Let me say right of the bat that I am not a democrat. I amhowever quite liberal.
Most everyone here knows about the PNAC
Now…read this.
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=252144&subsecid=900020&knlgAreaID=450004
Is that any different than the pubbies?
No it’s not. It calls for America to run the world.
I looked in my Being an American handbook. It said nothing about us running the world.
I don’t have the faintest idea what you want to debate here, Reeder. I read both websites–so what? So two groups of people both apparently have the same “America Rules, The World Drools!” agenda–so what?
It’s a legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who himself drew on 18th and 19th century American exceptionalism. It’s not a new idea that America is somehow special, and that it’s America’s moral duty to spread liberal democracy around the world. Even the founders of the country argued that American democratic ideals represented the next stage of political development, and that we had a duty to enlighten Europe. As Paine said, in his “Rights of Man”
and
It’s not a surprise that you find these attitudes across the political spectrum.
My point is you see dems on this board blasting the pubbies on this board for pnac while the dems are spouting basically the same thing.
They are just taking a slightly different road.
Pubs? Demmies? HATE SPEECH!
semi-related drive-by
"The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best."
Welcome to the world Reedy ol’ pal.
Can’t trust politicans. We th eelectorate can only hope to keep tham at each other long enough to get our lives lived.
Exactly.
Tell me you love our “two” party system.
I’d just like to say that I object to the term “Pubs” when referring to Republicans. It gives pubs a bad name. 
Is there some reason to believe that page is representative of most democrats, or the democratic party?
Of course there are whackos on the edge of both parties. In fact, I’ve often heard that the political spectrum is better described as circle, not as a line with “Conservative” and “Liberal” at each ends. The fringe elements wrap around the circle and meet.
Since the first days of the Republic, we have been among the most expansionistic powers in history. Look at our power and influence 220-some years ago, and look at it now. And note that our expansion didn’t all take place under the august rule of Bushco; It’s been going on since day one.
Why change now?
Surprise. 
Was it written by the group of people who will form the backbone of the Kerry administration? That might make a slight difference, since the PNAC people included major Bush administration figures and Jeb Bush. So some Democrats think of America in the same terms as some Republicans. That hardly merits shrieking “the parties are the same!” Not all Republicans agree with the PNAC, although the ones in power do. Likewise, not all Democrats agree with these guys, so the notion that this makes them all the same doesn’t fly. Being a Republican doesn’t mean you have to disagree with Democrats on every single thing and vice versa. I don’t agree with everything these guys say, but they don’t strike me as radicals so far.
“Once again the United States must rally the forces of freedom and democracy around the world to defeat this new menace and build a better world.”
Ooh, scary.
What exactly is the contrary position that (I guess) you’d support, Reeder? Agreeing that America should reduce its power worldwide? America occupies the most powerful place in the world today. To argue that we should behave as if we didn’t doesn’t make sense, and if you argue we should give somebody else the reins no one else will agree.
I agree with a lot of what the PPI said, and disagree with some. As far as a call for Americans to run the world, I don’t buy into it. The PPI may be Democrats, but they don’t necessarily represent the views of all Democrats.
If it’s not clear, this is a quote from the PPI website.
I’m wondering if everybody who’s posted has actually read the article that’s so upset Reeder?
Here’s a representative quote (representative because it summarizes one of the four main points of the article):
I have difficulty seeing more than one similarity between the PPI and PNAC. Both organizations desire American global leadership, but where the PPI advocates “[S]haping a world congenial to our interests… through collective action”, the PNAC requires unassailable supremacy assured by unilaterality and aggressive preemption of any attempt by a rival to gain equivalent military or economic capability. These are two quite different interpretations of global leadership.
In fact, I find it impossible to believe the PNAC would recognize anything about the “progressive internationalism” of the PPI as compatible with its own positions, emphasizing as the PPI does such principles as “broadly shared prosperity”, “global labor and environmental standards” and the importance to peace and security of not only “relations between states but also between state and society”, which it proposes might be achieved only by working through those international institutions so derided by the neocons.
Perhaps the OP should look beyond the similar sounding rhetorical flourishes and consider instead the underlying (and distinctive) philosophies.
