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Jon Chait has a nice piece on the Joe Lieberman's descent into rabid insanity over the past few years. He notes that Lieberman hews to a fairly popular rightwing revisionist history of Democratic foreign policy thought, in which Democrats were hawkish between World War II and the 60s, traitorous between the 70s and the 90s, saved by Clinton and Gore in the 90s and early Oughts, and then captured by far-left liberal bloggers somewhere around 2004. In this telling, Lieberman plays the lonely role of John F. Kennedy, or maybe Bill Clinton. Chait corrects him:
Lieberman's history, which imagines a binary fight between hawks and isolationists, is woefully mistaken. In fact, during the cold war there were three camps: anti-interventionists on the left, liberal internationalists in the center, and hard-line anti-communists on the right. The left opposed the cold war. The center favored containment. The right deemed coexistence with communism unacceptable and advocated "rollback" of communism.Lieberman's foreign policy views are in the tradition of the right, not the center. In the 1990s, he promoted "rogue state rollback," a neoconservative doctrine that's the direct lineal descendant of cold war rollback. Right-wing anti-communist hardliners opposed negotiations or arms control agreements with the enemy and, at various points, raged against Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan for their soft line.This is exactly correct. The center-left tradition of foreign policy prudence backed up by American power is very different than the far rightwing tradition, which advantages power and tried to violently remake the world in our image, or the far leftwing tradition, which is deeply uncomfortable with American power and, at times, refuses to use it. Of course, the far leftwing tradition has never held national office in this country, and is basically an ideology of protest marches and reading groups. The far rightwing tradition has often occupied the highest offices in our government and in the military (see LeMay, Curtis). One of the offices it occupies is that of the Junior Senator from Connecticut. Lieberman fits neatly into the neoconservative movement, and is very, very far from the type of political thought that led to summits with the Soviet Union and the construction of international institutions that legitimize our power by restraining it. His attempt to wrest the mantle of Kennedy and Eisenhower and FDR is a cute, self-congratulatory political trick, but not a piece of analysis anyone should take seriously.
