No one will confuse me for an Obama fan or someone who puts much stock in Obama’s “hope and unity” routine, but I have to second Sullivan’s amazement at this remark:

I don’t see any problem with Barack Obama admitting that part of his appeal is the hope that he might help mend the racial divide and turn a new page. But he could also say that he’s not running for the President of Black America but of all America and that his qualifications involve more than his skin color. He’s more than eloquent enough to make that case.

It does defy belief that anyone even remotely familiar with Obama doesn’t know that he says this sort of thing all the time (indeed, he says it almost ad nauseam as far as I’m concerned).  This was only the central theme of the DNC speech in 2004 that raised him to national prominence, and it has been repeated time and again in his victory speeches over the past two months from Iowa until Wisconsin.  For instance, he said in South Carolina:

The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white.

It’s about the past versus the future.

His oft-repeated lines, of course, derive from the original speech:

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

And again:

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

It’s not as if the campaign started just a few months ago.  This is the elementary, superficial stuff that I assumed everyone knew about Obama–I thought this sort of rhetoric was the reason why more than a few conservative pundits have been so impressed with Obama.  For some of them, though, it’s as if he just appeared on the scene.

Update: Goldberg has clarified his remark to some extent.

Dennis Byrne has a different explanation for the loss in IL-14:

It is a measure of the moribundity of the Illinoisʼ Republican Party, whose national consequences seem not to be fully appreciated by the GOPʼs national proprietors. The once proud and powerful party of the late senators Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles Percy, and more recently former Gov. Big Jim Thompson, has sunken to such depths it didnʼt even bother to field token candidates in the populous Cook County.

It’s true that the Illinois GOP, the people who have recently given you such outstanding standard-bearers as George Ryan, Jack Ryan and Alan Keyes (or “Allen,” as Byrnes would have it), is in miserable shape since the corruption of the Ryan administration turned the state party into a shambles, and it has been in decline longer than that.  Nominating Oberweis didn’t help matters.  Even so, the deplorable state of the Illinois GOP didn’t start recently, and cannot fully account for the failure in this special election.  Suburban and ex-urban districts have started trending towards the Democrats, especially in Illinois, and that has as much to do with the national party’s failures as it does with the state party’s implosion.  The problem for the Congressional GOP is that the same moribund Illinois party that just failed in IL-14 has to defend at least three other vulnerable seats in the fall.  Even if the IL-14 loss has no greater significance for how the GOP fares in the Midwest or nationwide, it does have significance for how Republicans will fare in closely contested suburban districts across Illinois.  In the same way that Byrne explains away IL-14 by focusing on state party collapse Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania Republicans could explain away the decimation of their House incumbents by talking about the loss of confidence in state party leadership.  The consequences remain the same: more Democrats winning House seats.

Ross says:

Americans want border security and they want a lower immigration rate; what they don’t want is to feel like they’re being asked to vote for “Operation Wetback, Part II.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there are any Republican politicians who actually believe in the moderate-restrictionist position.  Instead, there are politicians who make restrictionist promises they don’t intend to keep in the hopes of keeping the yahoo vote appeased, and politicians who sound like, well, yahoos themselves.

One of the reasons why there are no (or virtually no) Republican politicians who believe in a “moderate restrictionist” position is that such a position presupposes that a stronger restrictionist position is essentially a “yahoo” view that must receive some lip service, but never under any circumstances should it dictate policy.  In other words, to hold the “moderate” position is to take for granted that the people most energised by the issue, the voters who are most likely to make your immigration position an important basis for their vote, are cretins who must be kept under control, which means that there is no political advantage in holding the “moderate” position when you can adopt a more “hard-line” view that you have no intention of supporting in meaningful legislation.  The average GOP House member knows that he will get no credit for taking a more “moderate” position and will suffer a backlash if he appears to “soften” on immigration.  Also, there are few people the politician could turn to in the conservative movement who would want to help his “moderate” position, since the debate long ago broke down into globalist/capitalist defenders of mass immigration in all its forms (for whom existing restrictions are the problem), opponents of illegal immigration and a relatively smaller, but vocal, bloc of opponents of most or all forms of immigration.  In theory the “enforcement-first” bloc, the second on this list, is the “moderate restrictionist” position, but as matter of intra-party politics the pro-amnesty forces have pushed together enforcement-first and all other restrictionists and deliberately try to obscure the differences between all positions to their right.     

