The end of the Second World War saw the Democratic Party split between two disparate visions of America’s role in the postwar world, those offered by the Party of Truman and the Party of Roosevelt. The victory of the former over the latter was not foreordained— though it did win important victories in the early years of the Cold War, not least the presidential contest in 1948, in which Truman was challenged by his former Commerce Secretary, the Rooseveltian Henry Wallace, who Truman fired after Wallace called for peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union in a speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden in September 1946.
Said Wallace,
…We most earnestly want peace with Russia—but we want to be met half way. We want cooperation. And I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers.
Truman’s defeat of Wallace (who ran as a third party candidate) at the ballot box was a resounding one—but the Party of Roosevelt had life in it yet.
Over the course of the Cold War, there existed a healthy, sometimes intense competition within the Democratic Party between the two factions—indeed, a spirit of Cold War militancy ebbed and flowed within the Party from the middle 1940s to the early 1990s.
In retrospect, the nomination of South Dakota Senator George McGovern was perhaps the Party of Roosevelt’s last hurrah. After McGovern’s historic defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon in ’72, Rooseveltian positions on matters of war and peace were seen as electoral poison—still more, during the presidential primary campaigns that followed, Rooseveltian insurgents carried fewer and fewer voters. In 1980, Senator Edward Kennedy (a Rooseveltian) failed to capture the nomination from President Jimmy Carter who by then had become, thanks to the influence of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a devout Cold Warrior. Rooseveltians put up spirited battles with to the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in ’84 and ’88; Jerry Brown in ’92; and Bill Bradley in 2000. But as the Clintons consolidated their grip on the Party, the Rooseveltians became more marginalized. Simply put, by the turn of the century, the competition turned into a rout—the Party of Truman emerged triumphant; its position within the Democratic Party can now fairly be described as hegemonic.
To see that this is so, look no further than the career of Tulsi Gabbard. For a time after her election to Congress in 2012, Gabbard was a darling of the Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saw in Gabbard “a rising star who has devoted her life to public service.” By 2016, Gabbard was serving as a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Her terms in Congress were marked by a deep-seated and thoughtful skepticism of “regime change wars” waged by both Republican and Democratic administrations. That opposition, in particular her vocal and indeed prescient opposition to regime change operation in Syria, earned her the undying enmity of both mainstream Democratic and Progressive foreign policy politicos and “thought-leaders” such as the odious Neera Tanden.
Only a decade after her election to Congress, Gabbard was a Democrat no more. In a statement released in October 2022, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Party, and accused the Democrats of “dragging us ever closer to nuclear war” with Russia.
The ill-will between Gabbard and the Democrats was clearly mutual. During Gabbard’s ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied that the Kremlin was “grooming” Gabbard. Upon being nominated by President Trump to head the Office of National Intelligence, a former Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, accused Gabbard of being a “Russian asset.”
That Gabbard is anathema to Democrats is not news—but what does it say about the state of the Democratic Party that it now finds itself to the right of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan when it comes to relations with Russia? A Nixonian policy of detente or a Reaganite policy of strategic dialogue with Russia would be roundly condemned by the political- and “thought-leaders” of today’s Democratic Party. This is not conjecture; look at the outrage with which Trump’s various attempts at diplomacy have been met in the years since he became president in 2017.
That this is so is of course widely recognized. Yet it is only occasionally bemoaned. How such a state of affairs emerged is a longer story not often told—but in order to understand how and why the Democrats became the party of the national security state and of Cold War, we need to understand the history of the debate over foreign policy within the Democratic Party since the end of the Second World War.
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Despite the twin war crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as his bungling of the postwar alliance, Harry Truman’s reputation has only improved with time. FDR’s reputation, on the other hand, has, in recent years, taken hit after hit; popular historians now castigate Roosevelt for his internment of American citizens of Japanese descent and for his perceived lack of interest regarding the Holocaust. Contemporaneous foreign policy practitioners, including, Dean Acheson and George F. Kennan, also voiced their preference for Truman. Yet one can't help but wonder whether this was because FDR—among the most preceptive, if not cagey, of American presidents—took their proper measure. Both Kennan and Acheson were lauded as wise men by the Washington establishment, but were treated merely as men by Roosevelt. Years later, Acheson could barley conceal his annoyance when he recalled his interactions with FDR, writing that, “It was not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one's forelock in return."
That aside, it is now Truman who looms larger in the imaginations of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, besotted as it is by a vision of world once again divided—this time between the “global authoritarians” and democracies.
Some might say: So what? Isn’t a Democratic Party that stands against global autocracy and for a strong US presence around the world a good thing—for America and the world?
No: The embrace of a worldwide militarized competition with nations that have differing traditions from our own is, in reality, a deep betrayal of both the founding vision of this country and of the path Roosevelt tried at the end of the war to set us upon.
Experience—abundant experience—tells us that the series of foreign misadventures which the US embarked on during the eight decades since the end of the war have been nothing if not counterproductive to US national security interests—at home and abroad. Still worse, the Democratic Party’s wholesale takeover by the Party of Truman has resulted in the marginalization and stigmatization of those who seek to engage the world through dialogue and diplomacy. This has been particularly the case since the election of 2016, and with it the emergence of Russiagate—a fictional creation concocted by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, its lawyers at Perkins Coie, the fabulists at Fusion GPS, who worked in conjunction with “confidential human sources” bought and paid for by the Obama Justice Department. This resulted in, among other niceties, a chilling re-introduction of McCarthyite norms into American political discourse.
The question before the Democrats today is whether they can rediscover its Rooseveltian foreign policy tradition and jettison the politics of militarism and Cold War. From the vantage point of May 8th 2025, 80 years since the end of the war in Europe, its appears the chances of that happening are vanishingly small.
James W. Carden is editor of TRR.