Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Politics

Deservedly eminent Yale cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis begins his excellent review of a new book about Dean Acheson in the following manner:

“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” The speaker could have been Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. In fact, it was George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address; and what he said is what historians will probably remember as the Bush Doctrine. This poses a serious challenge for Democrats. What do you do when Republicans steal your principles?

You can yell, “Stop, thief!” — but that’s not likely to be very effective. You can deny that you ever held those principles — but then you have sold out what you stand for. You can acknowledge that you once held those principles, but that now that your opponent has endorsed them, you are compelled to abandon them — but that would be to surrender to partisanship, even to pettiness. You can question your opponent’s sincerity, claiming that he doesn’t really mean what he has said — but there is every reason to believe that he does. Or you can say, “Delighted you’ve come to see it our way.”

Democrats so far have tried all of the above, except the last….

Reading this tale of how Democrats abandoned their former foreign policy principles and policies to the Republicans, I was struck by how eerily accurate that same account fits what happened over the past generation to the Democrats’ previous civil rights principles and policies.

The Democrats succeeded after a long struggle in enacting the principle of colorblind equality into law … and then promptly turned their partisan back on their success, abandoned the “without regard” principle that Gunnar Myrdal identified as the cornerstone of the “American Creed” to the Republicans, and now are firmly entrenched in the defense of widely unpopular racial preferences.

That about face was as significant and as wrongheaded a wrong turn as their abandoning their formerly strong national security stance to the Republicans.