The Democrats Have Always Been "Liberal" Interventionists

The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.

This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated bythe public debate betweenColumbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.

Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd theAmerican political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucraciesthat would undermine democracy.

While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.

Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitledUntimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on asolid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.