On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Niall Ferguson was quoted in the WSJ as saying
> But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term
> could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the
> Democrats than a Bush defeat.
The American part of his historical argument here is completely out of touch with reality.
> The obvious retort is that American politics is not British politics.
> No? Go back half a century, to 1956, and recall the events that led up
> to the re-election of another Republican incumbent. Sure, Eisenhower
> didn't have much in common personally with George W. Bush, except
> perhaps the relaxed work rate. But Ike was no slouch when it came to
> regime change. In 1953 a CIA-sponsored coup in Iran installed as
> dictator Mohammed Reza Shah. In 1954 Ike enunciated the "domino theory,"
> following the defeat of France in Vietnam and invaded Guatemala to
> install another pro-American dictator. In 1955 he shelled the Chinese
> isles of Quemoy and Matsu.
>
> Yet Eisenhower's refusal to back the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of
> Egypt following Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, and his
> acquiescence in the Soviet invasion of Hungary, should have alerted
> American voters to the lack of coherence in his strategy.
Here's the first problem: there's no incoherence there. There may be stupidity and ignorance, but Ike's policy -- which laid much of the real foundation for the next 40 years -- was perfectly coherent. Ike thought nuclear war was a horror, and that anything that could conceivably lead to a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union had to be quashed as quickly as possible. This was why he got us out of Korea, which was largely what he was elected to do, which he accomplished almost before he was inaugurated, and which almost no one else could have done. (Sometimes his savior image was not over-rated.)
But Ike, like everyone in the American establishment, hated communism and wanted to fight against it. His solution was covert action, which after Iran and Guatemala he thought was the magic bullet that would allow him to win the cold war without coming into the sort of direct confrontation that would set off a nuclear war (simply by denying we were involved). This was wrong and horrible in lots of ways. But it explains in perfectly simple terms why he immediately shut down or refused to take up conflicts like Suez and Korea and Hungary while happily plying covert action in many other places.
> These were the setbacks that lent credibility to JFK's hawkish campaign in
> 1960: And Kennedy's victory handed the rest of the decade to the Democrats.
It lent exactly two terms to the Democrats, the second one lame before its end. That's not an epochal change. What makes this argument comical is that it completely misses the epochal change in the American party system that did happen during that period, which had nothing to do with foreign policy, and which went the other way: the signing of the 1964 civil rights bill, which removed the solid south from the Democrats and gave it to the Republicans. So that ever since the President has only ever been a Republican or a Southern Democrat.
> Like Adlai Stevenson before him, Mr. Kerry has an aura of unelectability
> that may yet prove fatal to his hopes. But a Stevenson win in 1956 would
> have transformed the subsequent course of American political history.
Yeah, so might a Mondale win 1984, which was 10 times more likely. Ferguson is entirely missing the elephant in the 1950s presidential elections: Eisenhower was the most popular man *in the world.* He was the most successful general in the greatest war the world had ever seen. The reason both the Democrats and the Republicans offered him their candidacy in 1952 (including Truman, who legally could have run again but decided against it) was because they both knew that whoever ran him as their candidate would win. It was as simple as that. The only chance Adlai (or anyone else) had in 1956 was if Ike died.
Beyond this point arguing with Fergie really very boring. No matter involuted it gets, the argument that you'll maybe make the most gains by losing is comical if you take it seriously. It's only useful as a salve after you've lost.
Michael