Symbolic border fence bills (such as the one the President signed in ’06) are perfect for such politicians, since it sends the message back home that you are appearing to take a strong restrictionist position, all the while knowing that the bill is pure symbolism and even if constructed will be insufficient in the absence of greater internal enforcement.  It’s rather like Republican politicians who intervened in the Schiavo case to get credit for their allegedly staunch pro-life convictions, but who otherwise do little or nothing substantive on matters of life.  There are no political advantages from what might be called a “moderate pro-life” position, and obviously there are no penalties for making pledges on an issue that are never kept.  The old logic of “where are they going to go?” applies to pro-life voters just as it does to restrictionists.  Knowing that these voters will always come back to the party in the end, Republican pols have every incentive to use absolutist rhetoric and essentially do nothing after the election, except for the occasional symbolic gesture (“pardon Compean and Ramos!” they cry).

However, it all depends on how you define the “moderate restrictionist” position.  Was the Pence compromise bill an example of a “moderate restrictionist” view?  In the view of most restrictionist activists and voters, the Pence plan was an unacceptable compromise and was seen as little more than delayed amnesty.  All of this relates to a basic lack of trust in the political class.  Supposing that there is a “moderate” position that could satisfy most restrictionist voters’ concerns, anything that seems to water down or weaken a “hard-line” position at this point appears to these voters to be a kind of trick.  Washington’s general neglect of immigration policy for the last two decades has created intense distrust, and the insistence by supporters of amnesty that they do not support amnesty (as Bush and McCain keep insisting to this day) reinforces that distrust and strips all compromise plans, including Mike Pence’s, of all credibility.  Pence also insists that his plan has nothing to do with amnesty, but having been lied to for years these voters are in no mood for the subtleties of guest-worker schemes (which they would regard as basically unworkable and unenforceable anyway). 

To overcome this credibility gap, Republican pols have to stake out very strong restrictionist views to reassure voters who will cease to trust them if they are seen to move very much at all towards a “moderate” position.  This dynamic is reinforced by the tendency of genuinely open borders and pro-immigration advocates within the GOP of denouncing any restrictionist position that goes beyond “securing the border” as bigoted.  Even if a “moderate” position existed that could conceivably address the concerns of restrictionists, no one would want to risk going out into the middle of the no man’s land between the WSJ and the establishment and the rank-and-file restrictionists, because they know they would take heavy fire from both, have very few allies and endanger their re-election over what a “moderate restrictionist” is likely to regard as a second-tier issue anyway.  In other words, if you are inclined to take a “moderate” position on restricting immigration, you probably aren’t concerned about it enough to risk the political suicide that adopting a “moderate” position would entail.

With all the appropriate caveats in mind (i.e., this poll does not predict what will happen, the election is far away, many things can change, and so on), here is some information from the latest Rasmussen Michigan poll.  McCain leads both Clinton and Obama by three points.  Only 65% of liberals express support for Obama with 19% going for McCain and 11% for “some other candidate.”  McCain has a weak hold on conservative voters (74%), but holds on to more of them than Obama does with liberals.  Obama trails narrowly among independents and gets just 67% of Democrats.  7% of Republicans support him, while 17% of Democrats back McCain.  There are slightly fewer “Obamacans” than Republicans who would opt for Clinton over McCain (13%).  That is not what is supposed to be happening.   

My generation must be pretty cynical, because they seem to react very negatively to Obama all over the country.  His unfav rating among voters 18-29 is 56%, which is by far the highest unfav of any age group.  He trails McCain among the 18-29 group by 23 points (33-56), but he managed to remain competitive or tie in every other age group.  This age group rallies to Clinton more than any other even though she has an unfav rating over 50% with this group: she still gets 54% of the 18-29 group to McCain’s 41%.  The story we keep hearing about the enthusiasm for Obama among the young does not reflect the attitudes of a majority of young voters.  The generational trend towards the Democrats that we have been hearing about is apparently real enough, but it seems to collapse when Obama is the candidate.

Dave Weigel offers an interesting article on the Ron Paul campaign, but unfortunately we are going to clash again over his claims about the alleged inefficacy of anti-immigration politics.  When longshot candidates who have little realistic chance of gaining traction take up immigration as an issue and then fail to gain traction, it seems as if this is frequently attributed to the adoption of the immigration issue rather than a function of the longshot, marginal candidacy itself or the result of a more general failure of political strategy that Weigel has described elsewhere. 

