David Horowitz: The Shadow Party
In understanding how far the Democratic Party has moved from its center of gravity in an earlier generation, it is salutary to remember that Democrats were once known as the more international and hawkish of the two political parties. Until the late 1960s, Democrat presidents were consistently more likely than Republicans to flex America’s military might abroad. Democrat administrations led America into both World Wars. Democrat president Harry Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine which like Bush’s own doctrine pledged America to support peoples fighting for their freedom abroad.
No president during the Cold War sounded the call to arms more eloquently than John F. Kennedy himself, warning the enemies of freedom that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
This commitment flagged and began to fail in 1972 with the presidential candidacy of George McGovern, as the radical anti-war movement that had developed during the war found a home in the Democratic Party, and began to remold its character and reshape its agendas. McGovern lost the election in the biggest landslide in American history, but in the ashes of defeat he and his allies were able to redraw the rules that governed the party and empower the radical forces inside it.
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No president during the Cold War sounded the call to arms more eloquently than John F. Kennedy himself, warning the enemies of freedom that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
This commitment flagged and began to fail in 1972 with the presidential candidacy of George McGovern, as the radical anti-war movement that had developed during the war found a home in the Democratic Party, and began to remold its character and reshape its agendas. McGovern lost the election in the biggest landslide in American history, but in the ashes of defeat he and his allies were able to redraw the rules that governed the party and empower the radical forces inside it.