It's the Wars, Stupid

Democrats are missing the way that their shift into a more war-happy party is fueling the perception that they have no intention of addressing people’s needs.

In mid-October, as Kamala Harris began to do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the Breakfast Studio of radio host Charlamagne tha God, where she took questions from callers. The first to come through was one of those questions that is often top of mind for voters, but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how the world truly works. 

Why, asked the caller, do we send so much money overseas but seem to have nothing to meet the needs of people here at home? 

“That’s one of the reasons the America First rhetoric resonates,” Charlamagne added, putting the question to Harris. 

“We can do it all—and we do,” Harris responded.

It was a callback to the debate in Washington the last time a Democratic president had pushed through a sweeping new social spending agenda, LBJ’s Great Society, but coupled it with ramped up spending on the Vietnam War. At a press conference in the summer of 1965, one reporter told President Lyndon Johnson, the day after the bombing of North Vietnam. “Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?”

LBJ said that the American people would be willing to bear the burden. “I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face,” he responded. 

He was wrong, of course, and the runaway inflation produced by the war spending broke the back of the New Deal coalition, shattering organized labor and ushering in the Reagan Revolution. 

But, according to Harris, not only could the American people have both guns and butter, they already had it, and it was good. 

“I maintain very strongly America should never pull ourselves away from our responsibility as a world leader and that it is in the interest of our national security and each one of us as Americans and our standing in the world. That being said, we also have an obligation to American citizens, obviously, and people who are here to meet their everyday needs and challenges, which is why, for example, we have done the work in the last four years of bringing down the cost of prescription medications.”

She noted that with the expanded child tax credit, the Biden administration had cut child poverty in half in its first year. “We did that,” she said, but then awkwardly added, given that the credit expired and child poverty doubled again, “We can do that.”

Democrats, as they hunt for the culprit that cost them the election, are getting some of it right. Dramatically expanding the social safety net at the beginning of Biden’s term—letting people know that a better world actually is possible—and then letting it lapse as prices stayed high turned out to be a political handicap. Then, instead of attacking the price hikes as the rotten fruit of greedy CEOs with too much economic and political power, the White House shot down the entire notion of greedflation—since confirmed as a driving factor in those price increases—and instead outsourced the fight against inflation to a Republican Fed chair who jacked up rates, and with it the cost of mortgages and rent.

Maybe Bernie had a point, James Carville conceded recently. Working people do indeed feel abandoned. 

They’re also blaming wokeness, whether its trans girls playing girls sports or the word Latinx or generally the rise of a more dogmatic approach to identity politics that became popular on the left over the past decade. I don’t think they’re wrong to examine that dogmatism — I wrote a widely read piece in 2022 on how the phenomenon was destroying progressive institutions while a culture of fear and silence reigned—but simply blaming wokeness misses a key factor: In order to fend off the rise of economic populism in the form of Bernie Sanders in 2016, it was those same party leaders themselves who turned to identity politics, portraying themselves as the true champions of progressive values and deriding Sanders as a “single issue candidate” – that issue being the economy. “If we broke up the big banks,” Hillary Clinton asked ahead of the Nevada caucuses, “would that end racism?”

Suffice it to say we did not break up the big banks, and we did not end racism. (My book “The Squad” goes over this chapter in painful detail, so I won’t belabor it here.) Now that Democrats have lost again, it’s the very same identity politics they are blaming. It’s an impressive trick: In 2016, cynical wokeness was wielded to fend off a challenge to corporate power. Now wokeness is being thrown overboard to save the Democratic Party elite from a deeper critique of their failure.

But there’s a more fundamental issue Democrats are ignoring, the one brought up by the first caller to Charlamagne. By continuing to think of American foreign policy and American domestic policy as distinct—the former the purview of experts in Washington and the latter the true concern of regular people—rather than in tension, Democrats are missing the way that their shift into a more war-happy party is alienating them from voters and fueling the perception that they have no intention of addressing people’s needs. 

