Sam Tanenhaus is back. In 2009 he called Republicans moribund as they geared up for their 2010 comeback. And in 2013 he called them the “white people’s party” as they were about to elect a new cohort of non-whites and women. This time he has an assessment of the Republicans as a bomb-throwing, dangerous and bellicose party that is still more unhinged than the last two, and perhaps just as untethered to reality.
The claim this time is that the current generation of GOP interventionists descend not from those of the World War II era, but from the pre-World War II isolationists who were converted by the emergence of the communists as a more dangerous enemy than the Nazis.
“Its theology was…America First,” complete with its hatred of foreigners, argues Tanenhaus. “What looked like brash new Republican internationalism [was] less a repudiation than a variation of GOP doctrine, c.1939-41. It was more aggressive, more militarist, more imperialist. But the old America First slogan, ‘Fortress America,’ still applied.”
From this flows incoherence that staggers the mind. Tanenhaus says the appointment of John Foster Dulles as secretary of state in 1953 marked the triumph of brinksmanship, and then admits that Dwight Eisenhower discounted his counsel. He calls Barry Goldwater uniquely fanatical, then calls Nelson Rockefeller and John Kennedy ‘rock solid cold warriors.’ He scolds Kennedy for using the missile gap, and Harry S. Truman for his “security dragnet,” meaning his list of aggressive and evil right-wing fanatics includes a number of centrist and liberal Democrats, justly unnerved by the Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, Tanenhaus insists the spirit of America First took over and still rules the Republican Party, with its insularity, arrogance and “indifference bordering on contempt for every ally but Israel.” So the America First people were philo-Semitic? Who knew?
Tanenhuas lists Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy and several obscure archconservatives as being the fathers of the modern Republican policy, but ignores Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s War Secretary, Arthur Vandenberg, the erstwhile isolationist who saved the Truman Doctrine when he endorsed it, and Wendell Willkie, who lost to FDR in the 1940 election and became his associate, colleague and friend.
The fact is that for most of the 20th Century, American leadership in both war and peace was conducted by men of both parties, even if both parties had outlying wings. Despite differences in temperament, style and background, when it came to big issues about war and peace — about what was our war and how we should fight it — there was almost no daylight between Truman and Eisenhower, Eisenhower and Kennedy, Kennedy and Nixon and Nixon and a fairly large cohort of New Deal Cold Warriors.
Franklin Roosevelt was the political idol of Ronald Reagan, who later dropped his big-government beliefs but clung fast to his hero’s pro-freedom international agenda. The idol of Franklin, in turn, was his fifth cousin Theodore, a Progressive Republican for whom he acted in 1914-17 as a mole and an agent, agitating within the Navy Department in favor of “preparedness,” a tough line against Germany and American entry sooner, not later, into World War I.
The Republicans emerged as the bellicose party in the late 1960s only because the Democrats, shell-shocked by Vietnam into reflexive passivity, dropped out of this bipartisan policy on defense and war. They became pessimistic concerning the use-of-force measures, seeing little to fear in other cultures or governments and little to like in their own.
Republicans picked up the slack — as somebody had to — but it is unlikely they relish their one-sided burden. It would be better for them, for the Left, for the world and the country, if they had a partner again.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
