Here is more of the same article, including the original sub-heading:
In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it’s time to reckon with what they got so wrong
-snip-
It’s a cliche that Americans don’t vote on foreign policy issues. However, according to public opinion surveys by Chris Shell, a fellow with the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, foreign policy played a relatively prominent role in the 2024 election – the climate crisis and immigration registered at the top of voters’ foreign policy concerns, followed by the war in Gaza, the Russia-Ukraine war and US-China relations. Among undecided voters in the weeks leading up to the election, Harris scored higher than Trump on only one of those issues (the climate crisis).
However disingenuous, especially given his aggressive support for rightwing forces in Israel, Trump’s vows to end the two wars dominating headlines were part of a winning message. According to the New York Times: “The Trump campaign’s research found that up-for-grabs voters were about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Trump made a play for these voters, promising to seek peace and attacking Democrats for campaigning with the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney. Just as he did in 2016 when he criticized Hillary Clinton as “trigger happy”, he managed to get to the Democrats’ left on foreign policy.
Democrats have no excuse for being surprised by this. Americans have voted for the less interventionist candidate of the two major parties in every presidential election since the end of the cold war (in the one exception, the post-9/11 election of 2004, John “reporting for duty” Kerry didn’t offer much of an alternative). George W Bush himself originally campaigned in 2000 on a “humbler” foreign policy.
Barack Obama ran and won by opposing not just the Iraq war, but warmongering itself. His memorable line in a January 2008 primary debate – “I don’t want to just end the war. I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place” – wasn’t just a critique of a policy, but of the entire militarist, interventionist foreign policy priesthood, which would later be termed “the Blob” by Obama’s speechwriter and adviser Ben Rhodes.
-snip-
We on DU know very well that there is a strong dislike of rightwing netanyahu's massacres in gaza.
= new reply since forum marked as read