Building a base of moderates and corporations who are basically paid off via whatever ridiculous spending they sign off on allows them to go hard in the paint (as my JV basketball coach might say) on foreign policy. Also, I mean, even Nelson Rockefeller was considerably anti-communist while being for the most part liberal (not to be confused with genuinely "left-wing", and except for drugs, of course) domestically. It basically creates a "big government" ponzi scheme wherein money is flushed out of the treasury and into both wars and domestic spending, making voters content enough to continue signing off on whatever their leadership is doing. Winning candidates of the right have been using this playbook since at least Nixon, probably Eisenhower. I mean, did even Reagan ever really threaten the New Deal, or even legalized abortion?
Yeah, basically it pleases as many interest groups as possible.
The George W. Bush presidency would have been a better example were it not for the divisive lip service to SoCon causes and the fact that he was so intent on making people less supportive of big government by picking incompetent cronies to run everything.
My assumption for the time being would be that Dubya abused the Nixon Doctrine, and has ruined it, at least for the right. If or when the GOP re-emerges victorious will be the time to test that hypothesis. I do hope it's right, though I'm not entirely sure what it would be replaced with. Anything too actually conservative ("conservative" in the sense of actually conserving this country, not its modern, warped definition) is out of the question for reasons of electability and modernity, so they'll have to think of something.
Nixon didn't care about anything but foreign policy. Domestic policy was mundane to him and he never formed a coherent governing philosophy on domestic issues. Since he faced a center-left Congress, he signed off on the expansion of the regulatory and welfare state, and in return, Congress more or less looked the other way while he bombed Cambodia and went to China and conducted Cold War chess matches in the Third World. If there had been a Republican majority in Congress, he would no doubt have gone along with whatever they wanted (New Deal rollbacks or whatever) in return for a wide berth in foreign affairs. Nixon as our "last liberal president" is more an accident of history than any deliberate agenda on his part.
I don't think Dubya was a Nixon in the sense that domestic affairs were something worthless to him that he realized could be a useful bargaining chip. I think he was more like LBJ - someone with very clear and distinct objectives at home and abroad who reconciled them by pushing through a Santa Claus grab-bag of legislation and spending to keep Congress from stopping him. For LBJ, the Great Society was his "gift" to the liberals, while escalation in Vietnam assured Republicans that he wasn't going to give the farm to the Soviets. I think LBJ was genuine in his support of civil rights and in terms of the political damage it did to his party in the short-term, he wouldn't have signed that legislation if he didn't genuinely believe in it.
Bush subscribed to what might be called "romantic conservatism." He had this quasi-Reaganesque vision of a nation of homeowners with steady, well-paying private sector jobs who were also "people of faith" (not necessarily Christian faith), buttressed by a social safety net where private charity and faith-based groups played an outsized role. He didn't deify free-market capitalism as something to be exalted in and of itself the way the current Republican Party does; he believed it was merely the means to the end. His domestic agenda was his father's noblesse oblige and protection of the status quo, made more idealistic and given a moral framework.
His foreign policy was very much a throwback to Woodrow Wilson's activist idealism and the notion of "a world made safe for democracy." The Iraq adventure is the sort of thing Wilson would have endorsed. Reagan essentially did the same thing when he enacted a "regime change" in Grenada (obviously the circumstances made that endeavor far quicker and easier to accomplish). But it would have abhorred Nixon - to him, the logical thing to do would have simply been to find a general in the Iraqi army who was sympathetic to the US, load him up with money and weapons and wink and nod and let him stage a coup. Iraq would then be under the control of a pro-American military dictator rather than an anti-American military dictator.
Bush's foreign policy was a set of beliefs held by a man who was too young to believe, as Nixon did, that people in the Third World were essentially lesser beings who could simply be crushed under the heel of whichever authoritarian the Great Powers chose for them, but too old to believe, as most people of our generation do, that people in the Third World are not helpless noble savages, that they should have the power of self-agency and they do not need to be "liberated" by other countries.
