The Agonist follows international relations very closely, as you all know. International relations and their effects on American politics, and vice versa, are, you could say, The Agonist's primary focus. Moreover, The Agonist believes that the Democrat's best chance of regaining the title of America's Party is particularly wrapped up in whether or not the Democrats can come up with a real foreign policy.
It is often right and proper to say what you are against. Sometimes in life, we are faced with choices which must be made rapidly and we can only dissent because we feel it. We don't have any other idea. It is just a visceral reaction, something that perhaps offends our core beliefs. In this place we find ourselves incapable of proposing something positive in the place of our negative dissent. This is a part of being human.
But it is not policy. In order to be effective we must have positive ideas. We must stand for something, not always against. And it is precisely this which will prevent the Democrat's from capturing and captivating the American public. This is the reason that the Democrat's continually get steam-rolled by the Bush Administration. The Democrats always say "NO" and yet they never present another option, plan or whatever. It is simply more of the same, "no, no, no." This strategy may maintain one vote majorities in the Senate but it won't put the Democrats back in the position they were in after WWII.
It has often been said that Americans don't vote on foreign policy issues. To a certain extent this is true. What Americans usually care about, at least over the past 25-30 years, has been "bread and butter" issues, home and hearth, as it were. But this has not always been the case. And though there is neither the time nor the space to discuss his book here, I would direct your attention to Walter Russell Mead's book, Special Providence. Mead has done more in one book to debunk the myth that Americans are inherently isolationist than anyone else.
One of the reasons the Democrats were so successful from Truman through Vietnam was because they had a vision for America. American and the ideals for which it stands were met on a great global battlefield against the very antithesis of what America was. There was a solid consensus in this country that Communism must be defeated, and at the very least "contained." This consensus kept the Democrats in power until a reckless few plunged us into Vietnam.
The Democrats were the party of a moral and ethical foreign policy that was not afraid to use American power in the pursuit of a better world. Johnson and McNamara's lying and deceit destroyed the public's faith in the Democrat's version of interventionist liberalism. It also gave the Wallace wing (i.e., Henry Wallace VP for Roosevelt's third term) of the Democratic party an opening to destroy the liberal interventionist wing. The Wallace wing is often equated with American hating lefties (to a great degree true, but not always). And then something interesting happened.
The Republicans (post-Nixon) captured the banner of liberal interventionism. That is what the Reagan Administration's foreign policy was all about. And they have held on to that banner up to the present. But something very strange is happening to the Republican's right now. The most serious and interesting debate about foreign policy is not between the Democrats and Republicans. It is between the Kissinger-Scowcroft Republicans and the Perle-Wolfowitz Republicans.
Basically, the later represents, in a bastardized form, liberal interventionism (call it hyper-yet-surreal-imperial-interventionism if you will) and the former represents the old school, amoral balance of power realists. And this fight between the two, if Iraq goes badly, could plunge the Republican party into the same kind of internecine conflict as that of the Democratic party after Vietnam. (I should point out, that The Agonist in no way hopes that Iraq will go badly. This is just an observation.)
Even a success in Iraq may be a boon to the Democrats. But they have to seize this opportunity and put their fear of power behind them, finally and for all time. They must become a party of ideas again, like they once were. This essay in Policy Review is a good start. The Democrats must be a party that stands up to the Republicans on the issues---a party that talks about what is truly important to Americans. A party with a plan, not just a two letter campaign slogan, "No." And security must be one of those issues. It should be THE issue.
And until they do so the Republican steamroller is going to keep flattening the opposition.
I will develop more on this theme in future posts.
Posted by Sean-Paul @ 10/16/2002 04:32 PM
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