No, John, I don't think it's because they like being defenseless. I think it's because it upsets their worldview which, as you've noted many times, is stuck somewhere in 1973.

Nineteen seventy-three was a world in which The Plan ruled supreme. The idea of The Plan was explicit in the socialist/Communist countries, what with their Five Year Plans and what-not. It was less explicit here in the United States, but it existed in the assumption by the elites (in the business world, in government, in the arts, etc.) that the "right" people would always be in charge and that things would go according to the principles laid down by generations of planners dating back to the Progressives of Theodore Roosevelt's day.

That cozy world began hiccupping badly in the later '70s, and Ronald Reagan had the temerity to point out just why it was "on the fritz". He then began to cut that world off at the knees with his various policies designed to free us from The Plan here at home and then to free others from the more hideous versions of The Plan found overseas.

That's what the Democrats can't abide, John-- our would-be masters, who deluded us into thinking we were mere marionettes, are alarmed that we've woken up and are cutting the strings we let them bind us with.

And SDI/"Star Wars"/BMD is part of that process-- we won't have to "make nice" to the Russians if we don't need to fear them.

Worse still for them is what that aerospace capability implies. If we can routinely operate such vehicles, the road to the Solar System (and by extension, the rest of the Universe) is opening up. Once that happens, "the masses" can slip the leash of the elites forever.

And that has to give the Dhimmicrats the shivers....

OK, OK, so I digressed a bit. But I think I got my point across. Sorry for the space-exploration commercial. :)

The democrats' revulsion to missile defense probably derived from their identification with America's enemy, the Soviet Union.

By the 1970s the Democratic Party's intellectual wing was largely Marxist. Their approach to economics and especially foreign policy echoed the Kremlin's. Anyone who remembers their orgasmic embrace of bureaucratic hack Gorbachev will harbor little doubt about their deepest sympathies.

Reagan's missile defense program posed a threat to the enemy they secretly cherished. Worse, if it worked, it would prove them wrong yet again on their core beliefs.

Reagan's missile defense was based on confidence in the superiority of America's incentivized free market system. We could devise a technology that was beyond the reach of current science, and the Soviets couldn't. That very confidence was an affront to the Democratic Party, so they insisted the science could never work.

Democrats also argued that deployment of a workable missile defense system would force the Soviets to pre-emptive attack. This was idiotic but it illustrates how profoundly they identified with the Soviets. They claimed that America's strength would embolden our enemies.

In fact, nearly every argument Democrats made at the time was counter to American interests, and proved wrong by subsequent events.

The same bad principles and stupid arguments - and many like them - survive on the left, now adapted to sympathy for Islamic fascists and hysterical outrage over Global Warming junk-science.

They are unable to learn from their mistakes, and continue to act as angry adolescents with the power to do great harm to this country, and to our prosperity and safety.

(Sorry about the excess length.)

Or it's consistent with their desire for unarmed, defenseless subjects as well. As the subject is to the national government, so should the national government be to the world government.

I think Mr. Adams is close, but it's not any particular Plan the Democratic Party mindset likes, but the meta-concept of having a Plan. Any sort of defense makes such Planning far more difficult.