I will admit to being unclear in what I meant in a previous post. I pointed out that the recent Democrats had more or less conceded defeat in the Cold War, and I listed their standard bearers: McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis. Conor was right to point out that before them were honorable Democrats who did believe in fighting the Cold War. My apologies to the old Cold Warriors. Nevertheless, I believe the point I tried to make still stands: that since roughly 1972, the Democratic party is the one that blames America first, as Jeane Kirkpatrick put it.
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I believe the dispute that Conor, Apollo, and I are having is boils down to whether Obama can convince the left that Islamism is a greater threat to America than Republicans are; more colorfully, can Obama exorcise McGovernism from the Democratic party? Conor thinks that Obama can do this; Apollo and I are skeptical.
Although the polarizing Nixon trounced him, McGovern remade the Democratic party in his own image. Some honorable Democrats tried to pull the party back to sanity: Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn, Joe Lieberman. They have had a rather spectacular lack of success. The depth of the change McGovern made can be seen in some of the statements and campaign literature his heirs to the Democratic nomination have made.
Consider Jimmy Carter’s address to Notre Dame’s 1977 Commencement:
[W]e are now free of that inordinate fear of communism . . . .
Now, I believe in detente with the Soviet Union. To me it means progress toward peace. But the effects of detente should not be limited to our own two countries alone. We hope to persuade [emphasis added] the Soviet Union that one country cannot impose its system of society upon another, either through direct military intervention or through the use of a client state’s military force, as was the case with Cuban intervention in Angola.
Persuade? The trouble with Carter was that the whole of his foreign policy rested on persuasion; convinced that America would do nothing but protest at the UN, the Soviets launched campaigns in Africa, Afghanistan, and Latin America. Indeed, the invasion of Afghanistan provoked only the harsh speech that Conor quoted here; Carter’s relations with congress were so poor that his efforts to help went nowhere against the grumpy opposition of then-Speaker Tip O’Neill and then-Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd. Actual aid to Afghanistan came only with Ronald Reagan and his deputies, CIA director William Casey and Sec Def Caspar Weinberger.
Walter Mondale didn’t do much better than Carter, as his campaign literature showed:
What about global brinkmanship saber-rattling? What about our increasing military involvement in Central America? Here’s what Mondale will do:
Strengthen our regular military forces.
Get back to dealing with smaller nations as friend instead of as a bully.
Restore our nation’s open commitment to human rights as the cornerstone of American foreign policy.
Help poorer nations stand on their own feet. Democracy will never grow in the soil of poverty, oppression, and despair.
Attract the people of Central America with our values — instead of scaring them with our weapons.
To Mondale, America’s policy was bullying, impoverishing, and ignoring human rights. Dukakis tried to separate himself from this legacy with the picture of him in a tank, which didn’t work, since it was painfully silly.
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George McGovern’s “Come home, America” campaign theme has stayed with the Democrats. I have no idea what it will take to root it out. I wish Obama the best of luck in doing so; I’d vote for him before I voted for Huckabee, and think that Obama could well be the least bad of the potential Democratic nominees for president. But I doubt that unity will come from his efforts. LBJ was the last really hawkish Democratic president, and the hard left of the Democratic activists broke his presidency apart (a fate I wish on no president, since whenever the presidency gets shredded, the country as a whole loses). Should Obama try to rebuild a muscular liberalism, he’ll face the same fight that licked Johnson. I hope Obama wins it. But from what I’ve seen so far, I’ve no reason to believe that he’ll pick that fight.
Posted by Hubbard in Audacity of Hype, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past