Cold War Habits Return

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This commentary from The New Republic was written by Lawrence F. Kaplan.

This was the moment Richard Nixon's "silent majority" finally spoke up. It was a harbinger of the 1972 election, in which Nixon successfully portrayed antiwar candidate George McGovern as "Mr. Radical Chic." More importantly, it offered a preview of the next two decades of U.S. political history, in which the GOP convinced traditionally Democratic voters that their security could not be entrusted to the likes of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Along with crime, drugs, and affirmative action, foreign policy became a cultural issue, one that would cost Democrats five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988. Next year, it may well cost them another.

Needless to say, not everyone agrees with this assessment. In a spring 2003 essay, Phillip Gordon and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution argued that the party should be able to rally "widespread support" for its foreign policies so long as it "can overcome an undeserved reputation for weakness that, in reality, is based on only a few years of post-Vietnam confusion."

Confusion is one way of putting it. From McGovern's admonition that the United States must "come home" to a majority of congressional Democrats' opposition to the first Gulf war, a suspicion of U.S. power lingered for a generation in Democratic foreign policy salons. As a result, the public consistently identified the GOP -- by ratios of three to one in the 1984 and 1988 elections -- as the party better able to contend with America's foes abroad. If it was true, as Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued in their 1970 book, "The Real Majority," that the Democratic advantage on economic issues and the Republican advantage on social issues created an even playing field, then national security repeatedly put the Republicans over the top.

That advantage disappeared with Bill Clinton, who drained foreign policy debates of their ideological substance and benefited mightily from the end of the cold war: By 1999, only 2 to 3 percent of Americans identified defense and foreign policy as the most pressing issues of the day. As a result, a pillar of the Republican Party's electoral strategy disintegrated overnight. Lately, however, voters and politicians seem to have reverted to their cold war habits. Karl Rove was pilloried last year for boasting that Americans "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of ... protecting America." But he was right.

During the 2002 elections, CBS and Gallup polls found that voters identified national security as the most important issue of the day and, by cold war margins, believed the GOP could do a better job of safeguarding it. True, the faltering war effort in Iraq has somewhat eroded those numbers. But, in a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll taken last month, Republicans still enjoyed a 15-point advantage on national security, while a Pew Research Center survey in September found that 64 percent of respondents still approve of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism.

As to why this should be so, presidential candidate Wesley Clark laments in his new book, "Winning Modern Wars," that Bush has reignited the "culture war" over foreign policy that began in 1968. Indeed, polls show that the culture gap on national security and defense, which narrowed significantly during the '90s, has reopened. The familiar demographic subgroups from the cold war -- white men, Southerners, religious Christians -- tend to be the most hawkish. African Americans, residents of the Northeast, and people with advanced degrees tend to be the least. The divide, in other words, tracks the other fissures that separate red and blue America, except that when it comes to national security, the GOP draws support in both Americas.

Credit for this hardly rests with Bush alone. Descriptions of America like "empire" and "bully" -- banished from our political lexicon after Vietnam -- have returned to favor among the 2004 Democratic candidates. Indeed, far from being a contest between "Bush-lites," the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has centered on opposition to Iraq policy. Senators John Edwards and John Kerry voted against funding the ongoing operation there. For the first time in three decades, we even have "peace" candidates.

More important, at least as far as cultural cues go, the brand of isolationism that the likes of Howard Dean peddle isn't the blue-collar, America-first isolationism of, say, Pat Buchanan. It is the dovish worldview of what "Los Angeles Times" reporter Ronald Brownstein has called Dean's "Starbucks ghetto" -- the highly educated, socially conscious voters who once turned out in droves for McGovern. (Among Democrats without a college degree, according to the latest Democracy Corps poll, Dean trails badly in both Iowa and New Hampshire.) Unlike the Buchananites, Dean's antiwar constituents view U.S. power as tainted, marred by its involvement in too many unsavory conflicts; along with Dean's support for gay marriage and other signature positions of elite liberalism, the GOP will have a field day with this. Dean feeds off of the resuscitated antiwar movement, whose original incarnation, as Adam Garfinkle documents in his book, "Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement," "deterred more Americans from opposing [Vietnam] sooner because they were afraid of the company they would have to keep." In their race to see who can denounce U.S. policy in Iraq most fiercely, the leading Democratic presidential candidates may be kindling that fear once more.

Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.

By Lawrence F. Kaplan
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