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December 07, 2004
War and peace and the Democrats
Never mind moral values. The dominant reason Bush won the election was the belief that he would be tougher on terrorism than Kerry would be. This is demonstrably false, but people believed it.In virtually the entire history of America, back to colonial times, whenever there has been a debate between a "war" party and a "peace" party, the war party has won in the end.
Since Vietnam, Democrats have been tagged, unfairly, as the "peace" party. So they keep losing.
In World War I and II, it was Democrats who were the war party. Republicans were isolationist; even after Pearl Harbor there were more than a few who claimed the whole thing was a plot by Roosevelt and his "Jewish friends".
Today, if you regularly read conservative propaganda, notice just how much the imagery of World War II is used to justify the war in Iraq. See this conservative propaganda anecdote here and attempt at satire here.
A regular theme of conservative writers is that Democrats were respectable in the days of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy but lost their militarism -- and with it, electability -- during Vietnam.
Americans will never vote for anyone who isn't a militarist. They never have, and they probably never will, unless America faces an overwhelming military defeat, like Germany and Japan did in World War II. We can't fight this basic cultural fact of life; we have to work with it.
On Vietnam, for instance, only 25 percent of Americans now believe that war was justified. Yet they continue to view protesters against that war in a negative light. John Kerry's activities as a Vietnam protester brought out the Swift Boaters and arguably cost him the election.
Many Bush voters weren't voting against John Kerry - they were voting against International ANSWER and other militantly anti-war groups, whom they believe to be both anti-American and indistinguishable from the Democratic Party.
In fact, the anti-Iraq protesters were right -- and a slim majority of Americans now agree. Yet candidates who were mistaken on the war, like Kerry and Edwards, were deemed preferable to those who opposed it from the start, like Dean. In America, it's better to be wrong than to be right, if it establishes militaristic bona fides.
But, as we know, selecting Kerry as the nominee could not refute the Democrat-as-peacenik stereotype. We need to do something much more dramatic.
Peter Beinart's much-discussed New Republic article argues that Democrats should re-establish their militaristic credentials by simply expelling Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. Most of us here would reject that notion. But it leaves the key questions unanswered:
- Can militarism even BE progressive If it can't, we're fucked. But if it could in World war II, why can't it now?
- How do we integrate militarism into progressive politics without becoming Bush lite?
My own take is that the mission of US forces abroad should be modeled on World War II: to stop and prevent genocide and mass killings, both present and future. That would have pointed towards military intervention in Rwanda in 1994. It would support the bombings of Serbia in 1995 and 1999. It would have supported sending troops to Liberia last year. Today, it might point towards using force against the Sudanese government in Darfur, or the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.
All these actions were or would be opposed by conservatives. That makes them all the more worthy of support, in my opinion. This allows us to claim the military as our own and paint conservatives as unpatriotic and unsupportive of the military.
And most importantly, it could save millions -- literally, millions -- of lives. That's the most important of all, for a progressive.
This doesn't mean US troops should be sent abroad for every international crisis - the failed Somalia intervention of 1992-93 is proof of that. The point is that we have to craft a foreign policy where the US military is used for good, and we can become the "just war" party rather than the "peace/appeasement" party we are now tagged as.
Posted by Tyrone at December 7, 2004 04:20 PM