People we shouldn't listen to

Over the last six years when they have had the keys to the national car the neocons have been wrong about everything. Every misadventure they advocated has turned into an expensive and dangerous debacle. When I say neocons I'm also talking about the neos who call themselves Democrats. That of course includes the likes of Joe Lieberman and Marshall Wittmann. To that list we can add Will Marshall. He is quoted today in a piece by James Kitfield, What Now?.

"There is a cautionary lesson for today's Democrats in the early 1970s, when their party generally sided with the public in thinking that the Vietnam War was botched beyond repair and the United States needed to get out," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. As a result of Democrats' perceived excesses and close association with anti-war protests, he said, the party got a reputation for being averse to any use of force and too quick to blame America first for international problems.


"That reputation put Democrats in the political doghouse for three decades," Marshall said. "So I think those who are mindful of history will shy away from trying to take over Iraqi policy by, for instance, cutting off funding for the war. The fact is, you really can't conduct U.S. foreign policy from the House of Representatives. It's folly to even try."

While at first glance it might appear there is truth in what Marshall says as Matthew Yglesias points out Marshall's analysis amounts to very, very little.

This version of the Decline and Fall of the New Deal Coalition, for one thing, always manages to evade the central role of race. The midcentury Democratic Party relied on securing the votes of white supremacists to obtain electoral majorities. Once the Democrats turned decisively away from the politics of white supremacy, they lost this edge, and southern voters took themselves and their generally conservative views into the GOP.

Meanwhile, after the debacle of 1972 -- where war-related issues definitely played a role -- it took the Democrats not thirty years, but four years to get back into the White House. Had Jimmy Carter and the Democratic congress of the late-1970s ran the country in a really impressive manner, the crack-up years of the early seventies would have just been a historical blip. But Carter made a lot of errors early in his presidency, the congressional leadership got cocky and didn't cooperate with Carter to make his administration a success, he inherited a bad macroeconomic situation and ran into bad luck relating to oil prices, and by the end he'd become very unpopular. Then came Ronald Reagan and the rest you know.

So the Democrats decline had more to do with LBJ's civil rights bill than it did his war. Yglesias also points out that the anti-war movement is not the same.

Meanwhile, the essence of the problem with anti-war politics in the Vietnam Era was that you had mainstream anti-war sentiment being tarred by associations with genuine radicalism and pervasive fears of social disorder. During a period of frequent violent urban rioting, a movement heavily invested in large-scale public demonstrations was frightening. You had the draft-dodging and associated illegal activities. You had people chanting "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!" and prominent campus groups calling for the violent overthrow of the American government. Things like that.

I, too, would be seriously worried if contemporary opposition to the Iraq War started going down that path. But there's no evidence that it is. Anti-war politics in the contemporary United States is being led by a range of perfectly mainstream, law-abiding politicians ranging from yuppie liberals like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi to gritty pro-defense dudes like Jim Webb and John Murtha. There's no rioting in the streets, nobody's calling veterans baby killers (every Wizards game I go to they announce at halftime the presence of recovering wounded soldiers from Walter Reed and every time they do it everybody stands and cheers), nobody's saying the United States should embrace Salafi Islam -- it's just a very different situation in almost all of the relevant respects.

Like all the other Democratic neocons Will Marshall is trying to draw attention from his own errors and failed ideology just like Marshall Wittmann and Joe Lieberman. Nobody should be listening to them.