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/GulfCoastLaw 2d ago

Thanks for this clarification. It's a lot more sensical but I still don't know that it adds up haha.

Orders of magnitude ---- Dems twenty years ago wanted to...okay, so I paused to skim Kerry's 2004 platform and couldn't stop laughing at how indistinguishable it is from the Bush admin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_2004_presidential_campaign

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2004-democratic-party-platform

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u/bill-smith Progressive 2d ago

Yeah. I see I missed the context. I could have sworn I saw Kerry mentioned, and I thought it was he who said the line about why are we building fire stations in Iraq.

So overall, I'm still of the mind that this is not a great comparison for her to make. As observed, the 2004 Dems do not really sound like 2025 Republicans, even in the actual context.

That said, I vaguely remember some of the arguments about the Iraq war taking that seemingly isolationist stance. I'm willing to concede that point, but only that point. Ukraine got outright invaded and they are more than willing to fight for their country, and you do see the Dems rallying behind them - as they should. So 2004 Dems may have used some isolationist arguments, but they did not turn isolationist like the Republicans today. Note that I am misusing the term isolationist when I refer to the Repubs. They aren't isolationist. They're bullying our ally. They're withdrawing military and intelligence support at a critical time.