“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” So declared Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief political strategist, in a 2005 speech.[13]
Rove was, we now know, fighting the last, um, war: By 2005 the debacle in Iraq was rapidly eroding the public’s perception that Republicans are better than Democrats at protecting the nation. But where did that perception come from, and how much did it help Republicans win elections?
It’s often asserted that the Republican national security advantage dates back to the Vietnam War, and specifically to Richard Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory over George McGovern. But as so often happens when we look closely at the real political history of this country, it’s far from clear that what everyone knows is true. Rick Perlstein has argued that the even the 1972 election was more of a personal defeat for McGovern than a rejection of the Democrats, who actually gained in the Senate and suffered only modest losses in the House.[14]
More to the point, the available polling evidence does not indicate that the public viewed Democrats in general as weak on national security in the years immediately following the fall of Saigon. As late as October 1979 a poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee, asking which party would do a better job of “maintaining military security,” found 29 percent of voters naming the Republicans, 28 percent the Democrats, and 21 percent saying both would do a good job.[15] The perception that Democrats are weak on national security—a perception that made the partisan exploitation of 9/11 possible—didn’t really settle in until the 1980s. And it had very little to do with the realities of defense or foreign policy. Instead it was a matter of story lines, and above all about the Rambofication of history.
Defeat is never easy to acknowledge. After World War I many Germans famously came to believe in the Dolchstoßlegende, the myth that German forces had been “stabbed in the back” by weak civilian leaders. And from the fall of Saigon onward there were Americans who, like their counterparts in post–World War I Germany, became receptive to stab-in-the-back theories, to the claim that the military could have won the war if only civilians hadn’t tied its hands. When memories of the Vietnam War in all its horror and futility were still fresh, however, they were a small if vocal minority.
If there was a moment when these theories went mainstream, it was with the success of the 1982 film First Blood, the first Rambo movie, in which Rambo declares, “I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win.” He also rails against “those maggots at the airport, protesting, spitting, calling me baby-killer”—and images of protesters spitting on returning servicemen have become ingrained in popular culture. There’s no evidence that this ever actually happened; there are no credibly documented cases of returning veterans having been spat upon or called baby killers. Nonetheless, the myth of liberals disrespecting the troops became fixed in the public’s mind.
After the stab in the back came the revenge fantasies. Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)—which reinvented the deranged, damaged vet of the first movie as an action hero—tapped into a market for fantasies in which rebellious military men in effect refought the war, and won it.
The newly belligerent mood of the nation clearly worked to the advantage of conservatives. The actual record of liberals in opposing the Vietnam War probably wasn’t that important: By the 1980s the realities of what happened had largely slipped from public memory. What mattered, instead, was the way movement conservatives’ fear and loathing of communism resonated with the desires of a nation rebounding from post-Vietnam syndrome. When Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” liberals and moderates tended to scoff—not because they were weak on national security, but because they were pragmatic about what it took to achieve security. But many Americans loved it.
Movement conservatism’s efforts to identify itself as the nation’s defender were aided by the fact that the military itself, always a conservative institution, became much more so after the mid-seventies. In 1976 a plurality of military leaders identified themselves as independents, while a third identified themselves as Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds considered themselves Republicans.[16] This shift in political identification probably had several causes. One was that military leaders, who were less able than civilians to put the Vietnam defeat behind them, may have been especially susceptible to the stab-in-the-back myth. It may also have had something to do with budgets: Carter presided over the post-Vietnam shrinkage of the military, Reagan vastly increased military spending, then Clinton presided over another decline, this time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Regional politics also played a role. As one account[17] put it:
[The shift of the military toward Republicans] also resulted from changed recruitment and base-closing policies, combined with the steady Republicanization of the American South. The period since the late 1960s saw the closure of many northeastern ROTC programs and the expansion of those programs in the South. By the late 1990s, more than 40% of all ROTC programs were in the South—mainly at state universities—though the South is home to fewer than 30% of the nation’s college students. Similar patterns in base closures have meant that disproportionate numbers of military personnel are now stationed at bases in the South and Southwest.
Last but not least, there may also have been a “values” component: As American society became more permissive, the military—where adultery is still considered a crime under certain circumstances—grew increasingly alienated. The sexual revolution, which we usually associate with the sixties, didn’t go mass-market until the seventies, a point emphasized by the title of one of John Updike’s many novels about adultery and the human condition, Memories of the Ford Administration.
As movement conservatism gained power, then, it was increasingly able to wrap itself in the flag—to claim to be stronger on national security than the other side, and to claim the support of a large majority of military leaders.
It’s hard to make the case, however, that the perceived Republican advantage on national security played a crucial role in any national election before 9/11. That perception did hurt Democrats on several occasions: The image of Michael Dukakis in a tank helped lose the 1988 election, and the fracas over gays in the military contributed to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Military votes made the difference in 2000, but so did many other things: In an election that close any factor that gave the GOP a few thousand votes can be called decisive.
It was only with the 2002 and 2004 elections that national security became a true election-winning issue. Faced with business scandals, a weak economy, and the normal tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections, Republicans should have lost ground in 2002, ending up with Democratic control of the Senate and, quite possibly, of the House as well. But the nation rallied around George Bush, as he promised to punish the “evildoers” responsible for 9/11 and bring in Osama dead or alive. And Bush’s party engaged in raw political exploitation of the atrocity, including ads in which the faces of Democrats morphed into Saddam Hussein. The result was a big victory for the GOP.
14.
Rick Perlstein, “Why Democrats Can Stop the War,”
15.
National Survey for RNC/NRCC, Oct. 21–Nov. 15, 1979, data from Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Two Harris Polls from 1978 also show the parties closely matched. See http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/ data_access/ipoll /ipoll.html.
16.
Ole R. Holsti, “A Widening Gap Between the U.S. Military and Civilian Society? Some Evidence,” 1976–96.
17.
Rosa Brooks, “Weaning the Military from the GOP,”