Leaders of the Opposition

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/opinion/29scheiber.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1112112415-uIREhT3XctkgYlRi02K8KA

Leaders of the Opposition
By NOAM SCHEIBER

Washington — ACCORDING to a now infamous memo circulated among Republican senators, the Terri Schiavo case is a "great political issue" for their party. The memo is half right: the case may be good politics - but for Democrats. After all, in defending their intervention, Republican leaders in Congress have marshaled traditionally liberal arguments about the federal government's obligations to its citizens.
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This dynamic gives Democrats a potentially huge opening if democracy takes root in nations like Iraq in the next few years - and if Middle America embraces it. (Both big ifs, of course. But American voters aren't nearly as isolationist as the caricature suggests; upwards of 60 percent consistently support American participation in United Nations peacekeeping forces.)

By embracing a robust democratization agenda, the Democratic nominee in 2008 will be able to appeal to his base while also claiming the new, pro-democratization center. The Republican nominee, who has to win the nomination of a party at best indifferent to democratization, will enjoy no such luxury. Mr. Bush himself won the Republican nomination in 2000 by promising a far less activist foreign policy than the Clinton administration had advocated.

There are important caveats. It's not a given that Democrats will be able to rise above their partisan dislike of Mr. Bush's war, and their broader suspicion of United States power, in order to embrace democratization. But by 2008 the job of consolidating democracy will probably be primarily nonmilitary in nature. It will involve financing and training indigenous political activists, helping to build highways, schools and hospitals, and nurturing democratic institutions like a free press and labor unions. Which is to say, all the things Republicans roll their eyes at and Democrats have long embraced.

Conversely, it's possible that the Republican Party will nominate a politician who transcends his party's structural hostility to foreign-policy activism. But Republicans typically succeed at selling their rank and file on democratization only if they can make the case that it's a matter of national security. The strategy worked for Ronald Reagan at the height of the cold war, and for Mr. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. It may be hard to sustain such an approach through 2008.<snip>

Everything he says applies just as well here. We need to be democratizing, "training indigenous political activists, helping to build highways, schools and hospitals, and nurturing democratic institutions like a free press and labor unions. Which is to say, all the things Republicans roll their eyes at and Democrats have long embraced."

In this context, the Repuke disinterest in democracy (here) stands out like a sore thumb.