Where have all the anti-war Democrats gone?
To bomb or not to bomb? President Trump treats waging war with the same gravity he might deploy when deciding whether to play golf. He said this week that 'I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do'. Call it strategic ambiguity, or flagrant honesty. You get the sense that the president doesn't know himself whether he will give the order. The White House line right now is that the president will decide over the next two weeks. Cue chatter that this is a ruse to discombobulate the Iranians before an imminent American strike.
Whatever he decides, Trump's attempt to save face after Netanyahu ignored his plea to leave the negotiations with Iran alone has exposed fissures between the neo-cons in his administration and the Maga isolationists. The Maga activist Laura Loomer has started a list of those who criticised the president, presumably for a future purge.
What, then, are the Democrats doing to exploit this chink in the normally preternaturally cultish Maga movement which rarely turns on itself? Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, issued an milquetoast statement when Israel first struck Iran. Hakeem Jeffries, his counterpart in the House of Representatives, issued a similar statement but called for American troops not to be put 'in harm's way'.
As Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Times, neither Democratic leader instructed the President that the authority to go to war resides with Congress. (Schumer later did, but took no action to that effect.) There is a tendency within the party to treat war as a non-partisan issue, as if bombing another country in the name of national security is a foregone conclusion. A rally-around-our-troops effect takes hold.
This might be a missed opportunity for the Democrats to become the anti-war party, a position Trump has dominated since he won in 2016. A YouGov/Economist poll found that 60 per cent of Americans don't think Trump should get involved in the war, including over half of Republican voters, with only 16 per cent supporting action. Yet, the anti-war Democrats are confined to the party's populist left, or what you could more generously call the left who wants to be popular.
Bernie Sanders has introduced a No War Against Iran bill in the Senate. Ro Khanna, the progressive Democratic representative, has emerged as the party's leading anti-war figure. Khanna opposed the Iraq war in 2003 and sees interventionism in the Middle East as yet another example – alongside globalisation and a pro-rich tax policy – of how communities in states such as Pennsylvania were shunted to the bottom of Washington's priorities.
It's a message Trump has put to good use for over a decade. Democrats' pitch to voters could now include both opposition to Trump's militarism at home and abroad. Challenging Trump's potential strikes could become a chance for the Democrats to tap into that populist anger which Trump has so deftly mined for so long.
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[See also: Is Trump the last neoconservative?]
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