It is fair to say that there were more competitors for the anti-amnesty, anti-immigration vote in the GOP primaries, which made any attempt to poach voters from the crowded field unlikely to result in smashing success, but there is a flaw in the following conclusion:

This lunge for the Minuteman vote didn’t work. According to exit polls, Paul won only 8 percent of Republican voters who want to deport all illegal immigrants. That was 16 points less than immigration compromiser John McCain, six less than amnesty waffler Mike Huckabee, and even one point less than “sanctuary city” mayor Rudy Giuliani. Paul finished a poor fifth among voters who cared about immigration but came in a strong second place among voters angry at the Bush administration. In other words, he came in second among his natural constituency and fared poorly on an issue every candidate was already scrapping over.

But consider that he also finished behind McCain among anti-Bush voters.  In state after state, he routinely fell behind both McCain and Romney among antiwar voters, when both stated clearly their intentions to prolong the war.  This means that there was something very strange about Paul’s natural constituencies–they may have been against Bush and the war, but they did not place a terribly high prioritiy on opposition to either one.  It also means that a restrictionist electorate that could bring itself to back McCain, Huckabee and Romney in large numbers is either generally poorly informed or fairly irrational in its candidate preferences, and the same could be said for antiwar voters.  When restrictionists refuse to vote for one of only two candidates (the other being Hunter) who had any real credibility as a restrictionist by the time of New Hampshire, there is not much that a campaign can do. 

Unlike the restrictionist voting pool, which could sometimes swell to 50% or more of the primary electorate, anti-Bush and antiwar voters consistently made up roughly a 30% minority of GOP voters, which meant that Paul was always fishing in a relatively small pool.  His “natural constituencies” were very unnaturally backing candidates who espoused the opposite of everything Paul was offering, meaning that Paul was usually getting perhaps a fifth or less of this third of Republicans that he theoretically should have dominated.  Arguably, restrictionism was one area after Tancredo’s withdrawal where Paul could have conceivably gained some purchase, since he had some real credibility in opposing mass immigration in a field crowded with latecomers and opportunists.  It was an attempt that did not pay dividends, but it was a reasonably smart move considering that it was the perception of Huckabee and Romney as hard-liners on immigration that continued to keep them viable with conservative voters who should have regarded both with suspicion on this and other issues.  Huckabee won Iowa in part because he presented himself simply as an anti-amnesty candidate.  The figure of 8% in New Hampshire is no better, but also no worse than his statewide performance, and the percentage is consistent with the fraction of GOP voters who have been called “Fortress America” Republicans.  These are the voters most receptive to a combined anti-Bush, antiwar and anti-immigration message.  Outside this group, however, anti-immigration sentiment tends to be strongest among nationalists, who tend to be “Jacksonian” in their foreign policy views and so are least inclined to endorse foreign policy arguments that stress “blowback,” criticise American deployments as outposts of empire and demand immediate withdrawal from a war zone.  It’s true that Paul could only draw a small sliver of restrictionist voters, because only a small sliver of these voters also share Paul’s foreign policy perspective.  In an ideal world, pro-sovereignty and anti-imperial messages ought to complement each other electorally, but in reality they seem to cut against each other. 

Yet it is very questionable whether a “more foreign policy–based libertarian message” would have been the better course.  I assume Weigel and others have seen the high unfav ratings Rep. Paul had in every early state; these high unfav ratings were the result in large part of Paul’s principled and correct foreign policy position, so it seems likely that an even more intensely foreign policy-based campaign would have been the cause of higher unfavs and would have been even less successful electorally.  As frustrating as it is to admit, thoroughgoing non-interventionism or a general “mind our own business” attitude in foreign affairs is not terribly popular among Republicans, and perhaps has not been for at least ten years.  Focusing even more intently on this part of the campaign was not going to boost Paul’s share of the vote.  Deploying populist appeals on immigration was an attempt to broaden Paul’s message that did not really yield the desired results, but it seems certain that a more strictly anti-imperialist campaign would have had even more limited appeal.  Some voters choose candidates purely or primarily on foreign policy, but most do not.  A campaign that was already heavily defined by its foreign policy dissent could scarcely have increased its numbers among antiwar voters who were already willing to vote for McCain and Romney, since their opposition to the war could hardly have been very deep.  One of the biggest problems with Paul’s restrictionist appeals is that they came relatively late in the process, which probably gave the average voter the impression that Paul was engaged in imitating Huckabee and Romney in their race to capture the restrictionist vote.  A deeper problem, and one Paul’s campaign could have done little to change, was that the GOP is filled with voters who rallied behind such “conservatives” as Huckabee and Romney and has very few that prize radical devotion to the Constitution or economic liberty.  Under the circumstances, and bearing in mind the mistakes in organisation the campaign did make, Paul may have done about as well as he could have.

