I believe Steven den Beste at USS Clueless and Wretchard at Belmont Club have done well to explain the anger within the Democratic base: Transnationalism.
On a strictly moral basis, there was no question that the Taliban were incomparably worse than the Americans. But pragmatically speaking the Americans were far more of a threat to the transnationalist goal of establishing world government, and if the Americans triumphed it would only reinforce American self-righteousness and self-confidence, nullifying decades of slow work aimed at convincing Americans to yield sovereignty to the nascent world government as it already existed in embryonic form. Ultimately the transnational movement swallowed its moral repugnance for the Taliban and embraced the pragmatic judgment that in the long run more people would suffer if America won than if the Taliban won.
For some this was not really much of an internal struggle. Their world view was highly abstract; their compassion was for symbolic groups rather than real people. Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of leftists had embraced transnationalism mostly because it was an alternative to what they viewed as an ongoing creeping dominance of the world by America. It wasn’t so much that they really were dedicated to the transnational agenda as that they hated America and everything it stood for, and would support any alternative that had a credible chance of success.
I don’t think Dean or Clinton are sincere in their professed support of the concept of international government. It’s simply one of those things that sounds good to people who believe the United States is too powerful. Subjecting our sovereignty to the will of other nations appears to be identical to the unification of the thirteen original states.
It’s not.
But there is a large segment of what has been termed ‘the Far Left