I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris.
Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that people were surprised he was able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yet recently such a feat has indeed come to seem extraordinary to the American right. Today’s Republicans seem to believe that America can have a foreign policy or a domestic policy, but not both.
Just consider the main talking points on the American right relating to the war in Ukraine. A few months ago the fringe yet noisome congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned the American government for sending money ‘to defend Ukraine’s border, but not America’s border’. You don’t have to go to the fringes to find this argument: from conservative pundits to the new Republican Speaker of the House, it has become mainstream to pretend that if US money was not going to arm Ukrainians, then the builders would be down on the southern border constructing a wall to stop illegal migrants coming in.
Republicans seem to believe that America can have a foreign policy or a domestic policy, but not both
The idea is a preposterous one.
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