Note: I don’t believe (or want) that the Republican and Democratic parties are really going to switch on this issue. It is merely for illustration so I can get some sense of it.
Historically, Republicans and Democrats have stood for various things that have eventually migrated to the other side. Today, President Obama has some foreign policy chops while Mitt Romney tends to be fairly quiet about foreign policy. And the relative conventions played up the troops more than normal (?) for the Democrats while playing them down more than normal (?) for the Republicans. (This is a perception, not a claim of reality.)
Is this the way parties end up switching sides on an issue? If we were to see (and I hope we won’t) dovish Dems become hawks and hawkish Reps become doves, would this be the sort of beginnings of it? Historically, have switches come all at once or like this, with a gradual meeting in the middle that eventually splits apart again?
I’m simply not well-versed in American political history.
Historical perspectives from other countries and cultures welcome.
The incumbent President always plays up his foreign policy experience. It’s one of the perks of being the President. The other guy really can’t compete on the issue.
And the challenger always wants to talk about the economy when it isn’t going so great. Remember the 1992 election?
I didn’t really watch either convention, so can’t really comment on that, but I will note that hawkish Democrats have been around for a long time.
I think it’s more like: a sizable contingent of party A disagrees with their party on an issue or two. Eventually they may jump ship to party B, or form their own party C, which thus far lasts a little bit of time then collapses back into A or B. We saw this with the Southern Democrats of the 20th century, and Reform, Progressive, etc. parties. Also, the Democrats were more conservative post Civil War, but then they split into conservative, rural Southern Democrats, and the less conservative, urban, ethnic European, Northern Democrats.
In other words, I don’t believe that anything like this will happen just during Obama, Romney, or Bush presidencies. It needs things like the beginning of a schism and/or the older people to die off and be replaced by people with different opinions, but not usually radically different, at least immediately. There’s all kinds of factions now, like for Republicans: religious conservatives, big business Repubs, pseudo-libertarians, hawks, etc. If say the Democrats started a more pro-business stance, and held onto it long enough, some of the libertarian types may consider that side to be more enticing, and the social conservatism that they’ve put up with so far a turn off.
I think there’s usually a restructuring, and it happens over time. When the Republican Party was formed it drew the Whigs and many Democrats from the Northeast. Many people left the Republican Party during the Great Depression, and new voters joined the Democratic Party in greater numbers through the 1940s because of the popularity of FDR. In the 1950s Hubert Humphrey helped convince the Democratic Party to take a civil rights stance and the Dixiecrats began to defect to the Republican Party. After Wallace was shot, and the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy the south turned more Republican. There’s usually a major event associated with the changes, but it takes time for the ripples to expand out over the water.
I’m not sure being hawkish or dovish are really positions per se. The parties don’t have blanket policies for or against using the military; it all depends on what the military is to be used for. A lot of conservatives were against Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans, even some of the most hawkish cold warriors. Going back even further, liberals were the ones pushing for the US’s entry into World War Two, whereas most conservatives were isolationists until Pearl Harbor.
Our Middle-Eastern wars have obviously dominated discussion of the military as of late and were mostly conservative-driven affairs, but it’s perfectly conceivable that a military crisis could come along that has the liberals as hawks and conservatives as doves. It didn’t really last long enough to become controversial, but opinion about US military support for the Libyan uprising seemed to be forming roughly along those lines.
Republicans traditionally considered themselves the anti-war party. They’ve blamed Democratic wars for being a drag on the economy. Their rhetoric has always been hawkish, but they’ve considered themselves the party that cleans up the military messes created by Democrats. The Bush dynasty has made that an impractical argument now.
I don’t see that the GOP and the Dems have switched positions on foreign policy. The Dems have had a more nuanced view of it than the GOP for some time now. The only difference is that GOP foreign policy has been so badly discredited among the voting public that Republicans aren’t publicizing the issue as they traditionally do.Can anyone name issues where the parties have adopted each others former position? It almost never happens, it seems to me.
What happens is that when one party finds a position no longer advantageous they quietly adopt the opposing view and, it no longer being contested, the issue drops out of the public debate. The one issue I can think of is active government. The Democrats, going all the way back to Jackson, were suspicious of government programs while the new Republican Party of Lincoln et al wanted the government to make changes. With the Democratics critically weakened by the Civil War the Republican upstarts became the dominant party and over the decades in power came to adopt the suspicion of governmental intervention typical of the well fed. Eventually the Great Depression gave the Democrats a way out of the wilderness by adopting governmental activism via the New Deal. So what happened was that the parties fell into agreement and when they fell out again, much later, they were on different sides than they had been previously.