Democracy Means Isolationism

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger has written a sentence that gets to the heart of America’s security policy divide. Henninger is discussing the how anti-Bush forces in Europe and the U.S. are uninterested in promoting democracy anywhere, not just in Iraq. In today’s atmosphere, Henninger explains, the Burmese people don’t have a chance of gathering meaningful Western support. He contrasts Democrats’ current attitude with Democratic President Kennedy, who pushed for democracy abroad as vital to America’s interest.

Then Henniger delivers his fateful sentence:

“The argument for democratic government in places such as Iran is in fact crudely pragmatic: nations with freely operating political parties are likely to be centripetal; their energies bend inward, fighting with each other.”

Bingo!

Henninger, without meaning to, describes the U.S. today, and develops the major argument against his position. America has “freely operating political parties.” Our politics is “centripetal.” Our “energies bend inward, fighting with each other.” We are, in fact, a democracy, and therefore uninterested in going abroad to convert others to democracy. We have our own struggles.

As England fought the Nazis alone, Roosevelt pushed against the natural American tendency to fix on what’s happening here. Bush is only the latest in a long line of presidents who seek to pull Americans together at home to support democracy abroad. But Americans, like Brits, French, Germans, Canadians, Italians, and other democratic people, have “energies” that “bend inward,” toward “each other.” Bush is pushing against the normal state of politics in a democracy.

From World War I to Vietnam, Democratic presidents did most of the pushing. Now Democrats are content to leave the pushing to Republicans, and to reap the political rewards of supporting isolationism. “Return to normalcy,” as GOP President Harding [picture] put it in 1920.