THE STORY BEING TOLD IN WASHINGTON, D.C., among pundits and in the establishment of the Democratic Party, is that the Democrats lost another election because they are weak on defense and perceived as "anti-military" by the American voters.
The generic conclusion that "the country is too conservative to elect a liberal" has already become accepted wisdom among the so-called "Washington realists." This analysis, of course, comes not from examining what the electorate embraced or rejected in the course of the campaign, but from what labels and images appeared to stick to the candidates in the race for the White House.
Ironically, to be elected, Bush had to portray himself as "the education president," "the day care president," "the environmental president," "the arms control president," "the Social Security president." This liberal agenda was cloaked in a flag of conservative ideology and fortified with daily doses of innuendo, appeals to racism, negativism, and fear.
Bush implied that the positive domestic agenda is held hostage to a threat from outside, supported by unknowing or willing accomplices--the Democrats and the peace movement--aiming to weaken America's defenses. If we let down our commitment to an ever-enlarging military, we will, we are told, somehow lose the lease on the American Dream.
The "enemy" has once again been used to mobilize a citizenry against its own best interests. The Democrats have allowed the right-wing ideologues to structure the national debate.
Meanwhile, the voters learned what liberals are: people who will obscure or change their beliefs to accommodate their private ambitions. Dukakis ran on an essentially pro-military platform. His campaign favored maintaining current defense spending levels, which amounts to approval of Reagan's massive military buildup. It called for a conventional buildup in Central Europe, the most heavily militarized zone in the world. And it favored deployment of an assortment of first-strike nuclear weapons systems.
Moreover, Dukakis hedged on the bombing of Libya and the invasion of Grenada, and he indicated flexibility on Star Wars. Only on the question of Nicaragua did Dukakis demonstrate consistency, favoring diplomacy and full participation in the Arias peace plan. His emphasis on the need for non-military resolution to regional conflicts was an important, even if overlooked, difference between the governor and the vice president.
While Bush appeared to rally public sentiment behind slogans such as "peace through strength," if asked what the greatest threat to national security is, the American public increasingly names drugs, the economy, and environmental threats. For the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, the "enemy" is not another people or ideology.
But given enough time and television ads, Bush campaign strategist Roger Ailes may have succeeded in transferring the fear and anger about drugs onto the Third World and onto black Americans. The insidious nature of the Willie Horton ad, the push toward using the military for drug interdiction, and the potential for blaming America's drug problems on Central America are purposeful and sophisticated uses of polling to manipulate public fear and anxiety.
STILL, THE GREATEST IRONY is that this resurgence of militarism among national politicians occurs at precisely the moment that a popular consensus is forming around the fact that new world realities demand fresh policies, beyond militarism. Public opinion is increasingly sophisticated about military and foreign policy issues. This is in large part due to the efforts of the peace movement.
A significant share of the peace movement's task is to promote political literacy in our own country. Every town meeting organized, every opportunity arranged for people to make their own judgments and come to their own decisions about U.S. foreign and military policy, is an investment in future social and political change. As people are confronted with these moments of decision, they are given the information, the tools, the sense of their own power to determine the shape of national security policies.
Washington is the place where decisions are made. It is not, however, the place where all the power is or where the most effective campaigns are always fought and won. The real political battle is between those who innovate and introduce ideas, intending to set the foreign and military policy agenda.
The Committee on the Present Danger, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (and other new conservative groups now more fully integrated into the Republican Party structure) create and generate arguments and political support for continued militarization of foreign policy. On the progressive side, peace groups, various institutes, and others form a loosely organized network, sporadically and ambivalently embraced by the Democratic Party, to press for a new peace politics.
Each side in this competition needs the collaboration of elected officials. But the politicians follow; they do not lead. Political power and short-term success demand that the peace movement redefine the larger security agenda and engage in what right-wing architect Irving Kristol calls the "war of ideas." In fighting to give legitimacy to our ideas, we push back the boundaries of what is now considered reasonable or politically possible.
Those who set the agenda have significant, perhaps decisive, power. This reality was amply demonstrated during the presidential campaign. The most powerful tool against war and the arms race, however, is unfettered imagination. The national security state cannot endure the release of political imagination, the invention of new language and new ways of thinking about and organizing around the U.S. global role.
If the tedious months of the 1988 campaign exposed anything, it is the enormous vacuum that exists in the work of defining national security. It is this political vacuum that the peace movement is handed as the Bush administration takes office.
We have an opportunity to put forward policy proposals to end the arms race, restructure U.S.-Soviet relations, reduce military spending, and create a U.S. foreign policy dedicated to resolving regional and global conflicts. In order to turn such proposals into policy, however, we must reject the Cold War as the context in which the peace movement conducts legislative, electoral, and nonviolent direct action campaigns and promote instead the context of "common security."
Common security is both a new way of thinking about the conduct of international relations and a political program. It recognizes the fundamental realities of a world weary of war: No nation can achieve security at the expense of another. Common security demands real progress in disarmament, development, and the resolution of regional conflicts. The challenge now is to convince cynical politicians that the public is ready for a principled and common sense approach to foreign policy.
Pam Solo was co-director of the Institute for Peace and International Security in Cambridge, Massachusetts when this article appeared.
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