Conservative Advocate: Are the Democrats doves or wimps?
Nobody who understands the psychology of American voters believes for a moment that they (or at least the great majority of them) favor a deliberately aggressive foreign policy. Plenty of other nations — Germany in the 1930s is only the most spectacular example — have been seduced into thinking that it was their right, and indeed their destiny, to run roughshod over their neighbors, or even to rule the world. But Americans, perhaps because their country is so big and requires such careful management, have usually been immune to the temptation to throw their weight around abroad. Above all, they are aware of the terrible cost of foreign wars in blood and treasure, and are wisely reluctant to pay it.
At the same time, however, most Americans are realists. They know that some foreign despots understand no language but that of force. Even then, they are reluctant to intervene in foreign quarrels in which the United States has no vital interest.
Since this is a democracy, there are bound to be dissenters who strenuously oppose the use of force in a particular case — or even in all cases. And the curious fact is that, for almost 50 years, these dissenters have made their home in the Democratic party. That is far from saying that all Democrats agree with them; there has always been support in the party for the appropriate use of force to support American objectives. But historically it has been the Republican party that is identified in the public mind with this policy, and the Democrats who are regarded suspiciously as being wimps. Why is this so?
It is so because, at least since the end of the Korean War in 1953, what might be called the “wimp faction” in the Democratic party has acted publicly, and all too often effectively, to weaken Democratic support for measures to strengthen our armed forces and assert America’s military clout abroad.
Straight through the Cold War, for example, it was the Democrats’ wimp faction that argued that the Soviet Union was simply misunderstood, and that peace was attainable through negotiations. There were plenty of prominent Democrats — John F. Kennedy for one — who didn’t believe that; but the whole peace-through-compromise movement was the brainchild of Democratic wimps. Their ultimate triumph was their capture of the 1972 Democratic convention and the nomination of George McGovern for president. The American people showed what they thought of him by giving Richard Nixon every electoral vote save those of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
The Vietnam War was simply a subdivision of the Cold War, and got the same treatment from the Democratic wimps. Not even Lyndon Johnson could bring himself to prosecute it effectively, and in 1974 the Democratic Congress not only voted to pull out America’s troops but cut our South Vietnamese allies off without aid.
As for the Gulf war of 1991, the majority of Democrats in Congress opposed giving the first President Bush the authority to use force to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The other day C-Span cruelly broadcast large excerpts from the Congressional debate on the subject, and one could watch Majority Leader Dick Gephardt and Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), then perhaps Capitol Hill’s foremost foreign policy expert, blasting the Bush proposal.
But the wimp faction won’t give up. As long as they don’t, the American people will know which party — and which party alone — can be trusted to use appropriate force when only force will do.
(William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.)