A few years ago, Republicans wouldn’t have experienced quite this kind of infighting over foreign policy. Ron Paul and his scrappy, sometimes scruffy supporters disagreed, but most GOP leaders were united around a big defense budget, tough enforcement of laws like the propagandistically named “Patriot Act,”a globally assertive foreign policy and a hard line on the GWOT. No longer. The McCain-Rand controversy is but the latest sign of a widening chasm in the Republican party. In the recent debate over the sequester, many Republicans signaled that they would accept cuts to military spending if it lowered the federal debt. And a growing number of conservatives are joining far left writers like Glenn Greenwald in their criticisms about the way the Obama administration is using drones in US foreign policy.
After the 2012 election, the media focused mostly on the divide between social and fiscal conservatives in the GOP, but these recent events suggest that another civil war is brewing between two groups of hawks: war hawks and debt hawks. On the one hand, the GOP is still full of people like Senator McCain who see the preservation of a robust foreign policy—drone strikes, big budgets and all—as the most urgent issue facing the United States. On the other hand, there is a small but growing and vocal group of Republicans who view the national debt as a bigger threat to US interests than Al Qaeda, Red China and the Russians combined.
More, a lot more, at the link.
2 comments:
thats a good link.
as for me, i would thoroughly enjoy two civil wars that split both parties so severly that niether was able to continue as a corporate entity.
as for me, i would thoroughly enjoy two civil wars that split both parties so severly that niether was able to continue as a corporate entity.
You may get that, Gino. There are a lot of fault lines in both parties.
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