For a few heady moments, after it was revealed that Barack Obama had ordered the swift termination of the Somali water-borne terrorists, one could indulge in a favorite fantasy, that the liberal hawk could revive.
In the last century, the words ‘progressive’ and ‘dove’ were hardly synonymous, and a forceful defense of the national interest was a truly cross-partisan cause.
Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and his protégée Franklin were among the loudest voices trying to push Woodrow Wilson into World War I. As President, FDR brought Republicans into his war cabinet; and among the strongest supporters of the Truman Doctrine, Truman being a liberal Democrat, were Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican moderate who opposed the Democratic domestic agenda, and John Kennedy, a Democratic congressman somewhere to the president’s right.
Running for president in 1960, Kennedy ran slightly to the right of Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and the Democrat whom Kennedy beat in the primaries, the rather more liberal Hubert H. Humphrey, was also a flag-waving hawk. In the Cold War, union leaders such as George Meany and Lane Kirkland were firm supporters of a strong foreign policy.
But by 1976, the similar views of Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a New Deal liberal on the domestic front, were enough to rule him out as a nominee of his party. By 1980, Carter’s weakness drove most of the liberal hawks out of party, though Jeane Kirkpatrick, a one-time Young Socialist, never became a Republican until Ronald Reagan’s second term, and Jackson himself rejected Reagan’s offer of service on the grounds that he remained a New Dealer at heart.
In 2006, Joe Lieberman, the one surviving liberal hawk, was defeated in the Democratic primary by a pacifist candidate, and sent back to the Senate by the votes of Republicans. In 2008, he broke with his party, and campaigned with McCain.
No one could have imagined at the mid-century that this would happen to the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, and just how this happened is somewhat unclear. Some think it was the fact that the war over the war in Vietnam took place inside the party, and made it allergic to foreign adventures. Some think the culture war that raged though the country caused most of those prepared to make moral judgments (i.e., that communists and terrorists are evil, and should be stopped by force, or the threat of it) to end up inside the Republican Party.
Historian James Piereson makes the case that it was Kennedy’s murder that began the unraveling: Unable to accept the fact that their president had been killed by a Marxist and not a right-winger or racist, liberals chose to blame the entire country for a general ‘climate of hate.’
When his brother was killed five years later, by a Muslim extremist even less typical of the country than Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals of course blamed the country still more. This led to the view that a country this bad might not be worth defending, and had no right to criticize, much less to oppose, the most aggressive or murderous governments. In less than two decades, Kennedy’s death had resulted in the obliteration of Kennedy’s policies from his old party, with many of his former aides in the White House denying he ever was a Cold Warrior.
By l997, when the theme park memorial to FDR opened in Washington, it was devoted almost entirely to his domestic accomplishments, with his role as war leader (the role largely responsible for his current pre-eminence) almost wholly ignored. It’s as if his war role now embarrassed his party. Which made it less than ‘his’ party at all.
There was a brief burst of Democratic esprit after September 11th, but it didn’t last long. At the first reverse, it slipped back into quagmire worship, declaring defeat in advance and in triumph, defunding the armed forces in the midst of a war. That’s not what they did in their moments of glory, which is why they were glorious.
No law says that a domestic big-government liberal can’t be an American exceptionalist, an unabashed patriot, and a resolute warrior. It’s a great tradition that produced some great leaders. Some day, it may do it again.
