“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about byan online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
One could find similar consternation withAmerican liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.
The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.
This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated bythe public debate betweenColumbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.
Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd theAmerican political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucraciesthat would undermine democracy.
While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.
Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitledUntimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on asolid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.
While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.
Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a fewstrident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of theformerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.
The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism,one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.
After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.
Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.
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