Be Like Ike

Will the 2008 election pit an Eisenhower Democrat against a Truman Republican? Now that would be an interesting debate. ~Michael Lind

Yes, it would be, if there were any Eisenhower Democrats.  One actually searches in vain for such people in the current presidential field.  Jim Webb might qualify, but he isn’t running.     

Mr. Lind’s article is right in its analysis of the GOP’s abandonment of most of its inherited views about foreign policy and war, and he offers a useful political explanation for why the GOP’s foreign policy has shifted as its constituencies and membership have changed over the decades.  Though the incorporation of traditionally more non-interventionist Southerners and fundamentalists into the coalition should have blunted the influence of interventionist foreign policy thinkers on the GOP, the “Jacksonian” constituencies can be counted on to back a war to the hilt once it has started and so have functioned as the main supporters of the sorts of policies that they would have decried as wasteful and crazy just ten years ago when carried out by the other party.  Neocons and Southerners don’t explain everything, either, since much of the GOP leadership remains in culture and background very much the product of the Eastern Establishment and possesses the same meddlesome internationalist perspective of the old Northeastern Republicans.  If the party leadership were the product of Middle America–fat chance, that–it is less likely that the same policies would have gained as much of a following among them.  The establishment types tend to be the “realists” in the party, but even as “realists” they are not really any less committed to hegemony and serve as rational enablers of the more dangerous enthusiasts for foreign adventurism.