Gaddis on the Democrats

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has a review of Robert Beisner's new biography of Dean Acheson in the next issue of The New Republic.  Beisner argues that Acheson was the real architect of Harry Truman's Cold War policy, which Gaddis agrees with, but also accounts for the man's flaws.  Gaddis also takes time to look at the Democrats today.  He argues that George W. Bush has stolen the Democrats' old theme of liberal internationalism by promoting freedom and democracy around the world.  Excerpts:

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The speaker could have been Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. In fact, it was George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address; and what he said is what historians will probably remember as the Bush Doctrine. This poses a serious challenge for Democrats. What do you do when Republicans steal your principles?

. . .

They have responded to the first Republican president to have become a liberal interventionist by quivering–and blogging–with rage. They have offered no plan for building on the Bush Doctrine and moving on. It's as if they're imitating the Republicans of the 1930s, who quivered with rage at Roosevelt (blogging had not been invented yet) while neglecting his warnings about tyrants, as well as his vision of what a world without them might be.

. . .

More than anything else, the borrowing of ideas–often without attribution–is what has spared the United States the proliferation of single-issue parties that so often paralyzes politics elsewhere. Political plagiarism makes big tents possible. If Reagan and Bush could borrow from Truman and Acheson, then it's hard to see why Democrats today should not borrow from Reagan and Bush. To say that nothing can be learned from an opponent's ideas is to claim infallibility for one's own, a pretension to which even Acheson never aspired.

The Bush administration, like the Truman administration, has given its supporters much to apologize for and its critics much to denounce. It is from those gifts, which reflect the recalcitrance of reality when strategy tries to shift it, that the Democrats will again rise as the Republicans once did. The only question is how long it will take Democrats to remember how to do this.