Caleb Brennan argues that centrist Democrats are reviving an old bargain: promise domestic renewal through rivalry with a foreign enemy. His essay follows the Cold War memories shaping Rahm Emanuel, Elissa Slotkin, and Jake Sullivan. Those memories help make American supremacy feel like common sense, even as support for military spending weakens.
- Harry Truman’s appeal to put America’s racial house in order connected civil rights to competition with the Soviet Union. Brennan asks what happens when justice needs a national-security justification.
- Sullivan invoked Rocky and Red Dawn when describing Ukraine. Brennan reads that language as a Hollywood moral script that narrows the room for diplomacy.
- Emanuel presents research investment as a way to beat China. Slotkin similarly ties economic security to an escalating technology race.
- Defense-industry donations and military-dependent economic interests help sustain this politics. Brennan also points to the Cold War tradition of using anticommunism against the domestic left.
- Historian Manning Marable’s account complicates nostalgia for the postwar liberal consensus: purging radicals from the Democratic coalition also damaged the struggle for civil rights.
Public research, health care, and climate investment deserve support on their own terms. Tying them to geopolitical confrontation makes social progress depend on sustaining an enemy.
Brennan calls for a socialist foreign policy with substance: demilitarization, ending support for abusive allies, and international cooperation on austerity and ecological collapse. The essay sketches that agenda rather than supplying a detailed transition plan, but insists that peace needs an affirmative political program.