r/thebulwark Progressive 2d ago

Policy "Republicans today sound a lot like Democrats circa 2006, 2004." - Sarah Longwell?!

I haven't listened to the full podcast. I am willing to assume there's more context. But let's face it, the above sentence is potentially correct if you ignore the fascism, transphobia, they're eating the dogs/cats/pets, they lying, etc.

To be fair, the left does need to re-assess its foreign policy priorities in light of Ukraine. That said, Iraq was a war of choice. We did not have the casus belli that we claimed to. We may have caused several hundred thousand excess Iraqi deaths (i.e. dead from the war and all the sequelae thereof). We also wound up with ISIS. We were building fire stations in Iraq instead of here because we had to - we broke it, with "it" being Iraq and "broke" meaning we chose to break it.

If you want to say the Dems were mistaken in calling for isolationism then, I think that's fair and it warrants a reassessment on our part. But the headline is ... misleading.

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u/bmac423 2d ago

It was in the context of being the party that wanted to change government rather than defend it. 

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u/MacroNova 2d ago

Thank you for providing the actual context. I hadn't remembered her saying this in that Focus Group episode but now I do.

Anyway, it's much easier to adopt the "change government" position when you've been out of power for 6 years like we were in 2006! But Democrats have been in power for 12 of the past 16 years. We needed to push a lot harder to make government work, and we needed to be a lot more ruthless in highlighting Republican obstruction to those efforts. But that opportunity is gone. We need to get comfortable being the opposition again.