Cowardly Democracy: Foreign Policy's Catch-22

Once, the Democratic Party bestrode the nation, a colossus of consensus and community. But there was a catch. Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer tell us that

before the reunited Democratic Party can start to make a forceful case to the nation, it will have to […] equal what was perhaps Franklin Roosevelt‘s greatest political success: to offer a bold foreign policy to match his domestic ambitions.

Note the word bold, as opposed to good. Not that Kazin and Zelizer wouldn’t want a good foreign policy. Perhaps that’s necessary. But it’s insufficient. This is already a pretty profound insight about what we suppose American public opinion wants from a foreign policy — sweeping scope, high-flying ideals, and so on. But how does this play out in practice?

FDR had an internationalist vision: that the United States should use military force only against clearly defined threats and with the aid of international, democratic institutions. This vision, with some exceptions, defined America’s stance in the world until Vietnam.

Begging pardon, that’s not very bold. In fact, that’s a fairly isolationist posture — only fight against blatantly directly threatening enemies, and let the rest of the world, no less, share the burden of that fight through global regimes rigged culturally or ideologically to divert resources our way. Why shouldn’t this be a Republican vision? Because then it sounds mean? Read on:

That debacle [Vietnam] destroyed LBJ’s presidency, and the question of how America should act in the world has haunted his party ever since. Democrats have no coherent view about foreign policy that differs from that of conservatives.

Aha! But if my read of Rooseveltian foreign policy is an accurate reading of Kazin and Zelizer’s, then that should be a good thing! Unless, of course, both parties have departed from FDR’s approach, and, worse, done so in incoherent fashion. And one could argue — hell, I will argue — that this is exactly what’s happened. Why? Because after the fall of the Soviet Union, there couldn’t be any Grand New Plan. The US couldn’t instantly, or even relatively quickly, develop a Bold, Coherent Foreign Policy because neither our big brains nor our big hearts could know or create the future. We could try, not without some minor successes, around the margins. But our actions in the world did more to create our unknowable future than our efforts to think it into being.

Enter pragmatism, right? Who needs to know or create anything bold and coherent? Burkeans on the right and Deweyans on the left have big books of popular hymns to sing about the virtues of improvisatory policy guided by either our longstanding interests or our longstanding passions. There’s no reason we couldn’t develop an ad hoc consensus on simply kicking the foreign policy can down the road until world historical clarity came into focus for us — even if we all, for varying reasons, really did want a Bold, Coherent, Unitary, Epic Foreign Policy. But maybe that’s not what we really want. Maybe that’s only what we appear to want because we’re so uncomfortable with being frank about not wanting it. What if Democrats and Republicans alike have been toiling away at foreign policy as therapy?

[Democrats] agree on finding a way out of Iraq and halting nuclear proliferation. But Democrats are vague about how to combat terrorists (and how to evaluate the threat itself), don’t have a clear strategy for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and are fearful of questioning the size and substance of the military budget. This weakness gives John McCain his best chance to delay or defeat a new liberal awakening.

Well, they did have a clear strategy for ‘solving’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But when Clinton offered it to Arafat, Arafat rejected it. And it’s not just Democrats who are vague about how to evaluate and fight the threat of terrorism (or do we mean evaluate the threat of terrorists and fight them?) — because the threat of terrorism, and the threat posed by actual terrorists, is inherently vague; vagueness, uncertainty, unmeasurability, is at the center of the threat that terrorism and terrorists pose! Terror without uncertainty is simply misery. And today’s terrorism is just one particularly intense facet of a vague, uncertain, unmeasurably new world — to say nothing of what values ‘we’ want to create in the world, or allow to flourish, or combat and destroy. Across the political board, our consensus is almost shockingly thin and fragile. We’re really anxious about this. We want to be bold and coherent because daily American life is neither. This is not the last time I will pound the podium and wave my copy of Democracy in America, because Tocqueville is definitively persuasive that two things are true in an age of equal freedom (and specifically in the US):

(1) dissipation and incoherence are essential, ubiquitous qualities of public life;

(2) so people long to, and do, organize life within the highest possible unities they can imagine (the state, the [pantheist] god, public opinion itself).

Thus we all gravitate anxiously toward the boldest and most seemingly coherent — the most unitary — foreign policy we can imagine. Oh, to have a Top Ten List of foreign policy commandments! To have a simple, single answer to a whole planet’s worth of tough questions! Kazin and Zelizer reveal, finally, that what Democrats need to do is give better democratic therapy:

[…] if Democrats find a way to address Americans’ insecurities about their economic futures as well as the future security of their nation, they may be able to emulate the only liberal president who ever managed that difficult feat. And for that achievement, FDR became one of the greatest and most beloved leaders in our history.

But the key to FDR’s boldness and clarity is captured in the boldest and clearest thing he ever said: there is nothing to fear but fear itself. For all our talk of toughness and principle, our anxious insecurity belies our failure to adopt one of the toughest principles around: courage. If Tocqueville is right, democratic courage requires a discipline of raising our tolerance for confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, contradiction, and randomness. Yet this message seems like one guaranteed to lose elections — even though it’s derived from no ideology and carries no political baggage. It puts our fate back in our own hands. But who wants that — from a candidate, no less, trying to help us recover from a President like Bush?