Mainstream Dissent

"Philosophically and politically, the Democrats' post-Vietnam retreat from internationalism was a mistake. Sometimes, however, their wariness about adventurism served them well, as when they argued against U.S. military intervention in Central America in the 1980s. More to the point, the baleful effects of their isolationist tendencies should not impugn the soundness of their opposition to the Vietnam War in general—a stand, after all, that was being vindicated across the political spectrum as early as 1972."

In Slate, David Greenberg revisits the variety of anti-war opinion during the Vietnam War, including that of Richard Nixon in 1972.


""McGovernism constituted, above all, a rejection of cold war liberalism. It was anti-communist liberals like Lyndon Johnson and Humphrey-- not marginal right-wingers like Barry Goldwater--who had taken the United States into Vietnam. And for McGovern--who had been opposing cold war liberalism since 1948, when he backed Henry Wallace over Harry Truman--Vietnam was merely a symptom of the larger disease: anti-communism itself.

And Peter Beinart in The New Republic looks at the differences between 1972 and 2006.