Democrats, and 21 percent saying both would do a good job.[15] The perception that Democrats are weak on national security—a perception that made the partisan exploitation of 9/11 possible—didn’t really settle in until the 1980s. And it had very little to do with the realities of defense or foreign policy. Instead it was a matter of story lines, and above all about the Rambofication of history.
Defeat is never easy to acknowledge. After World War I many Germans famously came to believe in the
If there was a moment when these theories went mainstream, it was with the success of the 1982 film
After the stab in the back came the revenge fantasies.
The newly belligerent mood of the nation clearly worked to the advantage of conservatives. The actual record of liberals in opposing the Vietnam War probably wasn’t that important: By the 1980s the realities of what happened had largely slipped from public memory. What mattered, instead, was the way movement conservatives’ fear and loathing of communism resonated with the desires of a nation rebounding from post-Vietnam syndrome. When Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” liberals and moderates tended to scoff—not because they were weak on national security, but because they were pragmatic about what it took to achieve security. But many Americans loved it.
Movement conservatism’s efforts to identify itself as the nation’s defender were aided by the fact that the military itself, always a conservative institution, became much more so after the mid-seventies. In 1976 a plurality of military leaders identified themselves as independents, while a third identified themselves as Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds considered themselves Republicans.[16] This shift in political identification probably had several causes. One was that military leaders, who were less able than civilians to put the Vietnam defeat behind them, may have been especially susceptible to the stab-in-the-back myth. It may also have had something to do with budgets: Carter presided over the post-Vietnam shrinkage of the military, Reagan vastly increased military spending, then Clinton presided over another decline, this time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Regional politics also played a role. As one account[17] put it:
[The shift of the military toward Republicans] also resulted from changed recruitment and base-closing policies, combined with the steady Republicanization of the American South. The period since the late 1960s saw the closure of many northeastern ROTC programs and the expansion of those programs in the South. By the late 1990s, more than 40% of all ROTC programs were in the South—mainly at state universities—though the South is home to fewer than 30% of the nation’s college students. Similar patterns in base closures have meant that disproportionate numbers of military personnel are now stationed at bases in the South and Southwest.
Last but not least, there may also have been a “values” component: As American society became more permissive, the military—where adultery is still considered a crime under certain circumstances—grew increasingly alienated. The sexual revolution, which we usually associate with the sixties, didn’t go mass-market until the seventies, a point emphasized by the title of one of John Updike’s many novels about adultery and the human condition,
As movement conservatism gained power, then, it was increasingly able to wrap itself in the flag—to claim to be stronger on national security than the other side, and to claim the support of a large majority of military leaders.
It’s hard to make the case, however, that the perceived Republican advantage on national security played a crucial role in any national election before 9/11. That perception did hurt Democrats on several occasions: The image of Michael Dukakis in a tank helped lose the 1988 election, and the fracas over gays in the military contributed to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Military votes made the difference in 2000, but so did many other things: In an election that close any factor that gave the GOP a few thousand votes can be called decisive.
It was only with the 2002 and 2004 elections that national security became a true election-winning issue. Faced with business scandals, a weak economy, and the normal tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections, Republicans should have lost ground in 2002, ending up with Democratic control of the Senate and, quite possibly, of the House as well. But the nation rallied around George Bush, as he promised to punish the “evildoers” responsible for 9/11 and bring in Osama dead or alive. And Bush’s party engaged in raw political exploitation of the atrocity, including ads in which the faces of Democrats morphed into Saddam Hussein. The result was a big victory for the GOP.
By the 2004 election doubts about the Iraq War were growing, but much of the electorate was still in a state of denial. On the eve of the election a majority of voters still believed that the United States did the “right thing” in invading Iraq, was on a path to victory, or both.[18] And national security almost certainly gave Bush his winning margin.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, there were many pronouncements to the effect that the perceived Republican advantage on national security would help cement a permanent Republican majority. Thus Thomas Edsall, whom I’ve already credited for his prophetic 1984 book,
Yet there is a good case to be made that the successful exploitation of security in 2002 and 2004 was an inherently limited, perhaps inherently self-defeating strategy. Unless the United States is actively engaged in major warfare, national security tends to recede as an issue. The elder George Bush learned that in 1992: The 1991 Gulf War temporarily gave him an 80 percent approval rating, but a year later the public’s attention had shifted to economic concerns, and the Democrats regained the White House in spite of public perceptions that they were weak on defense issues.
The same thing initially seemed to be happening to the younger Bush: By the summer of 2002 his approval rating had descended from the stratosphere, and public attention was shifting to corporate scandals and the weak economy. Then came the buildup to war with Iraq. We may never know exactly why the administration wanted that war so badly, but military adventurism does have the effect of giving national security, an issue that the Republicans thought they owned, continuing salience.
The problem, which eventually became all too apparent, is that keeping concerns about national security on the front burner means picking fights with people who shoot back—and in real life the bad guys have better aim than they did in the Rambo movies. The quagmire in Iraq wasn’t an accident: Even if the Iraqis had welcomed us with flowers and sweets, there would have been a bigger, worse quagmire down the line. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a British official told
What’s more, movement conservatism and major war efforts don’t mix. Any major military mobilization prompts calls for equal sacrifice, which means tax increases, a crackdown on perceived profiteering, and more. Both world wars led to a rise in union membership, an increase in tax progressivity, and a reduction in income inequality—all anathema to conservatives. Much has been written about the disastrous lack of planning for post-