Via Ross, here is George Kateb’s essay against patriotism.  Within the first few paragraphs, he makes the classic mistake that nationalists tend to make when he says:

Are such feelings properly transferred to a country? Should love of country overwhelm all self-centered reluctance? In particular, is gratitude, a kind of love, the right emotion to feel towards one’s country? Although children are not usually asked to die for their parents, and most parents wouldn’t accept the offer if it were made, some defenders of patriotism imagine the state as a super-parent that may ask its children to die for it. The idea of patriotism is inseparable from killing and dying for your country. A good patriot is a good killer.

Right away this confuses the state and the country, and also rips out of context the obligation to defend one’s country against invasion.  Regarding Ross’ question, I don’t know what Mr. Kateb thinks about Prof. Lukacs’ crucial patriotism/nationalism distinction, but I can say that the distinction vitiates this objection to the connection between patriotism and force, because patriotism is essentially defensive while nationalism tends to be aggressive and domineering.  Children aren’t usually asked to die for their parents, but then their parents aren’t usually placed under threat of attack.  In the general course of life, episodes when one’s parents and country are under attack are happily rare, but would Mr. Kateb really say that there is literally no obligation to defend either when they are under attack?  Grant that your parents would probably not ask you to die that they might live–would you not rightly feel a duty to risk your life in their defense anyway? 

In any case, there are two different questions raised here: should the state be able to oblige you to serve it in a military capacity in the name of patriotism regardless of circumstances, or does a general obligation for all eligible citizens to serve in the military only become operative if your country itself is under attack? 

Next, Kateb focuses his attack on obligations one owes the political community, which is once again distinct from the obligations one owes the patria/patris.  Whether or not we should think of the polis as being prior even to the family, it seems to me that an obligation to one’s home country is prior even to obligations to the polis, which came into existence at some point in association with a particular place where people had already settled in some kind of community.  Arguably, in the case of Greek poleis the distinction between country and political community might be at its weakest, but even here it exists.  Nonetheless, what Kateb finds offensive is the idea of unchosen obligations to the political community.  The confusion between government and country continues throughout the essay.

Kateb’s essay is weighed down further by his reliance on contract theories of government, which advance pleasant fictions (the consent of the governed and social contract) as if they bore some relation to political reality anywhere in history.  If Kateb wants to argue that you can only be patriotic if you reject the fiction of social contract, I might be tempted to agree with him, but for a very different reason.  You need not endorse a Filmeresque idea of a paternalistic or absolute monarchy in which the monarch serves as father of the country to believe that you have obligations to both state and country to which you never consented.  It is telling that Kateb then acknowledges that even theorists of social contract could not, or at least did not, maintain a contrary view.

Kateb has raised two lines of defense for patriotism that are actually defenses of something else, has found both wanting and therefore declares that patriotism has no justification.  But patriotism won’t go away, and this worries Kateb because:

The trouble is that this brute fact contributes to the erosion of the sentiment that government exists by consent and has the status of servant to the people.

So the “brute fact” of patriotism helps to dispel a myth woven by 17th and 18th century political philosophers, which means that patriotism actually works to demystify the real structure of politics.  I suppose patriotism does facilitate “the erosion of the idea of rational consent,” which is mainly a problem for those whose defense of constitutional government is bound up with this implausible theory.  According to Kateb, unless we maintain this myth liberty itself is in danger.  Apparently there are no other arguments, prudential or otherwise, for checking the consolidation and abuse of power and providing legal protections to citizens against their own government unless we embrace the Whig fairy tale that the people are sovereign and have only delegated their sovereignty to some public authority.  This is not right.

