Daniel Drezner is a perceptive scholar (you don't get a tenure track job at Chicago without some smarts!), and I love his support for free trade (go New Zealand agriculture exports!).
His latest column at TNR is a bit limp, in buying into the tired, cliched descriptors that political journalists use to place people in the spectrum of ideas; left and right, liberal and conservative.
How, for example, is "equality of opportunity" a conservative trope?
More substantively, though, how does calling to expand the size of military make one "right wing" or "conservative". In the context of the current debate, all the Democrats are saying is that we should cut our cloth to fit our needs, not pretend that we can get by with a size 4 army when we have size 16 on steroid needs for that army.
If there were no major external threats or military responsibilities then calling for an increase in the size of the military might qualify as right wing, but not now.
My point, differently put but similar to Matthew Yglesias', is that you can only evaluate these things in context.
In 1940 the Democratic party was more martial than the Republican party, so does that make a strong military a left wing issue the Republicans have co-opted?
Posted by robe0419 at July 29, 2004 2:38 PM