There is a great article at antiwar.com byJustin Raimondo about the growing anti war/non interventionist movement in the republican party. He also wrote peice about the "isolationist" scare tactic that the elites from the Left and Right always use to tar and feather people who speak out against American interventionism and international meddling.
His article is quite long, so I'll just post a part of it.
Unlike Larison, I am willing to give advocates of withdrawal such as Chaffetz the benefit of a doubt, for two reasons. One, it is clear that a great many conservative Republicans are undergoing a transition: faced with the consequences of eight years ofdangerousanddebilitatingmilitarism, some are beginning to question the basic premises of interventionism, as Chaffetz does with his insistence on limiting the goal of the "war on terrorism" to simply taking out al-Qaeda.
Which brings us to the second reason for cutting Chaffetz a little slack, and that is the political importance of an emerging anti-interventionist caucus in the GOP, especially at the congressional level. The political rationale for Democratic hawkishness isalwaysthat the Republicans will supposedly beat up on Obama and the Democrats in Congress if they show "weakness." With a strong anti-interventionist tendency in the GOP, the Democratic Leadership Council and its "centrist" allies will have to come up with a different excuse.
Yes, it's true that politics in Washington is all about partisanship, and to be against this president and his programs is to at least call into question the conduct and motivating principles of his foreign policy – and anti-interventionists shouldn't hesitate for one moment to take full advantage of this. During the run up to the second world war, Republican opposition to FDR"sstrenuous(albeit largelycovert) attempts to drag us into the European side of the conflict provoked antiwar sentiment on the Republican right. The group that came together to oppose the Rooseveltian program of war abroad and a highly-centralized, semi-socialist state at home – those we call, in retrospect,the Old Right– came from very disparate points on the political spectrum: the Hooverites, Liberty Leaguers, and Taft Republicans on the right, and on the left disillusioned old-fashioned liberals like the journalistJohn T. Flynn, and anti-war, anti-Washington Midwestern progressives, such as SenatorBurton K. Wheeler, of Montana. Together, they built the biggest antiwar movement in American history, theAmerica First Committee, which, at its height, had 800,000 dues-paying members, and a large activist contingent.
This is the model we should emulate when building a contemporary movement against our policy of perpetual warfare. It will take a broad-based coalition, one that spans the political spectrum and allows for a high degree of variety, to stand against the Empire. But if we're going to have our old Republic back, it will be a battle worth fighting.
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