All in all, what Kateb wants more than anything is to make an argument against war, and particularly against senseless foreign wars, but scarcely talks about war or the incentives that the state has in waging wars.  Instead, he pins the cause of wars on a sense of obligation to political communities, which he continually mistakes for patriotism, and then blames patriotism for all of it.  In general, what Kateb is complaining about, to the extent that it has anything to do with patriotism, is the tendency of the state to wrap up its war propaganda in appeals to patriotism.  Rather than focusing his criticism on the state for its war propaganda and its desire for more power, Kateb blames patriotism for creating the possibility for the state to exploit natural sentiments of loyalty to country.  The state claims the right to invoke the obligations owed to the country, even when its policies may be contrary to the interests of the country and patriotic duty may demand non-compliance or open resistance, and Kateb takes for granted that the obligations are the same.  Indeed, he makes the state’s conflation of the two the basis for his critique of patriotism.  Patriotism has been horribly violated by warmongers, and it seems that Kateb blames the victim. 

What is frustrating about all of this is that Kateb seems to accept on its face the lie that an “activist foreign policy,” which he clearly opposes, has something to do with patriotism.  Yet it is almost never the case that what we are calling an “activist foreign policy” serves the interests of our country.  Unwittingly, Kateb endorses every critique, whether expressed openly or not, that says that opposition to such a foreign policy is in some sense unpatriotic; it cedes patriotism to nationalists, ideologues and warmongers, when they have the least claim to it.  This is not simply a question of not alienating the broad patriotic majority, but it is really a question of whether we are willing to endorse the deception that imperial misadventures have something to do with the defense of the United States.  Needless to say, should opponents of such a foreign policy ever concede such a fundamental point they will deserve to lose.  The question is also whether we want to endorse this deception for the sake of defending the fiction of government by consent. 

I would argue that it is this fiction that the government owes its existence to popular consent and the system of mass democracy that encourage this fiction that represent the real threats to constitutional liberty both in theory and in practice.  Without the myth of government by consent, the argument that government represents the interests of the people or of the country would be much less persuasive, which in turn would make it much harder for patriots to identify the best interests of their country with whatever the state was doing.  Without mass democracy encouraging people to identify themselves, their country and the government, patriotism would be harder to exploit in the service of government policies, whether focused on “security” at home or “defense” overseas.  The “danger” of patriotism, such as it is, is that citizens mistake their patriotic duty for more or less unquestioning support for unjust and/or illegal state policies and mistake criticism of those policies for attacks on their country, which they naturally resent.  Instead of combating this dangerous confusion, Kateb reinforces and endorses it, which is why he has embarked on the misguided task of discrediting the very patriotism that tells this anti-imperialist that an “activist foreign policy” advanced through unjust and illegal wars is contrary to the best interests of America, a threat to constitutional government, the cause of increased consolidation of power in fewer hands and the pretext for the violation of numerous constitutional liberties.

A three-day old Rasmussen poll shows Obama ahead 53-39 with 8% “not sure.”  Even if most of the late deciders go for Clinton, then Obama still ought to win by five points or more if we assume that these figures are right.  The crosstabs show a pattern very similar to South Carolina, where Obama wins almost every demographic by virtue of winning an overwhelming percentage of black voters.  The poll shows 22% of white voters backing Obama, which I believe is slightly lower than his share of that vote in South Carolina.

Dionne makes a heroic effort to argue that 2008 will be another 1932 in terms of the character of the election, but the reasons he gives are less than persuasive.  Issues related to religion and culture, he says, are fading into the background, and he argues that they always do when “great” crises occur.  There are two major problems with Dionne’s analysis.  One has to do with his assessment of the “long secular era from 1932 to 1980” and the other has to do with his description of the character of the current election cycle.   

Of course, the most notable crisis moment of the last eight years in America was 9/11, and this yielded not a weakening or minimising of religious and cultural divides, but rather an amplification of them because of the role of religion in the conflict and through the association of different sets of cultural values with attitudes towards the administration’s response.  An eruption of “new atheist” manifestoes and books warning about incipient theocracy have all been published in the last three or four years, and these tracts are feeding a growing demand for anti-religious nonsense.  On their own, they may not be terribly significant, but they are symptoms of a widening chasm between secular and religious in America.  The culture wars are not only continuing, but they are arguably intensifying and the belligerents are become more hardened in their opposition.  At this point Dionne will reply that this only represents the “extremes” and not the majority, but the “extremes” are where the energy and activism are.  Milquetoast moderation does not mobilise very many. 

