Penn Kemble succumbed to cancer in October. He was a friend and mentor to me and will be sorely missed by all of us at PPI. I admired many things about Penn, but three stand out in particular:

First, Penn never gave up on the Democratic Party. In the late 1970s, when a lot of disillusioned intellectuals and recovering socialists in his world began to cross over to the GOP, Penn chose to fight rather than switch. With Scoop Jackson, Pat Moynihan, Ben Wattenburg and other stalwarts at the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Penn tried to keep the post-McGovern Democrats from straying too far from their great tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism as well as their working-class roots. If Penn and company didn't quite win those battles, they didn't lose, either.

As the "new left" attempted to drive Democrats into the fever swamps of pacifism, anti-Americanism and identity politics, CDM kept the flame of liberal internationalism burning. That was a source of inspiration to a group of us who formed the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985. Now the DLC and CDM obviously arose from very different points on the broad Democratic compass (I couldn't tell a Schachtmanite from a Straussian if you put a gun to my head). But we shared the conviction that America, with all its faults, is a progressive force in world politics, that moral equivocators are either dumb or dishonest, and that Democrats ought to reclaim their historic leadership role in the fight against illiberal ideologies of all stripes.

Second, I watched in the early 1990s as Penn offered a subtly guiding hand to efforts by a network of pro-democracy advocates to put spreading democracy at the center of America's post-Cold War foreign policy. By now, even erstwhile "realists" like George Bush seem to recognize that governance is key -- that how states behave in the world is largely determined by their internal character and institutions. But where the president trafficks in lofty abstractions, Penn was always practical and concrete. He always kept his eye on the nitty gritty work of helping emerging democracies build the civic institutions that enable citizens to act and make decisions for themselves.

Third, solidarity wasn't just a slogan to Penn. He stuck with the trade union movement as it battled the hard left and conservative union busters, suffered a drastic loss of membership, underwent a wrenching leadership change and, lately, faced an internal revolt. It was Penn who helped me to understand labor's crucial role in nurturing free unions and democracy from Poland to Latin America. It was Penn who gently reminded me organized labor isn't just another special interest, but one of the few remaining civic associations that give working people real voice and power. And it was Penn who worked tirelessly to shore up progressive solidarity by building bridges between labor and social democrats and New Democrats during the Clinton years.

Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute