As Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, one of the most notable things is what did not happen in the next 24 hours. My inbox wasn't immediately filled with anxious notes from old Democratic campaign hands. Vulnerable 2022 incumbents didn’t come out swinging in opposition. And although a handful of Republicans made noise about the soft-on-terror Dems, they were widely ignored.
It’s a reality that would have been head-spinning just a few years ago. The Democratic Party’s national security establishment is full of people and institutions who made their careers in the 2000s arguing that its leaders needed to be, or at least appear to be, just as “tough” on national security matters as Republicans.
What happened? A shift in public sentiment and political demographics — thanks in part to Biden himself, and even a bit to Donald Trump — suggests Democrats may be able to leave tough guy national security politics in the dust at Bagram, at least for now.
It’s simple, and true, to say that the most important reason this is happening is Joe Biden. Biden, famously, wanted to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan in the Obama administration. His concerns extended to the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. When voters chose him, they knew what they were getting.
Biden’s willingness to be skeptical of American military engagement is, if not an absolute, a consistent throughline in his very long career. While he initially favored the invasion of Afghanistan, and a few years earlier U.S. operations in the Balkans, he was more active than many Senate Democrats in trying to put speed bumps in the way of George W. Bush’s rush to war in Iraq. And as his biographers have written, when Biden entered politics in the late 1960s, one of the first issues he raised (unwisely, his mentors thought) was opposing the war in Vietnam.
Much of Washington’s professional foreign policy class remains filled with (an understandable) ambivalence about Biden’s decision to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan. But the president, as has often been the case when he seems out of line with the establishment, is channeling broader public opinion.
Majorities of Democrats have told pollsters the war was not worth fighting for nearly a decade now. While GOP voters have come to view U.S. involvement somewhat more favorably since 2014, self-identified independents have also continued to drop their support.
One reason Biden is unlikely to get completely pilloried by Republicans is Trump.
After the former president spent years railing against the “forever wars” and making his own effort to wind down the war in Afghanistan, it will be far harder for conservatives to go after Biden on the issue. Sure, some GOP hawks still fly on Capitol Hill, but Trump’s base has followed him, hobbling party efforts to mount a full-throated critique.
Biden and his advisers have every reason to hope that voters will not punish them for taking the policy route they believe best.
A pause in Democrats’ tough guy stance on national security also stems from a shift in voter demographics: the disappearance of the bloc that Cold War era “Scoop Jackson Democrats” originally targeted.
The think tankers and campaign advisers of the 2000s had a very specific “security voter” in mind. Presumed to be someone who remembered Vietnam and President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 failed hostage rescue with a sense of impotence, the security voter wanted leaders who radiated power and confidence in U.S. military might. Even if only a small minority of voters said national security was important to them in the voting booth, they were thought to matter greatly in close elections and swing states.
It went without saying that this voter was white and male. But that demographic is either gone generationally, or just gone to the GOP and not expected to return. It is an interesting question whether the Black and Latino men reported to be defecting to the GOP are the new swing security voters.
When pollsters noticed that women tended to vote differently from men, Democratic foreign policymakers were told to worry about “security moms.” They too were white, by default. They were worried, campaign advisers imagined, about their kids falling victim to suicide bombers at home or abroad. They were more concerned about the threat of war than men, and they needed to know their government was keeping them safe.
Public opinion professionals hotly debated the existence of “security moms,” like the “soccer moms” that preceded them. But whatever the reality of the aughts, in the last few years polarization has made it clear that it is women’s different partisan affiliation that is driving voting behavior. Women are more likely to vote Democratic than men, and women of color, especially Black women, are far more likely to vote Democratic than white women. Democratic political thinking is now highly focused on varied racial and economic demographics — though we still have little to no research of how views on security and international affairs break down by race and class, and precious little by gender.
With large majorities of veterans and their families also reporting support for full withdrawal, it’s difficult to identify any constituency Democrats might court by keeping troops in Afghanistan.
That is a sea change. With the rise in Americans’ concern over both domestic and non-military threats, it may represent, decades on, a shift away from the Cold War-era intense internationalization of Americans’ security fears.
Still, it doesn’t mean that security fears have gone away or ceased to be potent motivators of voting.
Even as the threat of foreign terrorists has become less prominent in recent years, Trump picked up on the theme of immigration, and immigrants, as a security threat with some success.
His claims were often extreme and false — immigrants commit fewer violent crimes per capita than native-born Americans — but they also seem to have been effective in ramping up enthusiasm for Trump and turning out infrequent voters both for him and for down-ticket Republicans in 2018 and 2020.
So the idea of the “security voter,” and Democrats’ alleged weakness, is still with us. The new form this worry takes is all too clear in the Biden administration’s reluctance to signal when it will fulfill the campaign promise to increase refugee admissions and its eagerness to be seen using military tools to deal with would-be migrants in Mexico and Central America.
If that is the foundation on which Democrats, either center or left, aim to chart a new course in global affairs, they are likely to find its politics as wobbly as its predecessor.
"soft" - Google News
April 17, 2021 at 04:46AM
https://ift.tt/3dpp80b
Why Biden Isn’t Getting Flamed as Being Soft on Terror - POLITICO
"soft" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QZtiPM
https://ift.tt/2KTtFc8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Why Biden Isn’t Getting Flamed as Being Soft on Terror - POLITICO"
Post a Comment