The New Liberal Know Nothings: Bret Stephens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-liberal-know-nothings-1434410685
On trade, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, Democrats would rather not know.
Because a wing of the Republican Party is hostile to immigrants, it’s tempting to see the GOP as a descendant of the mid-19th-century Know Nothing Party, infamous for its antipathy to Irish-Catholic newcomers—the Mexicans of their day. But if the Know Nothings have a 21st-century heir, it is Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party.
So much was made clear last week, when House Democrats did their best to torpedo the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. So opposed is Mrs. Pelosi’s party to free trade—that is, so beholden are Democrats to organized labor—that the party was prepared to defy President Obama and vote against a $450 million retraining scheme to scuttle TPP.
What an extraordinary comeback for such a parochial political impulse. “Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain [David] Ricardo?” So asked one famous economist in the mid-1990s, making fun of intellectuals who couldn’t grasp the great English economist’s concept of comparative advantage “with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both.”
To this economist, Ricardo’s ideas were as self-evident as Darwin’s—beyond dispute except to quacks or creationists. The economist was Paul Krugman.
Now Mr. Krugman has become the kind of “pop internationalist” he once despised, and he leans against TPP. Try naming three prominent liberals or Democratic heavyweights who support the president on trade. Such is the state of a party in which Barack Obama is the extreme-right flank.
The Democratic turn against trade is part of the wider progressive march away from the centrist moorings that anchored it in the 1990s and made it a winner. But that march is also part of the liberal retreat from the world, and from the idea that the U.S. should serve as an economic, political and security anchor for free nations everywhere.
Does it matter to Democrats that TPP is also the economic centerpiece of the “pivot to Asia” that marked Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department? Does it matter to them that China would like nothing more than to see TPP fail, so it can step in with its own version of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Does it even matter to Mrs. Clinton, or has she also moved on?
As with trade so with terrorism. The old liberal critique of the war in Iraq was that it was a distraction from the real threat to the U.S., al Qaeda and its jihadist affiliates above all.
But now al Qaeda has ceded pride of terrorist place to Islamic State, which is drawing thousands of recruits from the West while gaining ground from Afghanistan to Libya—and Democrats can barely muster a shrug. ISIS rated a glancing reference in Mrs. Clinton’s big campaign speech on Saturday, but that was it. Mr. Obama thinks the effort is worth deploying some additional trainers to Iraq, but not a single combat soldier.
It’s not that Democrats don’t have thoughts or position papers on Iraq, ISIS, the Mideast. It’s just that they don’t particularly care about any of it. Mentally, they’ve checked out of the great-power game. Their world view boils down to a Gini coefficient.
Oh, but there’s Iran. As details of the pending agreement become clearer—no snap inspections of Iran’s military sites; no snapback sanctions; no credible U.S. military options on the table; no restrictions on Iran’s missiles; no answers about its past nuclear weapons work; no promises to release Americans held by Iran; no moderating of Iran’s regional behavior; an upfront $150 billion bribe in the form of sanctions relief—so too does the scale of the administration’s capitulation. Negotiations with Iran now amount to a diplomatic strip tease, the only difference being that Washington both takes it off and doles out the dollars.
Yet the notable thing here isn’t the behavior of the administration. It’s the indifference of rank-and-file Democrats. Jimmy Carter was a congenital appeaser but at least he had Scoop Jackson to worry about, along with the millions of voters who would become Reagan Democrats. Mr. Obama, by contrast, only has Chuck Schumer. The rest of the Democratic Party seems to have persuaded itself that the wisest foreign policy is to have less of one. Foreign policy, somebody once said, begins at home.
It’s worth noting that the original name for the Know Nothings was the Native American Party, though somebody must have thought better of that one. Later it was renamed the American Party. “Americanism” has usually been the cause of people who imagine that they can keep the world at bay, either by shutting our doors or closing our eyes. It never works. Boorishness is a bad basis for policy, and so is blindness.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com.
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