Since becoming speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has campaigned for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq with surprising fervor, making it sound as if "the war" and George W. Bush were America's only enemies. I had supposed that the Democrats would prefer to keep up a drumbeat of criticism of the administration's teetering policies without assuming responsibility for whatever comes next in Iraq, which is what they will in effect be doing if they force the president's hand. I had, in short, thought they would behave more like politicians than like ideologues and activists. I had missed the ideological streak in Pelosi's own background.

Pelosi comes from the San Francisco Bay Area, where Democrats have long positioned themselves far to the left of the national party. For example, former congressman Ron Dellums of Berkeley was a tireless stalwart of Communist front groups, and other representatives, like George Miller, Pelosi's closest colleague in the House, and the Burton brothers, John and Phil, manned the party's left fringe. Miller still does.

The reason for this sharp tilt was not, as one might imagine, the influence of University of California student radicalism, which in reality had little reach into practical politics. Rather, it was the unique character of organized labor in the Bay Area. Everywhere else in America, the AFL-CIO was a staunch force for anti-communism. This was symbolized by labor's most important postwar leader, George Meany, who denied labor's backing to George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election for the sole reason that McGovern was soft on communism, and who organized a welcome to America gala for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1975, when President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger refused to receive the Soviet dissident.

Beginning in the late 1940s, American labor unions had purged their own ranks of Communists, the AFL-CIO adopting a policy of expelling any union led by Communists. By and large, this policy provided sufficient impetus for anti-Communist factions to organize to battle the Communists within those unions in which they had become powerful. In most cases the anti-Communists succeeded in running the Communists out. But in some cases the Communists won, and the most important such exception was the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), which controlled the docks of San Francisco.

The ILWU was duly expelled from the AFL-CIO, but it thrived nonetheless. It became arguably the most powerful union in the Bay Area and a big supporter of leftist causes, including inside the Democratic party. Unlike UC students, the ILWU could bring lots of money and resources to bear on behalf of favored candidates.

The force behind the ILWU's ideology was Harry Bridges, an Australian immigrant and devoted Communist. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations tried to deport Bridges, on the grounds that he had lied about his Communist affiliation in his immigration papers, but for various procedural reasons the case was dismissed. So loyal was Bridges to Moscow that during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, he opposed the (1940) reelection of labor hero FDR, because Roosevelt was aligning the United States with Britain against Germany, and the ILWU printed antiwar pamphlets proclaiming "The Yanks Are NOT Coming." As soon as Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, Bridges did a 180-degree about-face on the war.