It is apparently easy to forget that the working-class drift away from Democrats underway in the 1980s and 1990s was reversed in 2008 by Barack Obama, who ran as an antiwar candidate against a party shredded by its spearheading of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Eight years later Trump bested Bush’s brother and every other Republican contender by portraying himself (with little evidence, but plenty of confidence) as having opposed Bush’s war. Liberals read “America First” as xenophobic and anti-immigrant, but Trump’s supporters scan it as a promise not to waste money on wars and nation building while our own country crumbles. 

The critique in that slogan, and expressed by that Charlamagne caller, makes an emotional link between issues that are treated as disparate and distinct by political operatives. The jarring price swings at the grocery store and at the pump combined with the out-of-control wars and the surge of migrants at the border to produce a visceral sense that our leaders in Washington were sacrificing the needs of regular people here in the United States. People’s sense that the economy was being handled poorly by Biden was colored by the chaos overseas. And his rapt attention to Ukraine and Israel left little room for confidence that he cared what was going on back here. 

By pretending that the U.S. could do it all, but then only delivering on the foreign wars, Democrats set up ordinary people to view it as a zero sum competition. When Harris says, “We can do it all, and we do,” she is offering a version of conventional wisdom in Washington, which loves to point out whenever people raise complaints like this that wars are paid for out of different accounts than schools, or that much of the aid we’re sending to Ukraine is in the form of weapons, not cash, which means we then get to make new weapons and everybody gets even richer. Even if that’s true, most people don’t consider themselves inside the “we” that’s benefiting from all that. We just see money going toward war and our bills getting harder to pay. 

Think about how the overseas conflicts and the chaotic economy interacted with each other these last four years. One of Biden’s most courageous moves as president, going through with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the face of fierce military and media opposition, wound up costing him badly. Thirteen U.S. servicemembers were killed amid the retreat and the airwaves were filled with the image of Afghans fatally swarming American cargo planes. It was chaos, and Biden never recovered. 

That chaos, which played on repeat, hit just as prices were rising and the Covid-19 pandemic was easing. People were tentatively emerging from lockdown, and crime surged – which in many people’s minds merged with and was blamed on the George Floyd protests, some of which had turned into riots. Kids who’d spent more than a year out of school never recovered. The legislative agenda pushed forward, and was impressive considering the razor-thin margin. Democrats celebrated the bipartisan infrastructure law, which would obviously benefit Americans down the line, but there were no more emergency measures for ordinary people. Climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act was historic, but is now vulnerable to getting crimped by Trump; the child tax credit Harris awkwardly referenced expired, the pause on student debt payments sunset while the Supreme Court blocked debt relief. People could get evicted again and tent cities sprang up around the country.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden assiduously resisted a negotiated end to the conflict. In June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court undid generations of precedent and overturned Roe v. Wade. The war in Ukraine raged on, as the body count piled up and the U.S. shoveled ever greater sums of money into the trenches. Wheat and energy prices fluctuated wildly. Prices eventually began rising at a slower rate, but rose nevertheless, and the response of the Federal Reserve to continuously raise interest rates arguably contributed to the problem, raising the price of mortgages and rent. The migration surge at the border became so large it couldn’t be ignored. That, too, had a foreign policy link. U.S. foreign policy in general has produced an unstable hemisphere with heavy out-migration flows to the United States. During his time in office, Biden tightened sanctions and penalties on Cuba and Venezuela and intervened to fuel chaos in Haiti. The three countries combined sent the bulk of migrants at key moments.

Then came October 7 and the horrifying images it produced. Weeks of a relentless and indiscriminate Israeli response turned into months. Biden and his administration took a public posture that the U.S. wanted a ceasefire, yet the attack only ratcheted up, as the death count reached shocking numbers, and U.S. weapons and financing went up with it. Biden’s stated goal was to “contain the conflict” in Gaza, but it periodically broke out into regional war, shipping was effectively halted. In October, Netanyahu, with the aim of defeating Biden, launched assaults on Lebanon and Iran, which launched their own assaults in retaliation. And the Ukraine war with its ever present threat of nuclear catastrophe, grinds on.

Does that sound like we can do it all?