What's at Stake in 2024

Since 2016, the Democrats have become, to revisit a phrase from the Iraq War decade, America’s war party. Few anticipated this. Barack Obama’s retort to Mitt Romney’s anti-Russian hawkishness in the 2012 debate (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”) reinforced the longstanding view that Democrats were oriented more towards peace-making than the GOP. No one realized it then, but Obama’s words marked an end of an era that had begun with Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.