Arsenal of Democracy

Politics and Prose had a three pm talk by Julian Zelizer about his new work, Arsenal of Democracy. The premise is that foreign policy partisanship, far from being a recent phenomenon, has always been a tool and a weapon of the parties to advance their agendas. He only goes back to FDR, but he traces each presidency to show instances of how these administrations and their oppositions at the time leveraged the foreign policy events of their times for partisan gain. I suppose I never really doubted this despite the whining and gripes of David Broder types, but I suppose it is impressive that Zelizer managed to get 600 pages out of this premise.

His actual talk I found even less enlightening as he decided to focus on dispelling some "myths", such as historically republicans have been hawks, democrats doves, George W Bush was an absolute Hawk, etc. Not really sure where to go with all these. Most of it is just dismantling straw men, and the last just ignores the political situation at the time (loss of both houses of congress) and somehow takes the position that the surge in Iraq was actually not a Hawkish move. I actually got to ask a question at this discussion which was to comment on how many of these supposed myths were actually just the talking points of the opposition rather than an actual description of a platform. Zelizer acknowledged that many of them did indeed originate as opposition memes but claimed that they had indeed taken hold in the popular consciousness. I am not sure whether that is true or not, but more importantly, I am not sure that it matters.

Once you acknowledge the political science literature that elections can basically be predicted by the state of the economy and the status of incumbency, then all of this is merely descriptive. I just mean that Zelizer may very well accurately be describing what past presidents have done but I am not sure whether he offers very good advice for how future presidents should react to such partisanship. In my own opinion, if individual decisions have little affect on reelection, than presidents should just enact their agenda according to their own ideological beliefs. Period. I think George W Bush actually did this pretty well. And by well, I mean he attempted to implement his idea of an agenda to the best of his ability. I happen to disagree with just about every element of his agenda, but what I wish we got out of this was for a Democratic president and congress to also implement their agenda to the best of their ability instead of inventing imaginary constraints of process and partisanship. The constraints are self imposed and a critical observer will notice that Republican feel no compunction to adhere to them.