This isn’t because Democrats don’t have any policy ideas in general. In fact, the party is teeming with them: Various Democrats in Congress, including some 2020 presidential prospects, have advanced new ideas on issues ranging from tweaking Obamacare by allowing all Americans to buy-in to Medicaid, to addressing structural racism in the criminal justice system by paying states to reduce their prison populations, to stopping the rise of monopolies in the tech field by requiring the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to protect small tech companies from anti-competitive practices. On many of these issues, the party has moved substantially to the left of where it has been in the past. [...]
When Trump announced his decision to keep fighting in Afghanistan in late August, for example, the party had no unified alternative plan for the country. Leading 2020 hopefuls like Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris didn’t even issue a statement on America’s longest-running war. The most recent Democratic Party standard bearer, Hillary Clinton, sounded very similar to Republicans on foreign policy. On Syria, for example, her plan — imposing a no fly zone over a swath of the country and increasing US support for rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — is strikingly similar to ideas you hear today from congressional Republicans like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. [...]
Congressional staffs and party officials often have their hands full just doing their day-to-day jobs, and true academic scholarship typically doesn’t focus on developing actionable policy ideas. Think tanks bridge the gap, translating academic knowledge into concrete proposals policymakers can use. They’re also a place to produce talent, to groom officials who can take new positions when there is a transfer of power. [...]
A major part of the problem is the money: Rich liberal donors were interested in funding national security policy work after the 2003 Iraq invasion turned into a fiasco, but their interest has petered out in recent years. Another part of the problem appears to be liberalism itself: The liberal base is highly divided over the use of American military power and Washington’s place in the world. [...]
The tools of foreign policy also sit uneasily with the liberal conscience. Diplomacy and foreign aid are fine, but economic sanctions and the use of military force will always be controversial among people on the left. Think about the fraught debates in 2011 over humanitarian intervention in Libya, for example — in which some liberals argued that the US had a duty to stop Muammar Qaddafi from killing while others warned of the consequences of another war for regime change.
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