Michael Barone has an article in today’s Washington Examiner that is—like all he writes—thought-provoking and worthy of a read. Titled “Obama’s lyrical Left struggles with liberalism,” it argues that Obama is a member of the “lyrical Left”—basically, a dove. But it wasn’t a dovish foreign policy that made the state big, argues Barone: it was the undovish liberals like Wilson and FDR who fought wars, because wars grow the state. As Barone concludes, “A big-government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.”

Well, maybe. I doubt Obama is learning any such thing: he doesn’t seem like the type much interested in fighting big wars, or in learning. The term “lyrical Left” is new to me, and while it makes sense, I’ve always thought of Obama not as a dove but rather as a college professor. He has the cool, above-it-all, slightly condescending attitude of a tenured member of the Harvard faculty. Not so much lyrical as holier than thou.

But Barone is definitely right about the “lyrical Left.” His case study is Randolph Bourne, a writer for the New Republic who opposed U.S. entry into the Great War on the grounds that it would give too much power to the state to interfere in private enterprise and private opinions. Indeed, that was largely the reason that Wilson himself delayed and delayed going to war, so Barone’s characterization of him as part of the “unlyrical warlike Left” is not precisely right, though fair enough as a retrospective summary.

What Barone is writing about is Gladstonian liberalism: averse to war abroad and averse to the big state at home. Not that the Grand Old Man didn’t fight and legislate, of course. But the liberal argument in the 19th century had it that the purpose of state action was to remove restraints it had previously imposed, be it on trade or voting rights, usually at the behest of powerful vested interests. The problem, in other words, was the state itself, and its capture by the aristocracy. Liberals then were the optimists.

But that is not today’s Left. The generation of the 1960s may have been pacifists abroad, but while they were supposedly in favor of freedom at home, they defined freedom as liberty from inherited morality. The past was a nightmare from which, at least rhetorically, they were trying to escape. And that attitude dovetailed perfectly with a massively expanded state, which existed not to undue its previous errors but to remedy the inherited wrongs of society at large. Skeptical and pacifist about the U.S. abroad, skeptical and interventionist about it at home. It isn’t Gladstonian or lyrical, but it’s undeniably coherent. Liberals today are the pessimists.

It would be wonderful if Barone were right. If so, the Left today would either be pacifist abroad and libertarian at home, or activist abroad and activist at home. Neither of those would be entirely to my liking, but in any case it would at least be one out of two, and that’s not bad. But the fact that the Left has existed for more than 40 years as pacifist abroad and activist at home suggests that the “basic contradiction” Barone sees between the Democratic party and liberalism is really a contradiction between the old liberalism and the new—even if the latter is now more than two generations old.