What Peace Party Doing?
What Peace Party Doing?
Whole lotta peace, breaking out around here
Sometimes the two-party nature of American politics obscures more than it reveals. An example is the “peace party,” such as it exists within the two-party system.
On the “left,” broadly defined, Barbara Lee is a dedicated pacifist. On the “right,” broadly defined, stands Kevin McCarthy. They represent two districts from the same state in the US House of Representatives.
Opposed as partisans, enacting two very different motives, both are skeptics of foreign intervention within their respective parties.
A week ago, McCarthy signalled that he could be more grudging about future aid packages to Ukraine in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Two days later, Lee’s Democratic peace caucus issued a letter calling for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine.
Some signatories quickly disavowed the letter after taking heat from their own party. Rep. Pramila Jayapal withdrew the letter after one day, but by that time a circular firing squad had already formed, with some signatories claiming that the document was first drafted in June and July, when the battlefield was very different in Ukraine. As others have noted, this just makes the whole thing look worse.
Is this “horseshoe theory,” in which ideological opposites find common interest at the fringe of an issue? Any synaptic signal between these two partisan events must exist within the opaque connective matrix of lawmakers’ staff.
To use an all-American phrase, it would be congressional “inside baseball,” and hardly representative of some greater potential for cooperation.
Support for Ukraine is still the popular position within the Republican Party, but it is even more popular with Democratic voters. This produces a perverse result, as negative partisanship is the single most unappreciated force in American politics today. That is, Republican popular support for Ukraine has deteriorated precisely because Joe Biden and Democrats are enthusiastic supporters of Ukraine.
A full court press of Kremlin agitprop has encouraged this thinking all around, left and right. If things get bad enough, Vladimir Putin reasons, the weak-willed West will break, and make Ukraine sue for peace. It won’t work.
From his own perspective, McCarthy is just taking the usual political hostages and pandering to the antiwar faction within his own party. It is worth recalling that McCarthy came to Congress as part of the “Freedom Caucus,” the Tea Party-tinged faction of new, rebel Republicans that made everything so interesting in Washington, DC during the Obama presidency.
Now a new class of “Trump Republicans,” notably Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, wants to stop supporting Ukraine, or reduce that support. To what extent their adoration for Putin and Russia inspires their language of fiscal responsibility is a useless debate.
What matters is that McCarthy long ago learned how a small faction can extract policy concessions as the price of forming a majority to support legislation. So it is not correct to say that a Republican majority in the next Congress will automatically bring victory to Russia.
For Joe Biden and Democrats who are not in the peace party, the price of future legislation to support Ukraine will increase. Add it to the wider inflationary pressures of the war on costs of all kinds, everywhere. But that’s it. That’s the net effect that Putin will get from his best-case US midterm election scenario next Tuesday.
No peace.
Until 2016, Ron Paul and Rand Paul were perhaps the most famous recent examples of the peace party within Republican politics. In the 19th Century “Real Whig” tradition, these “paleoconservatives” are suspicious of American involvement overseas as an operating principle.
Crossover and third-party votes from antiwar opponents of Hillary Clinton added another small edge for Donald Trump in a tight election. So although the peace party remains a minority in the GOP, it has proven consequential, even decisive.
If Putin is counting on a Republican-controlled Congress to save him, however, he will be sorely disappointed when they extort other spending cuts in place of Ukraine aid.
It’s what the GOP will do because it is what they always do, being ideological enemies of federal spending, first and foremost, since 1978.
Lee, by contrast, is an ideological enemy of war itself since at least the same date. Two decades of relentless work to repeal the 2001 AUMF (Authorization of Military Force), the emergency measure which legitimated two decades of failed overseas occupation, left her as the acknowledged leader of the peace party within the Democratic caucus.
A full inventory of Lee’s leftist and progressive political credentials would bore the reader. She would probably not refuse comparisons to Eugene V. Debs, the American Socialist Party presidential nominee who led opposition to US involvement in the First World War.
If Lee had real power within the Democratic Party, she might be a threat to Ukraine aid in the next Congress. But she is not, and the minority faction of a minority party does not get to make any rules about anything.
There is no American peace party, no lobby in Congress strong enough to stop aid for Ukraine altogether, or prevent Russian defeat in 2023. Forget about it.
Elon Musk is a handy reference to where the peace party lives. Politically heterodox and libertarian, more a dilletante than a deep geopolitical thinker, his public steps into this domain have met with derision. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether such criticism is deserved. Observing Musk’s Twitter stumblings, however, I was reminded of an earlier industrialist who waded into the cold and unforgiving waters of wartime peace advocacy.
In 1915, a diverse group of international pacifists convinced Henry Ford to hire a steamship and embark on a peace mission to end the First World War. It was an embarrassing failure. Ford caught a bad cold in Copenhagen and returned to the United States without the squabbling, faction-riven crew of peace partisans that had crossed the Atlantic in his rented ship.
Without their philanthroper, the peace mission turned into a farce by the time it reached Stockholm. They were complete amateurs and innocents abroad, alternating between solidarity displays and struggle sessions. Before the “Peace Ship” even touched European shores, as they drew their charter of peace, it was apparent that divisions over a passage condemning the “preparedness movement” in the United States had irreparably fractured them.
Just as Henry Ford’s affections for Hitler later proved ephemeral, Musk is not married to Putin’s welfare, or Russia’s. He cannot, will not save Putin.
There will only be peace in Ukraine when one or both combatants have had enough. Until then, no outside party will convince either of them to stop. Indeed, both seem more maximalist in their goals than ever.
It is a false truism of our time that ideology leads to violence, and that the right set of ideas will resolve the need for violence.
We can observe its falsity demonstrated every time the “peace party” gathers to make peace and the factions begin to form against each other. Political science has a term for this behavior: it is fissiparous, as in fissile, a kind of nuclear meltdown that emits great heat and perhaps a little bit of light while turning issues radioactive.
Radicalism has always been its own undoing this way and peace has always been the radical proposition. As a result, faith in unifying figures replaces programmatic agendas and a personality becomes the only viable organizing principle.
In the American context, this just produces…politics. Never peace.