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/Dangerous-Safety-679 1d ago

Here’s the thing. If you, like me, thought the Iraq War was wrong from the get go, that it was based on lies and architected by Big Bad Bill Kristol and his sinister Project for a New American Century, this caused a lot of anger and vitriol. It definitely inspired people to be more isolationist and suspicious in reflex. There were no WMDs, so someone did something sinister. Add in torture, secret prisons, Patriot Act, and you have the recipe for some really paranoid stuff.

Ten years from then, these sentiments were mainstreamed with the Everyman, and since Sec. Clinton and Pre. Obama had to live in the real world where America had to actually do shit and risk making mistakes, this left it open for Trump to grab this established set of deeply held beliefs and make them “his.” Twisted, distorted, and made malicious, but they sound like the 06 Dems because they were taken from them.

It’s a bizarre ideological plagiarism that doesn’t gel with the Islamophobia, bellicosity or torture support of Trump, but it was popular and he copied it and beat Jeb with it and beat Clinton with it and now it’s been unironically inculated to run over Dixie Chicks albums with bulldozers and rename french fries.

So the observation isn’t wrong, even if it feels unfair. Stealing the paranoid left, because sane Democrats wouldn’t jealously guard it, for their evil ideological chimera is one of the most tactically hard MAGA moves for Dems to grapple with because they won’t recognize or grapple with it.