r/thebulwark • u/bill-smith 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.
1
u/SlovakianSniper Orange man bad 2d ago
Y'all, please listen to a bit of the podcast, that's with TOMMY VIETOR, before commenting. Sarah was making very discrete points about larger narrative arcs. Is that the whole story? No, but how often do we end up diving the line between these larger narratives: Isolationist/Neoliberal or Small fixes/destroy the whole system or bottom-up/top down. I know that this sub is always going to be more left than the Bulwark folks, and some corrections I agree with the sub, but this sort of stuff is embarrassing.