NOT EXACTLY RECENT:

GOP and Democrats trade ideologies? (Godfrey Sperling, 4/05/05, CS Monitor)

Back in the early part of the Iraq war I was intrigued that Anthony Lake, who had been a national security adviser to President Clinton, held this perspective on the foreign policy debate between President Bush and his Democratic critics: That this policy conflict was really between conservatives and radicals and it was the Democrats who had emerged as the conservatives and the Republicans who had become the liberals, or "radicals."

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. elicited that from Mr. Lake in a November 2003 interview. It was part of Lake's assessment of his own Democratic Party's ideological position in resisting the president's forced injection of democracy into Iraq.

Mr. Dionne wrote in that column that the Democrats had been in a box ever since the Iraq debate began because, for many years, they had been identified with the policy of spreading democracy abroad that Mr. Bush had underscored in a speech at that time in which he said: "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."

This has been true since at least 1968, when Democrats gave up on the rest of the world because Vietnam was harder than they thought it would be and maybe since the '50s, when even their best became anti-anti-communists..

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2005 6:17 PM