The Democratic candidates debate only the purity of one another’s antiwar stance: Whose denunciation of the war came first? Whose goes the furthest? ~Jeff Jacoby

Mr. Jacoby attempts the impossible: to use the Republican presidential field’s views on the Iraq war and foreign policy as vindication of the ever-popular “intellectual diversity on the right, mindless conformity on the left” trope.  Intriguingly, The American Conservative and Ron Paul receive mentions that might almost be called respectful–which would be to ignore a sort of cordon sanitaire erected against the former by much of the “respectable” right and the vehement and widespread denunciations of Ron Paul by the “mainstream” conservative pundits.  Antiwar conservatives are now useful to mainstream pundits to serve as an exhibit to show off to the crowd: “Look, we have our very own war opponents!”  Perhaps if someone had been living in a cave for the last six years and emerged this week, he might be persuaded that foreign policy debate was sweeping through the GOP like wildfire.  On the contrary, anyone who has watched all three debates to date can tell you how mind-numbingly similar nine of the ten candidates are.  Brownback’s tripartition plan and Tommy Thompson’s three-point plan make vague gestures in the direction of a change, but have no fundamental disagreements overall on foreign policy or Iraq.  Like some of the disagreements on the Democratic side, theirs are arguments over how to pursue the same policy, not substantial disagreements of principle.  The lone principled opponent of the GOP field’s foreign policy views is Ron Paul.  Nine of the candidates, plus perhaps Fred Thompson, have virtually no differences between them.  On torture, eight of the ten agree (and I have a sneaking suspicion Fred would frown one of those hounddog frowns of his and say something about how it is a shame that terrible things have to be done to keep liberty alive, etc.). 

I won’t pretend that the Democratic side is exactly a free-for-all of exciting and vigorous debate, since this would be preposterous nonsense.  Modern political parties abhor exciting and vigorous debate for the same reason monopolies abhor competition: it forces them to operate at greater and greater efficiencies, it creates uncertainty and potentially threatens their control of the market by opening up the market to alternatives beyond the approved handful of products.  This would also be the sort of spin that partisans engage in and I am hardly one of those.  However, as an antiwar conservative who knows Mr. Jacoby is generally quite wrong about the diversity of conservative thought on Iraq and foreign policy, and as someone who has followed the foreign policy debate on the other side to some degree, I believe I have to call Jacoby on his rather gross exaggeration.  The point here is to get at the truth and understand the political reality before us.  Conservatives need to do this more than anyone else.  It seems to me that the last thing the right needs is more self-delusion about its intellectual vitality and freshness, since it was exactly this kind of overconfidence, complacency, laziness and groupthink that helped get the conservative movement into the present predicament.  Continuing to slap themselves on the back by pretending that they are at the center of a dynamic and lively exchange of ideas is probably one of the most certain routes to further disasters American conservatives can take.  This myth of the right’s present intellectual diversity only helps to reinforce the instincts towards conformity that have so crippled conservative thinking.  To have a mainstream conservative pundit peddling this junk is bad news for the right. 

If Jacoby can cite TAC and the Standard as opposing magazines on the right as proof of the vast diversity of opinion among conservatives, for every Washington Monthly war opponent you could probably name a New Republic editor war supporter.  As I talk about in my TAC article (sorry, not online) this week, there have been neoliberal hawks and antiwar neoliberals.  Democratic political and policy leaders are actually still divided over the broader contours of foreign policy, but on the question of where the left is with respect to Iraq today you have almost a reverse image of the right: a small band of war supporters, outnumbered and almost overwhelmed by opponents.   

The broad base of the Democratic Party opposed the war early on, and it has been only in fits and starts that many of their pundits have caught up with where their constituents were years ago.  As conservative support for the war has waned, there have been a few changes of mind by pundits on the right and a handful of GOP Congressmen, but the majority of the party continues to support the war and their pundits and activists are typically in agreeement with this majority.  On the Democratic side in the presidential race, you have almost every position ranging from Joe Biden, who voted for the war supplemental and remains the pompous voice of establishmentarian Democratic hawks on all other matters, to Dennis Kucinich, who opposes war itself as an instrument of policy, and Mike Gravel, who sees the other candidates as madmen bent on attacking Iran.  On foreign policy generally, you can find Barack “‘Every Ailing Indonesian Chicken Is A Security Threat” Obama and Dennis Kucinich proposing, for the umpteenth time, the Department of Peace.  Gravel’s fears about his fellow candidates are not entirely unfounded, since Iraq policy is probably the only specific foreign policy matter on which there is some relatively “dovish” consensus, while views on Iran seem to cover almost the entire range of options (stopping short of the majority of the GOP field’s openness to using tactical nukes–but not clearly enough to satisfy the former Senator from Alaska).  In short, there is debate over fundamental differences aplenty on the left.  It is possible to find similar disagreements over basic assumptions on the right (on immigration, for example), but it is very hard to find much of that when it comes to discussions of foreign policy.