Because genocide was the result of much of the expansion?
Reeder has a point, but it’s a bit tougher to make than the way that he’s doing it.
For reference, remember that LBJ was a Democrat. That alone should give everyone pause. GWB would recognize in LBJ a kindred spirit.
The US doesn’t owe the rest of the world the obligation of keeping it in order, and the rest of the world doesn’t want us to, anyway. There was a column in the Financial Times the other day (can’t link to it, as it requires a paid subscription) which pointed out that the Iraq war ended two myths about American power:
1 - that our military was unassailable, a thing which the guerrilla war in Iraq has proven, the way Vietnam did a generation ago, is just plain wrong. No government in its right mind would want to go against the US military, but that’s different from thinking that the US can waltz into a country and have its way unopposed.
2 - The Abu Ghraib revelations put to rest any idea that the US military was any less brutal than anyone else’s. Brutality is a function of circumstance, and a military occupation will bring out the worst in any military, as happened to the French in Algeria, and as has happened with the IDF in the Territories.
Given that, both the neocon ideology and the “muscular neoliberalism” (the FT’s term) that you see in Reeder’s second cite are both goners. Not a second too soon as far as I’m concerned. If another Bosnia happens in Europe, it will have to be a European-dominated and led force that contains it.
I will be voting for Kerry, but I have no illusions about his potential for leading us to Hell on a road paved with good intentions. The solution is to end the power of the Executive to wage war on its own word. As I have pointed out ad nauseum, this is the real problem, one that our Constitution was meticulously designed to prevent.
Yeah, we do, if for no other reason than that we’re the largest, most powerful liberal democracy out there, and that fundamentally, liberal democracy is a good thing and needs to be spread. People have basic rights that need to be protected, not just in the US, not just in the “west”. People in the Sudan, in Iran, in China, wherever, need to have the right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to have a voice in their nations policies, and if the Western democracies don’t help them gain those rights, then we are shams as nations, and our values are lies.
I concur with xenophon41 on this. A similar PPI quote that caught my eye was this:
Didn’t bother to re-read the PNAC BS, but I know what Bush’s foreign policy has been like, and this is far from it.
The PNAC and PPI both believe America has a leading role to play in world affairs. Once you get past that, though, the differences pile up pretty fast.
No, no, no, Captain Amazing. There is no practical difference between Dubya’s ignorant international idiocy and this sentence:
…from the PPI cite Reeder provided in the OP.
This is a very cleverly constructed strawman, but a strawman nevertheless. Allow me to reduce it to ashes.
The US has no role to play, outside of the framework of the UN, in ending human rights abuses in other countries. We have enough on our hands at home, given that one of the guards at Abu Ghraib was alleged to have learned some of the “techniques” he practiced there as a correctional officer right here. As for terrorism, if they attack us, we’re perfectly within our rights to go after them. We are also perfectly within our rights to support international efforts against terrorism. We are not within our rights when we turn an ordinary, delusional dictator like Sodamn Insane into a world-class conqueror and invade his country on that basis, because the UN is “ineffectual”. That phrase could have come right out of Dubya’s ignorant mouth without editting.
The UN Charter, it should be noted, allows countries to act in self-defense against those who attack them, and on that basis the action against the Taliban in Afghanistan was easily justifiable, and no one said “boo” in the UN against us for that.
In short, our armed forces are there to protect us, and we would do well to concentrate on making sure they do so and are able to prevent a repeat of 9/11. International actions against tyrants like Saddam, who pose no threat to us, are covered by the UN. Our children are not so much cannon fodder to be fed into justifying the ideological idiocies of fools like Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz and Cheney. The PPI statement is just a very slightly different flavor of the same arrogant, idiotic, ignorant nonsense.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
My child is not going to act as your asphalt.
No. But it does mean that anyone who thinks the U.S. should drastically scale down its military establishment and phase out military interventions abroad – and there are a lot of voters in both parties who feel that way – has no pacifist or isolationist candidate to vote for in this election. (Unless you want to vote for Nader, or the Green, or the Libertarian, and what’s the point of that?) Yes, this election does present a real choice – there are a lot of important ways Kerry is different from Bush – but on the basic questions of military and foreign policy, they are not that far apart.