Matthew Continetti has a cover story in the Weekly Standard where he compares partisan attitudes to American military force and power. Using this data he describe the Republicans as the ‘power party’ and the Democrats as the ‘Peace Party’. Nice framing. A more balanced characterization, which is born of the data, would be that the Republicans are the ‘war party’. But that doesn’t sound as nice as the ‘power party’.
The real divide is over America’s history and opinions on the inherent goodness of American foreign policy. We can see this in the following numbers:
In 2004 the pollster Scott Rasmussen asked respondents whether America is “generally fair and decent.” Eighty-three percent of respondents planning to vote for George W. Bush agreed with that sentiment; only 46 percent of those planning to vote for John Kerry thought so. Rasmussen also asked whether respondents thought the world would be better off if other nations were more like the United States. The data were similar: Eighty-one percent of those planning to vote for Bush thought so; just 48 percent of Kerry voters agreed. When Rasmussen asked the “fair and decent” question again in November 2006, he found similar results.
In 2003, Pew asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement that “I am very patriotic.” As you might expect, almost everyone who is asked this question says “yes.” But a simple “yes” is not the only option. Seventy-one percent of Republicans said they “agreed completely” with this statement, while less than a majority of Democrats (48 percent) said their agreement was “complete.”
One’s views of America correlate strongly with one’s views of American power. In 2004 Pew asked whether the United States should be the “‘single leader’ or ‘most active’ nation” in the world. Fifty-four percent of Republicans agreed that America should be one or the other. Only 29 percent of Democrats shared that opinion–a 9 percentage point decline, Pew found, since the same question had been asked in 2001. Similarly, in 2004, Pew asked whether U.S. “wrongdoing” might have “motivated” the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Fifty-one percent of Democrats–and 67 percent of liberal Democrats–agreed with that sentiment, compared with only 17 percent of Republicans.
It stands to reason that if you think American power is not always a force for good in the world, you will be less eager to deploy that power than others.
I agree that is is a problem that the country is so divided, and divided on increasingly partisan lines. But, here’s my question. Since the United States has so clearly NOT always been a force for good, and we have so obviously committed significant wrongdoing, can’t we just agree that the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong? Continetti doesn’t tackle this question. He notes that Democrats opposed our deployment to Lebanon in 1982. He doesn’t note that that that deployment ended in disaster. He notes that Democrats opposed our intervention to liberate Kuwait. He doesn’t note that the aftermath of that war left us as a target of terrorist attack, and with an unsustainable obligation to contain Saddam in perpetuity. He notes that Democrats opposed the invasion of Iraq, he doesn’t mention that events have proven them right. I could add the dirty Central American wars of the 1980’s…the Sandanistas just won in a free and fair election. I could add our dirty wars in Africa in 1970’s and 80’s. What good did they do for Angola and the Congo? I could add the mystifying decisions to invade Grenada and Panama. What did they accomplish?
And, for the record, while the decision to invade Afghanistan was reasonable and justifiable, it can hardly be said to be going well. And, given the rise of militant Sunni Islam, it is at least worth revisiting the wisdom of our involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. We know Vietnam was a poor decision. The Korean War left us with a 60-year obligation for South Korea’s security, and brought us the dangerously isolated and militant North Korean regime.
In fact, it is a real challenge to find a post-World War Two military, or paramilitary mission that has turned out in an unambiguously positive way.
Yet, we keep intervening. It’s the very failure of these interventions that has changed the attitude of the American electorate. It’s not that the Democrats are nay-sayers. It’s that the nay-sayers have grown so large that they are beginning to dominate the one party that has eyes to see and ears to listen.
Bush was right to call for a more humble foreign policy. Why he created the least humble policies in our nation’s history cannot be pawned off on 9/11. That is no excuse.
