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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Attack of the ‘Centrists’

Nothing could better sum up the vacuity of conventional 'centrist' foreign policy thinking.
Joe Lieberman

There’s a lot wrong with Jim VandeHei’s weird op-ed about a possible agenda for an independent presidential candidate, but this seemed especially deplorable:

Exploit the fear factor. The candidate should be from the military or immediately announce someone with modern-warfare expertise or experience as running mate [bold mine-DL]. People are scared. Terrorism is today’s World War and Americans want a theory for dealing with it. President Obama has established an intriguing precedent of using drone technology and intelligence to assassinate terrorists before they strike. A third-party candidate could build on death-by-drones by outlying [sic] the type of modern weapons, troops and war powers needed to keep America safe. And make plain when he or she will use said power. Do it with very muscular language—there is no market for nuance in the terror debate.

In other words, VandeHei’s recommendation is to take one of the most warped, irrational parts of our political system and make it worse on purpose. Politicians from both parties routinely exaggerate foreign threats to the U.S., and they mislead the public into thinking that they are at great risk of attack. His answer is to do even more of this as irresponsibly as possible. He observes that people are scared, and so he concludes that the best thing that a “disruptive” political movement can do is to scare them even more and promise to kill foreigners more efficiently. He wants to take the worst elements of Trump’s demagoguery and combine them with some of the most objectionable policies of the current administration. VandeHei wants to “rail against Big,” except for the part where he wants to indulge and strengthen the warfare state. His dream candidate is not Mark Zuckerberg, but rather Lex Luthor from Batman v. Superman.

Confronted with a political culture that always blows foreign threats out of proportion, VandeHei calls for treating a relatively small and limited threat from terrorism as if it were “today’s World War,” which puts him on the same page as the most deluded alarmist hawk. Nothing could better sum up the vacuity of conventional ‘centrist’ foreign policy thinking and the reckless manipulation of public opinion that goes along with it. But then both major parties already excel at all of this, so it’s not clear what VandeHei’s imaginary candidate would add to the already distorted debate. The fact that he thinks this represents a desirable alternative speaks volumes about what ‘centrists’ want from our political debates.

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