The Left Has Always Taken an 'America First' Position To Foreign Policy And For the Democrats To Thrive in a Post-Trump America They Must Find A Way to Reckon With It

 

When Donald Trump ran for President the first time one of the hallmarks of his campaign was the idea of a near isolationist approach to foreign policy which he labeled 'America First'. Critics rightly made the comparison to that of the movement that happened starting in 1940 of the 'America First Committee led mostly by isolationists who didn't want America to get involved in World War II. Once having as many 800,000 members with Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous, it disbanded four days after Pearl Harbor.

A decade later there are multiple ironies that occur to me on both sides of the political aisle. On the right there is the current movement by the President to increase his level of foreign intervention to the increasingly dismay of many members of the MAGA base who voted for him in three consecutive elections. On the left there is the historical one that they used the parallel at the time to argue the office racial parallels when it came to racism – and that, to put it generously, they've been backing away from that particular parallel for the last three years as part of being a dealbreaker.

But the purpose of this article is to deal with the issue the Democratic Party has been facing for a very long time: the fact that a large part of their constituency is vehemently anti-war and by this point there's a small but influential branch of the Party that has for all intents and purposes an isolationist plank in its platform.

I need to be clear upfront about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying. I'm not going to pretend that in my time American's interventionist foreign policies have become expensive boondoggles that have cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and did immense damage to America's reputation long before Trump became President. And while foreign policy in the Cold War has its share of bipartisan clusterfucks, the ledger has to come down on the Republican side when it comes to damage ever since Nixon took office in 1968. But as a student of history its worth noting ever since at least the 1952 election the Republicans have managed to make their biggest victories whenever they've accused the Democratic Party of being weak on foreign policy. And the last Democratic Presidential candidate to run to the right of a Republican on foreign policy was John F. Kennedy in 1960. He also won the largest percent of white working class voters of any Democrat in history with just over 64 percent. That's not entirely a coincidence.

So as we deal with the leadup to the midterms I think we have to look at one of the critical weaknesses with the Democratic Party and its relationship with the left and that is their foreign policy. And that's simple: they don't really have one and indeed haven't had once since the end of World War II.

For much the last half-century the Republican party was dominated by neoconservatives who believe that the purpose of the American military was to act as the world's policemen. It wasn't until after the dual disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they began to even slightly back away from this and not until Trump's candidacy that they abandoned it more out of a desire for political power than any real conviction for it.

Ever since the Vietnam War the Democratic Party has to reckon with a left-wing constituency that has made it crystal clear that they will not vote if the party even hints at a non-interventionist policy. Despite the disaster of the McGovern campaign in 1972 the Democrats basically followed that policy and it kept leading them to electoral disaster. Only when Bill Clinton came along did he manage to find an alternative and the left very quickly chose to vilify him as part of the same brush. They have done the same thing in the 21^st century, first with Obama's presidency and then Biden's. Part of the reason that eleven percent of those who voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and voted for Trump in the general may very well have been for his isolationist policy which has been close to the left than they want to admit.

Reading the left's scholarly journals along with multiple films and documentaries on the subject one can only reach the conclusion that the only reason the world has not beaten its artillery into plowshares and is singing Kumbaya is become of America's actions no matter who becomes President. They have rewritten history so that the Cold War only started because Stalin acted defensively against Truman's foreign policy (which as I've written extensively is not the case) argued that multiple Presidents have engaged in regime changes to further American interests abroad and that all of this is done to further the military-industrial complex.

I don't deny the truth in many of their statements: our intelligence community did spend the second half of the 20^th century overthrowing many Marxist governments to create allies during the Cold War and the Vietnam War was a disaster because of an attempt to containment in Asia the same way we had in Europe. But it leaves out the critical fact that after the Second World War ended there was no other country left to take up the battle against the Soviet Union and dictatorships abroad. I don't deny that we've screwed up being the world's policeman far more than we've succeeded, but there were no other applicants for the job.

The left then proceeds to use as a cudgel that every other democracy in the world has a far greater safety network than America does. They conveniently leave out the fact that, particularly in Europe, the main reason they can afford to spend as much money as they can on social policy is because they knew during the Cold War America was going to be doing the bulk of the work.  They were able to spend much of their money on butter because they were spending almost none on guns. When LBJ tried to do both after winning in 1964 it led to a disaster and not coincidentally the rise of the Republican revolution. (The left's hands are far from clean on that accord, but I've written about that before.)

The main reason the progressive wing spends so much time on its domestic policy is because it's foreign policy is all but nonexistent. The Justice Democrat platform is almost entirely devoted domestic policies. Indeed in its entire ten year history it has only two planks that deal with foreign policy. I'm going to quote them here:

Ending arms sales to countries that it says violate human rights

Ending the practice of unilaterally waging war, except as a last resort to defend U.S. territory.

It's that second plank I'd like to focus on.

Now I'm more than willing to admit that in my lifetime Congress has all but relinquished one of its major powers: the ability to issue a declaration of war. And I'm all in favor of recent Congressional efforts to try and reaffirm teeth in the War Powers Act. But until that's done – and I'm not optimistic it can be for the foreseeable future – what will happen if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends up running for President?

