The Joe Six-Pack Doctrine

By: Daniel Brumberg

October 6, 2008

I am not in the Joe Six Pack crowd. As my friends and family will attest, if I drink more than two beers, I fall asleep. Moreover, when I do drink, I usually choose beer from exotic places like Germany, Britain (I love Guinness), or even Japan. I also like many microbeers from the good ol' USA. But read my lips: I won't drink a Schlitz. If that makes me an elitist who doesn't grasp the realities of Wasilla Main Street, so be it.

The notion that Washington needs a dose of Wasilla intrigues me.

American politics has long been animated by a populist tradition that views the inner workings of the nation's capital as far removed from the lifeblood of "real America." While Congress's legislative record might sometimes seem to justify such views, there is far more to the story than that. Born and raised in DC, I have seen the sacrifices our public servants make every day. These men and women, who come from every state in the Union, are joined by some half a million Washingtonians in the public and private as well as non-profit sectors, struggling like the rest of the country to balance work and family and to make ends meet. We have our soccer moms (and dads) and PTA meetings; we are deeply involved in our churches, synagogues and mosques, and we participate in and are affected by local politics of every shape and form. In a city denied the democratic rights enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans, we cope every day with a myriad of urban problems, all of which have been exacerbated by a widening gap between rich and poor and black and white.

These realities are blotted out by a reckless manipulation of stereotypes. Disdain for Washington constitutes a kind of geographic and cultural racism that is invoked (and manipulated) during every presidential election season. No amount of folksy kidding around can hide the ugliness of Washington bashing, despite the fact that some of our leading bashers have lived here for decades.

Washington bashing also has troubling implications for America's foreign relations. Lurking behind the notion that Washington is alien and disconnected is an inchoate anxiety that the rest of the world is even more foreign and menacing. Though ours is a nation of immigrants, it is also a land where suspicions run deep about the "true loyalties" of the "foreign policy establishment," particularly among those most attracted to the fantasies and prejudices of American populism.

Certainly, U.S. intervention in Iraq fed such fears. Someone or something must have been behind this gambit, the thinking goes. Was it big oil companies, Gulf Arab Sheiks, neo-conservative intellectuals, the Israel lobby, or some weird alliance of all of four? The fact that President Bush, who in an earlier incarnation was something of a Joe Six-Pack himself, eventually embraced a neo-Wilsonian nation-building project only reinforced the belief that some nefarious cabal had turned the administration inside-out, leading it to abandon what populist credentials it once had in the sand and dust of Iraq.

Such fears of course were greatly exaggerated. Indeed, those who backed the invasion of Iraq took a page out of the populist, anti-Washington playbook. American Middle East policy, they declared, would no longer be defined by an elite of State Department Middle East experts and career diplomats who—they implied—had betrayed American values by cozying up to Arab autocrats. While this harsh judgment was, at best, a caricature of US foreign policy, the populist thinking that inspired it provided a key pretext for the disastrous decision to reject—indeed sweep under the carpet—all of the careful planning for post-invasion Iraq that had been set out in the State Department's Future of Iraq Project.

Against this backdrop, one can almost forgive Governor Sarah Palin, who before her fellow Wasilla churchgoers, prayed that "there is a plan" for Iraq and "that plan is God's plan." In the absence of any other planning, perhaps her appeal to a Higher Authority made sense. Moreover, it tapped into religious themes that constitute one other ingredient in the brew of American populism. Talk of an American "crusade" in the Middle East may have faded long ago, but the desire to convert the world to this or that creed endures in a Joe Six-Pack/Neo-Wilsonianism that Palin has only recently embraced.

This urge to proselytize is troubling. Whether Barack Obama or John McCain wins, I hope that the U.S. will advance a new vision of democratic reform in the Muslim world—one that is deeply ethical and steadfastly realistic. Can we have a foreign policy that is inspired by religious values, but does not claim to be guided or sanctioned by God? I think so. This would be a policy that Republicans and Democrats could call their own. Indeed, Joe and Josephine Six-Pack might well endorse it, thus defying the "us versus them" stereotyping that is at the heart of anti-Washington populist ideology.

Opens in a new window