ARE THE DEMOCRATS DIFFERENT?
Armstrong, Robert
THE SPIRIT OF TORQUEMADA,THE FIFteenth century friar who headed the Spanish Inquisition, has returned to haunt the politics of 1984. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary assertion that...
...The Olympics were a repeat performance-again largely uncontested victories over a world cast in the role of enemy...
...Reagan as Indiana Jones, suggested another commentator...
...The next four years may take us into uncharted areas of confrontation, and nowhere are the risks greater than in Central America...
...If there were any doubts in anyone's mind before the Republican Natipnal Convention, the Dallas Coronation should surely have laid them to rest...
...Precisely here is the danger: the victories of Reagan's first four years have been uncontested and symbolic...
...Ronald Reagan's extraordinary assertion that the Democrats have moved "so far left, they've left America" is only one example of the new inquisitorial style in politics, which includes only the radical Right in the acceptable patriotic spectrum...
...The party's old Liberal ideology, epitomized by Walter Mondale, seems finally to have run out of steam, but its challengers from both ends of the political spectrum are unequipped as yet to give the party a coherent new form...
...Since 1981, NACLA staff writer Robert Armstrong has published a series of Reports posing major questions about U.S...
...One European visitor to the United States during the Los Angeles Olympics caught the new mood in a perceptive letter to The New York Times...
...foreign policy since World War II...
...U.N...
...The second, By What Right?, looked at U.S...
...But defying the tide of history is a dangerous business...
...The first, entitled Will the Empire Strike Back?, looked at the coalition that brought Reagan to power...
...Reagan's characterization of today's Democrats as wildeyed leftists is, of course, absurd...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick-the prime exponent of the inquisitorial style of politics-once touched on the real heart of this Administration's foreign policy, asking rhetorically why it was wrong for the United States to help its friends "stand against the tide of history...
...The odyssey of the Democratic Party since the New Deal is a complex and fascinating one...
...Those impulses have capitalized alarmingly on a wave of jingoistic sentiment in this country...
...For all Reagan's wishful thinking, in a second term the number of Grenada-style knockdown victories will be strictly limited...
...With the vital added ingredient of strident Christian fundamentalism, the new intolerance of the Right in a sense goes one step beyond McCarthyism...
...The tone of the event and the Republican platform, dominated by men like Falwell, Kemp and Gingrich, made it clear that the Reagan revolution is unfinished...
...Now, Armstrong's latest Report asks, Are the Democrats Different...
...politics and foreign policy...
...This most radical of conservative administrations would interpret re-election as a mandate to give free rein to its darker impulses, particularly in the realm of foreign policy...
...And faced with a challenge of that magnitude, just where do today's Democrats stand...
...The fantasy of subduing a complex and inexplicable world was first satisfied a year ago, the writer believed, by the Grenada invasion...
...But we agree with Ronald Reagan about one thing: the 1984 election is the most important choice of our lifetime...
...Reagan's tendentious marriage of politics and religion identifies political dissent, quite literally, as an act of heresy...
Vol. 18 • September 1984 • No. 5
