"No, Hillary Isn't A Republican But The Resemblance Is Striking"

The American Conservative: "Obama Is A Republican"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-american-conservative-obama-is.html

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

No, Hillary Clinton isn’t a Republican — but the resemblance is striking

Clinton is a lot closer to Richard Nixon than Trump is, but she's really a Cold War liberal left behind by history

ANDREW O'HEHIR 

Beinart on Cold War liberalism

You don’t have to look far on the American left to find accusations that Hillary Clinton is essentially a Republican, or almost a Republican, or simply too damn close to being a Republican. At least I don’t: I’ve done it myself, very recently, in a throwaway jibe partway through a recent article on the GOP’s spectacular implosion. I was aware, even as I wrote that, that it’s only partly true. If the joke stings, that’s because it cuts closer to the bone than Clinton supporters and Democratic Party loyalists would like. But it’s an imprecise formulation, at best; even in his harshest criticisms of Clinton, Bernie Sanders has never suggested that she might, y’know, be like that.

Part of the problem is definitional and historical, and maybe even epistemological. What do we mean by “Republican”? A Republican where, and when? In broad strokes of politics and policy, Clinton is a lot closer to the worldview of Richard Nixon, let’s say, than Donald Trump is. (Consider her amazingly clueless reference to her friend Henry Kissinger, one of the moments of 2016 she definitely wishes she could take back.) It’s probably fair to say that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, last of the Northeastern Republican dinosaurs, is to Clinton’s left on many issues. But the Richard Nixon who got elected in 1968 would not be a remotely viable presidential candidate in today’s GOP, and Collins remains a Republican out of sheer Maine cussedness, or for embarrassing personal reasons. (Did she lose a bet at the bridge club? Does Reince Priebus hold a trove of juicy text messages?)

So no, those things don’t make Hillary Clinton a Republican. She’s a Democrat, all right — a Democrat of a specific vintage and a particular type. At least in her 2016 incarnation, Clinton is an old-school Cold War liberal out of the Scoop Jackson Way-Back Machine. (That’s a completely obscure reference, if you’re under 45 or so, and I promise I’ll get back to it.) Many such Democrats indeed defected to the Republicans after 1980 — in several prominent cases, the Cold War liberals of the 1970s became the George W. Bush neocons of the 2000s — but Clinton didn’t exactly do that, and that’s not my point.

Clinton’s problem, or let’s say the crux of her many problems, is that the machine dropped her into the wrong decade. There’s no Cold War to wage against a monolithic ideological nemesis, only an endless, borderless and profoundly unsatisfying conflict against a nebulous, Whack-a-Mole enemy. She faces a public ground down and demoralized by 15 years of pointless warfare and empty paranoia. Clinton’s version of liberalism — she has earned that label, in all fairness — has been rebranded and reconfigured so many times no one could possibly keep track of its current contents. Her politics are like Doctor Who’s flying phone booth: Until you open the door, you have no idea what’s inside.

Clinton has assumed for decades that her understanding of American politics and the global order, shaped by the Cold War liberalism of her youth, is rooted in unshakable reality and represents a finely calibrated blend of idealism and pragmatism. Whether you think she’s right is a matter of interpretation, but she now finds herself at a moment of unexpected political turmoil, when all her underlying assumptions about reality are under attack. It remains likelier than not that she will win this election — but how confident do you really feel about that? Clinton has clearly been taken off guard by the rise of Bernie Sanders on her left and Donald Trump on her right (if that’s even where he is), and is struggling to catch up to a sudden shift in the political tides that threatens to leave her stranded.

You don’t encounter much discussion of Cold War liberalism these days, at least outside American history seminars. But it lies at the heart of the Democratic Party’s recent history and its current dilemma. As this anonymous post published on the Progressive Historians blog just before the 2008 campaign suggests, Cold War liberalism never really went away. It changed its form and its name but continued to drive the internal politics of the Democratic Party (and drain away its soul). It drove the botched and uneven “humanitarian interventionism” policies of the Bill Clinton administration, and drove Democrats’ unquestioning capitulation to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, the Patriot Act and every other form of hysterical, paranoid and hyper-militarized response to 9/11.

Intriguingly, Cold War liberalism made a brief but striking reappearance in mainstream media discourse late in the Bush-Cheney era, not long before that Progressive Historians post was published. Peter Beinart, then a contributor to the New Republic (the Bible of Democratic centrism, published a semi-influential book in 2006 arguing that a juiced-up, 21st-century reboot of Cold War liberalism was the Democratic Party’s best path forward and the best way to win the “war on terror.”

In Beinart’s account, Cold War liberalism had effectively disappeared with the rise of Reagan, but needed to be resuscitated. His tradition was relentlessly sunny and almost hilariously selective: You won’t read about CIA-sponsored coups or American support for murderous right-wing dictatorships in his book, and he skates right over the Cold War liberal Armageddon of Vietnam, let alone any comparison to the then-current debacle in Iraq. But Beinart is an elegant prose stylist who constructs an articulate defense of Cold War liberalism as a intellectual vision of American imperial power and its limitations, with quotations from semi-forgotten postwar titans like theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and foreign-policy mastermind George F. Kennan.

I would bet the ranch that Hillary Clinton read Beinart’s book. Barack Obama probably did too. In any event, the policies they pursued in the Middle East and around the world beginning in 2009 seemed inspired by the convoluted doctrines of Niebuhr and Kennan and by what Beinart calls “the irony of American exceptionalism”: We have a unique role as global superpower and supercop, and a unique responsibility to scrutinize the morality of our own actions. Which sounds great in theory — if you can stomach the unbearable, preening arrogance behind the entire proposition — but hasn’t worked out too well in practice.

Understanding the paradoxes of Cold War liberalism is crucial to understanding the paradoxes of Hillary Clinton — and the possibilities, for good or ill, of a Clinton administration that might take office next year. Cold War liberals were internationalist hawks who favored an aggressive global policy of American hegemony, and they were also center-left Democrats who supported labor unions and civil rights and a broad range of progressive reforms. If the combination sounds bizarre in retrospect, it made more sense in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In its less hypocritical expressions, Cold War liberalism was about fighting Soviet communism around the world, while smoothing over the contradictions of capitalism and providing wider equality, justice and prosperity at home. Cold War liberals dominated political discourse for almost 30 years after World War II, a period that saw marginal tax rates above 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans and rapidly increasing wages and living conditions for working people.