By the definition of the plank of her party she's essentially saying that a future successor to Putin or Kim Jung Un could theoretically attack multiple countries in Europe or Asia with either ground troops, air power or even nuclear weapons – and by the terms of her wing of the party until they bomb New York City she or a similar candidate doesn't believe its America's job to intervene.

I'm not saying that will happen – I personally don't believe AOC will ever get anywhere near the Democratic nomination, much less the White House – but the fact remains there is a small but vocal contingent of my party right now who believe that any American intervention abroad is immoral and the Democrats should be primaried if they don't actively endorse this policy.

In the decade since Trump's first election there has been much hair-pulling by many people about his foreign policy. I'm in agreement with a fair amount, for the record, but I've always thought the left's attitude has always been the least sincere and most based in their opposition to all things Trump.  If anything the fact that he was promising an end to American intervention in wars should have made them their candidate considering how much their loathing of internationalism.

And its not like they're attitude for human rights abuses abroad – another one of their biggest sticking points – has always been limited to selling weapons. They've talk about the human rights abuses in so many countries over the years but they've never really thought that strongly about foreign aid either. They'll argue for charities to do more, make speeches advocating for them in awards shows, but that is as far as they want us to go. If people are dying in Tunisia or Belarus or any of a dozen other horrible countries, they basically think those countries have to life themselves up by their bootstraps and do the work.  America's job is to help Americans. Leaving the feeding of the poor overseas to Sally Struthers.

So when they started crying about all of the international norms that Trump was tearing down in his first term, it now looks like something of a hypocrisy.  They think America should be helping Americans. It's only because he wasn't spending the money on social services either that they were pissed.

Even their attitude about Trump's admiration for dictators across the globe has always smacked of hypocrisy considering their own admiration for them ever since the Cold War began. They continue to argue the Soviet Union was 'a failed experiment', still admire Cuba and everything that Castro has done and it is worth remembering the Green New Deal is based on the model of a woman who famously wrote an article in 2004 that she voted for Hugo Chavez.  The left spent much of the decade before Trump's election in open admiration of the socialist rise in South America and chose to excuse the numerous human rights abuses that were going on. Famously John Oliver once said about Venezuela's government: "It was not socialism" when it fact it very much was.

So much of the left's attitude towards foreign policy can be seen in reaction to Trump. Putin invaded Ukraine. Putin is a friend of Trump. Therefore the left must support Zelensky. Netanyahu is a friend of Trump; therefore the left must support Gaza. They've never cared anything for human rights abuses throughout the Middle East – they never said word one about Iran all through the last year and a half. And while they supported Machado when she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the moment she tried to win Trump's favor – something that Venezuela will need now that Maduro's gone – they turned on her in a heartbeat.

Even their own moral standard about right and wrong is flexible. No one even bothered to pretend that Nicholas Maduro was a good guy or that Venezuelans were suffering under him. And no one is going to argue that Iran has undergone forty-five years of horrible rule under the various Ayatollahs since the Revolution in 1978. But Democrats keep saying: "There's a right way to do things."

The problem is that in the nearly sixty years since Nixon took power the Republican party has been able to wrap itself by combining military action with patriotism while the left increasingly argues the military action is wrong and barely bothers to argue a difference between the soldiers and the Army. This has enabled Republicans to win over blue collar workers by arguing that the Democrat party isn't patriotic and is unamerican. They’ve managed this message successfully since 1972, a full quarter of a century before Fox News came on the scene. The left wing has increasingly – and even more since Trump's election – argued that all things associated with America, whether they are the military, the police, or even Olympic athletes – are things that should be worthy only of their contempt. The Democrats have always struggled with being seen as intellectual snobs or elitists and all of this has been leading to Trump's election in the first place. For the left that is represented by the Squad isn't one. For a Democratic Party that has been losing with middle America and blue collar voters long before Trump arrives, it's increasingly becoming an obstacle they may not be able to overcome unless they meet it head on.

There are signs they may coming to this. Abagail Spanberger and Mikey Sherill, both of whom won the gubernatorial elections last year, spent their lives in public services before running for Congress. Spanberger worked in the CIA as a case officer, and Sherill as a former Naval Officer. They represent a kind of Democrat that is different then the ones of the Squad, those who have served their country and want to enter politics to further that service.

Considering that one of the major draws for Republican congressional candidates for the 21^st century has been military service running as part of the military is a sign of patriotism. The DNC has been looking for Congressional candidates as part of their 2026 campaign (a future article will deal with this) that involves military or public service. This stands in stark contrast to the Justice Democrats who to this point have mostly been activists before they ran for Congress the first time.

For better or worse, wrapping oneself in the flag has been one of the major factors in both the conservative rise and the Republican revolution ever since Nixon's election in 1968. Ever since that time and even before the Democrats have been reluctant to do so increasingly out of fear of isolating the far left of their constituency. In a post-Trump America they must be more concerned with meeting people in the middle than trying to reach out to the people who have basically made it clear they're not willing to meet the Democrats even halfway on anything. And that can only be helped by not being afraid to that you're proud to be a citizen of this country, no matter who's in the Oval Office.