F-14A, the F-14D, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile. And he sought to reduce procurement of the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the F-16 jet. Time and again, Kerry fought against what he called "the military-industrial corporate welfare complex that has relentlessly chewed up taxpayers' dollars."

Kerry also opposed the US invasion of Grenada and American support for anti-Communist fighters in Nicaragua, declaring, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them"—the people of Nicaragua—"what to do."

At every stage of his career, Kerry has consistently opposed the development of American military power and the assertion of American interests in the world.

Kerry's foreign policy theory is also consistent across his career. In 1970, as a 26-year-old candidate for a Massachusetts congressional seat, he told the student reporter from the Harvard Crimson: "I'm an internationalist. I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations." (He also declared that he wanted "to almost eliminate CIA activity.") He expressed similar views—though more cautious in the details—in a December 3, 2003, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kerry began by criticizing President Bush for pursuing "the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history." If this is his description of the timid, pragmatist policies of the Bush administration, what would Kerry regard as a non-arrogant policy? His solution is a return to "the fundamental tenets that guided our foreign policy for more than half a century: belief in collective security and alliances, respect for international institutions and international law, multilateral engagement, and the use of force not as a first option but as a last resort." The theme of the rest of the speech is international collectivism. He speaks of "collective security," "collective endeavor," and "collective action," calls for a foreign policy that is "collective and not imperial," and vows to "replace unilateral action with collective security."

Hence the actual specifics of the Kerry foreign policy. While stating that "As president, I will not cede our security to any nation or institution," he vows to "treat the United Nations as a full partner" (emphasis added). What does this imply? Kerry declares that he would "put the United Nations in charge of the reconstruction and governance-building processes." The hasty retreat of the UN when its Baghdad installations were attacked by terrorists last year makes it clear that this is Kerry's plan for a surrender in Iraq that would be just as "immediate and unilateral" as the one he advocated in Vietnam.

As for the centers of the war on terrorism, he advocates a "non-confrontational policy" which would "explore areas of mutual interest with Iran, just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam a decade ago." The goal, incredibly: "to broker an arrangement with Iran"—the chief sponsor of international terrorism—"for a mutual crackdown on...terrorist groups." He later vows to "engage Iran and renew bilateral negotiations with North Korea."

This diplomatic surrender is to be followed by a unilateral freeze on America's nuclear arsenal. Kerry excoriates the Bush administration for "building bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons—smaller and, some incredibly believe, more 'usable' nuclear bombs. I don't want a world with usable nuclear bombs."

Meanwhile, Kerry calls for more international welfare spending. He wants to make the UN our "full partner—not only in the war on terror, but in combating other common enemies like AIDS and global poverty."

Kerry's most extraordinary proposal—and the one that reveals how deeply mired he is in the mindset of international diplomatic collectivism—is this promise: "In the first days of the Kerry administration, I will appoint a Presidential Ambassador to the Peace Process"—not an ambassador to Israel, to the UN, or even to the Palestinian Authority, but an ambassador to the "peace process" itself. This is an eloquent symbol of Kerry's intention to enshrine pacifism as the essence of American foreign policy.

All of these proposals are absurd and disastrous, but they are all required if the US is to subordinate its interests to the demand for international "cooperation and compromise."

John Kerry is the candidate who stands for American self-immolation on the altar of international collectivism.

What makes Kerry think he can get away with it? And what makes the Democrats who voted for him in this year's primaries think he is the most "electable" candidate?

Kerry has known, ever since he returned from Vietnam, that he has one indispensable advantage he can exploit to keep the public from recognizing the meaning of his policies: his military service. In 1970, he complained to the Harvard Crimson that "everybody who's against the war is suddenly considered anti-American. But I don't think they can turn to me and say I don't know what's going on or I'm a draft dodger." At the end of Kerry's Senate testimony the following year, Senator Javits advised him—on the record—that anti-war rhetoric "is not as effective unless you have those credentials. The kind you have." This is why, when Kerry joined the veterans who flung their decorations at the nation's capitol, he actually threw the medals earned by another soldier and not his own—which are now prominently displayed in his Senate office. He knew those medals would be needed as a shield to blind the public to his anti-American foreign policy.

Kerry's cynical exploitation of his Vietnam service has been on full display in campaign rallies across the country. Here is how a Washington Post reporter describes it:

The simple mention of Vietnam spurs a John Kerry crowd to applause. No greater context is necessary. No "John Kerry served his country in Vietnam" or "earned a Silver Star in Vietnam" or "protested the war in Vietnam" when he returned home. Simply say "Vietnam" and a Kerry gathering...yells approval, as if the word had been stripped of all its divisive connotations....

Vietnam in and of itself has become a rock-star brand within Kerry's apparent juggernaut for the Democratic presidential nomination.... Vietnam is Kerry's best offense and defense: he was there, Bush wasn't. And if the Republicans deride him-when they deride him-as a "Massachusetts liberal," Vietnam will be his patriotic armor.

"Armor" is not the best analogy for Kerry's Vietnam record. Rather, it is camouflage—a cover meant to fool the American people by appealing to their sense-of-life admiration for military heroes, distracting their attention from Kerry's actual principles and policies.

Kerry is the candidate of American self-immolation, disguised as a war hero.

But Kerry has begun to get caught in his own camouflage. He has to attack Bush's strategy in the War on Terrorism, but he does not dare make explicit his goal of disarming and crippling the US. So Kerry has largely been reduced to the middle road of carping: criticizing the minor failures of the administration while offering nothing but vague promises that he would somehow do better.

The result of this ineffectual strategy can be seen in the public opinion polls. When asked who they think will be best at directing the War on Terrorism, the American people clearly choose Bush over Kerry, by ratios of about 55% to 45%—and this is before the mainstream press has provided the public with much serious scrutiny of Kerry's foreign-policy record. The only reason Kerry currently ties Bush in the overall poll numbers is that he leads among those who are dissatisfied with the economy. In short, Kerry will only win if the economy continues to grow slowly and the public agrees to focus only on the latest unemployment statistics—that is, if the American people choose to ignore the threats to America from abroad and forget about September 11.

As this issue goes to press, however, Kerry may have gone too far and tipped his hand. It is one thing to hope that the voters will forget about September 11; it is another thing to ask them to do so. Yet that is the meaning of Kerry's scathing criticism of brief references to September 11 in Bush's first campaign ads. As Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton told reporters, "September 11 was a national tragedy that is forever seared into the hearts of the American people. It belongs to the families and firefighters, not any political party. It has no place in political advertising and certainly not in political fund-raising." The Kerry campaign is trying to promote the idea that September 11, the most important foreign-policy event in the past decade, should be banished as an issue in this year's political campaign.

In the February 23 issue of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria notes that, in this election, "for the first time in decades we have the chance at having a serious national conversation about foreign policy." Yet when one candidate attempts to quash such a discussion, voters are bound to ask: what does he have to hide? If enough voters ask that question, they may begin to look beyond Kerry's medals and see the reason he does not want to talk about the threat of Islamic terrorism: because the former soldier has no response to offer but surrender.

The American people are not entirely wrong to trust their sense-of-life evaluation of a candidate's character—but it is not always enough to penetrate the façade of a practiced political manipulator. The American people need to make a closer, more exacting examination of the meaning and implications of Kerry's fundamental ideas.