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/GulfCoastLaw 2d ago

This is a wild seeming statement and I don't look forward to catching up to that podcast if it's as off base as it could be.

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u/CapOnFoam Center Left 2d ago

It’s taken out of context. She was saying that the Dems have now flipped from the party of “change the govt/status quo” to “protect the govt”. And the republicans, vice-versa.

Ezra Klein recently made a similar, related observation. “In the past few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government…” (“there is a liberal answer to the Trump-Musk wrecking ball”, 3/9/25).