Over at his Atlantic blog, Ross Douthat looks at some new polling data from Pew and notes:

When asked to name the issue they care most about, 31 percent of Republican voters picked the War in Iraq, another 17 percent picked terrorism, and another 8 percent picked “foreign policy.” More potential GOP primary voters picked Iraq, in particular, than picked the economy, health care, education, abortion, and immigration combined.

GOP voters’ hawkishness, Douthat notes, explains why leading Republican presidential candidates hold fast to support for the Iraq war, despite the massive problems that position will present in winning a general election.

Douthat’s observations remind me of an earlier piece in the Weekly Standard, “The Peace Party vs. the Power Party,” by Matthew Continetti:

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded in 2005 that “foreign affairs assertiveness now almost completely distinguishes Republican-oriented voters from Democratic-oriented voters.” Together, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq seem to have accelerated a shift begun some 30 years ago: The Democratic party is increasingly linked with the attitudes, tendencies, and policies of peace, whereas the Republican party is increasingly linked with the maintenance and projection of American military power.

I haven’t yet had a chance to look at the underlying surveys in either case (writing a book is hard), but what they describe certainly corresponds to what I’ve noticed over the past few years about how, for conservatives, all other ideological priorities have collapsed into the black hole of the war.

Ordinarily–and all other things being equal–I’d think it a positive development that GOP voters were willing to consider a cross-dressing, pro-choice moderate on social issues who grunts appeallingly on economic issues. But Giuliani’s support among GOP primary voters appears to stem entirely from his hard-guy reputation and perceived willingness to blow stuff up.

One of the more astounding examples of this I’ve noticed was a fawning interview with Christopher Hitchens published last year in the right-wing evangelical magazine World, edited by former Bush adviser Marvin Olasky.

The interviewer trips all over herself noting how generally awesome Hitchens is for backing the Iraq war. In a way, it’s to his credit that Hitchens won’t pander to his sycophantic interviewer and the audience she represents. He says that the essence of the Christian religion, the message of Jesus on the Cross,

is scapegoating that absolves one of all responsibility in return for the acceptance of the incredible and the undesirable. And then with the other shoe, the other hand, says if you don’t believe it, then we have a real program of torture that will go on forever. It’s disgusting. It was completely invented by very underdeveloped human beings,” he says, astoundingly citing Augustine and Aquinas. “These are peasants; the sort of people we are up against now, with wild looks in their eyes and living in caves.”

That this is “a rare moment of less-than-astute analysis” for Hitchens is all the condemnation the interviewer can muster. As I said at the time:

Insult our Savior, defame our religion, support the president: you’re pretty swell, all things considered. The war must be very, very important to Christian conservatives.

And for conservatives in general. One can’t expect GOP primary voters to be familiar with the antiwar elements of the conservative tradition, as represented by men like Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk, who recognized war as a heartless destroyer of human life, an invaluable aid to the forces of centralization, and an enemy of family, property, and tradition. But one can expect them to be conscious enough to recognize what most other Americans have by this time: that the Iraq War is a disaster and an enormous human tragedy. And that swagger, moronic bluster, and indiscriminate bellicosity have nothing to do with an intelligent defense of American national security.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 9:07 pm by Gene Healy and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.