This article about Richard Lugar in Foreign Policy is called "Twilight of the Wise Man," which should tell you just what a flattering portrait it is. But its effect may be to increase the very disdain for Lugar the writer is lamenting. It talks about how happy Lugar was to be a foreign policy mentor to a young Sen. Barack Obama and how his current difficulties with the GOP base are an indication of "an entire tradition of Republican foreign policy that is being repudiated by the party faithful."
But Lugar's predicament is wholly predictable. It's the logical terminus, you could even say, of a career devoted to a party that has always been divided between the presumptions of its grandee class on the one hand and a resentful and bellicose populist movement on the other. Over the decades, those resentments have repeatedly been papered over, only to re-emerge with increasing virulence. Perhaps the surprising thing isn't that Lugar and his fellow remnants of the establishment are on the run. It's that they survived as long as they did inside a party that often regarded the idea of a patrician elite with consternation.
The Republican foreign-policy establishment traces its roots back to the upper-crust Republicans of the late 19th century, a class that saw itself as essentially above politics, particularly when it came to foreign affairs. The Republican elites of the day were conservatives, but not reactionaries; they believed in American power but also in international law and free trade. They saw foreign policy as a calling, one that demanded they serve presidents regardless of their political affiliation, which, again and again, subjected them to the charge of being opportunistic trimmers. Nothing was more important to them than the appearance of personal rectitude and service to the nation.
Perhaps the leading such figure -- the archetypal wise man -- was the Republican reformer and conservative Elihu Root. Root embodied what would come to be establishment traditions. A secretary of war under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, he supported U.S. entry into the League of Nations and unsuccessfully tried to persuade Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge to drop his campaign to kill it -- an early skirmish between internationalism and unilateralism within the GOP, one that the rumbustious Republican reformer Roosevelt had managed to straddle successfully.
The "upper crust Republican" wise men with "a calling" who are "essentially above politics" taken down by the "bellicose populist movement" rabble who regard "the idea of a patrician elite with consternation." Could they possibly be any snottier?
It was only a matter of time before the populist right finally destroyed the Republican Establishment's hold on foreign policy. The question is, considering how many screw-ups the Establishment has produced, don't they deserve their comeuppance?
