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This is the big issue: for too long the commentators and especially people in the Democratic Party have taken as axiomatic the kind of James Carville thought in 1992 that “It’s the economy, stupid.” Don’t talk about foreign policy. Don’t talk about the first Gulf War, just talk about bread-and-butter issues, and then, leave foreign policy to other folks.

I think the way to respond to that is to have one, a mass democratic movement politics that’s also about foreign policy and integrates the two. That’s the way that Medicare for All reached the table. It wasn’t through the reasonableness of the arguments or certain experts in D.C. making the point. It was because it became a rallying cry of mobilized masses. Two, we need to talk about material interests in international terms.

Take the security budget. If we’re interested in a Green New Deal or genuinely social-democratic policies like a guaranteed job and full employment and universal access to health care, housing, education, you need the money to do it, and that money is not just going to come from taxing the rich. Where is the money? There’s $800 billion annually that’s outlaid for defense, and reconceiving the defense budget as a freedom budget is a significant way of telling that story.

It’s important that these two things are connected because you can’t just say, “We need to cut the budget,” without thinking of how the defense budget is itself an example of governmental social provision. That budget is one of the ways in which old-style New Dealism and empire have been joined. It is government stimulus that often provides jobs and opportunities to really impoverished parts of the country, but unfortunately in ways what enhance corporate profits and serve the interests of the security state.

You need to cut that defense budget, but in conjunction with new social-democratic initiatives. Then, you have the debates about impunity; what the US does abroad, what it allows its allies to do. And also how financial elites behave, including through trade policy. Trump has opened up space to talk about trade in a way that links the foreign and the domestic, and the Left needs to have an alternative account. His version of trade is talking about bad trade deals.

That version of the argument is inconsistent with Republican free market orthodoxy. But it’s not in the interest of working people; it’s all about how working people abroad are stealing your jobs. It’s pitting the working class against itself and giving payoffs to corporations. We need to have instead, a conversation about trade that’s bound to domestic social democracy. Things like a guaranteed job, and a freedom budget. But the conversation also has to take to task the footloose nature of capital, that corporations need to be responsible for what happens in their supply chain today.

There has to be a commitment that US multinationals provide labor and environmental rights to folks; that there are actual constraints on corporate property rights and that corporations don’t enjoy tax haven status. The other real pillar of it has to be immigration politics.

Trump links domestic and foreign through immigration, to asserting in a racialized way the imperative of the border. I think the Left has to go to where that struggle is and to invert it, and to say, “Well, immigrants are working people and that they are located in a primary site of class struggle in this country.”

Decriminalizing immigration status, providing rights to immigrant workers, and having immigrant activists as a central part of how we think of domestic economic freedom is key. But above all, the big point is, it’s not going to be done just through think tanks or by having Sanders elected and maybe one or two different left policy experts in the room. The only way that that national security establishment is going to, in fact, be confronted is if there’s this transformation. Social democracy at home requires anti-imperialism abroad.