Even Obama’s campaign and the movement building around the campaign are described all the time with religious language, whether half-jokingly, accusingly or out of admiration, and if his agenda is secular his progressivism nonetheless participates in the tradition of the Social Gospel of liberal Protestantism to which he personally belongs.  Likewise, the harshest and most unfair attacks on Obama have been aimed exactly at two things, patriotism and religious faith, that ought not to be gaining any traction in an electorate that is less receptive to culture war politics.  Clearly, it has gained some purchase, or else the campaign would have felt no compulsion to combat the falsehoods being spread about the candidate.  This election cycle is simply overflowing with issues of cultural symbolism, and Obama’s supporters have made no secret that they find his candidacy attractive because of its symbolism.  We are using a very denuded definition of culture and religion if we think that these are not prominent in the current campaign, and it would be a major mistake to assume that these issues are not important in this contest simply because traditional “hot-button” questions have momentarily receded from the center of the debate.  

Just a few months ago, it seemed that quite a few people were fretting that this election cycle had become all together too infused with religious rhetoric, imagery and quarrels.  Obviously religion played some significant role in the Republican nominating contest, and it is wrong to conclude that McCain’s victory represents even a temporary decline of culture war politics.  Let us recall that prior to Romney’s withdrawal McCain was routinely getting perhaps 33-36% of the vote, while the two rivals who were explicitly identifying themselves with more or less credibility as social and cultural conservatives received together almost twice as much support.  The very existence of Mike Huckabee’s insurgent campaign is a testament to the enduring power of this kind of politics.  A candidate so closely identified with evangelical Christianity has never come as far in a nominating contest in my lifetime, and I suspect that this is a sign of more things to come rather than a last hurrah.  Obama and Clinton have started to make more use of religious rhetoric, but this does not herald an end to the culture wars, but instead represents a modest transformation of how people are expressing clashing cultural values. 

The exact cultural issues that will be salient may not remain the same from cycle to cycle.  Gay “marriage” was one of the flashpoints in 2004, but so were rehashed arguments over Vietnam and all the original late-’60s and ’70s culture war baggage these entailed.  After all, contemporary and post facto arguments about Vietnam were never entirely about military involvement in Southeast Asia, but also concerned the definition of America and American-ness.  Even to the extent that Obama frames his entire candidacy around abandoning these arguments, the proposal to stop the argument is itself still part of the same clash, and while Obama may offer the opportunity to move “beyond” the Boomers the election will nonetheless be decided largely by the Boomers and will be fought over the cultural baggage of the late ’70s and ’80s.  To the extent that he is compared to or models himself on liberal heroes of ’60s myth, he represents the wish-fulfillment of liberal Boomers, and it is almost inevitable that the nomination of the first minority major party candidate for President will open or re-open divisions over race and affirmative action that existed in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

As Ross has suggested more than once, the “long secular era” was the exception.  It was related to the conditions of the country for the war generation, and to post-war economic expansion and a fairly high degree of cultural homogeneity during these decades.  He was referring more specifically to post-war politics, but I think it applies to this entire period.  Post-1965 immigration and cultural fragmentation that came out of the “age of abundance” are part of what created the conditions for the disputes of the last thirty years.  We are still living in the world shaped by cultural radicalism and the reaction against beginning in the ’70s, and the legacies of both seem to be set on trajectories that take them ever farther away from each other.  The “polarisation” so many people complain about is part of our social life and is based on, among other things, the significantly divergent interests of married and religious voters on one side and unmarried and secular voters on the other.  Also, you cannot have ever-greater cultural fragmentation aided by consumer capitalism and increasingly specialised social networks geared towards connecting you to people who are mostly like you and have a new era of amity and collaboration at the same time. 

An excess of cultural diversity in a republican or representative system ultimately means the crisis and breakdown of that system into either an authoritarian or monarchical regime of some sort or a crack-up of the polity into numerous, relatively more homogenous states.  We are probably still quite a long way away from such a crisis, but until it comes political polarisation will keep increasing as citizens come to have less and less in common with one another.

In the spirit of fairness, I should note that some of Obama’s other advisors on foreign policy are catching flack from the left for having been insufficiently interventionist in Rwanda and Bosnia (and “alarmingly” so).  Now that SamanthaPower is fortunately out of the campaign, this arguably might make Obama’s foreign policy team somewhat less appalling.  Of course, it is the candidate people are electing, and this reminder about what some of his advisors did (or, more importantly, didn’t) do thirteen or fourteen years ago doesn’t really change my assessment of his views.  It’s a bit like finding out that Scowcroft is on board with McCain: it’s slightly reassuring that there is at least one voice of reason in the cacophony of madness, but only slightly.