A seemingly ceaseless supply of new books and radio talk-show commentary in support of George W. Bush and his foreign policy give the impression that the only controversy in America worth mentioning involves patriotic Bush supporters and knee-jerk opposition to war by liberals.
Two arguments are being made here: that the Iraq War and foreign-policy aggressiveness constitute the self-evidently correct conservative position and that liberals are philosophically and historically squeamish about going to war. The first of these arguments has been addressed at length in these pages. It is the second claim, involving the American Leftâ??s alleged aversion to war, that remains to be overturned, for ever since the Spanish-American War of 1898, leftists have more often than not been at the forefront of calls for American military intervention abroad.
The progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the tendency toward American territorial expansion and foreign-policy aggrandizement. Domestic reform and foreign intervention, to many progressives, were simply two sides of the same coin: just as an invigorated federal government would achieve order and social justice at home, an interventionist foreign policy would spread the benefits of progressivism around the world. â??At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War,â? explains historian William Leuchtenburg, â??few men saw any conflict between social reform and democratic striving at home and the new imperialist mission; indeed, the war seemed nothing so much as an extension of democracy to new parts of the world, and few political figures exceeded the enthusiasm of William Jennings Bryan for the Spanish war.â?
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