My mother is not an illegal immigrant. ~Sam Brownback

Young Zeitlin doesn’t like Ron Paul’s remarks throwing the pejorative term isolationist back in the faces of those who use it all the time.  For the whippersnapper, it’s clunky and outdated international institutions or nothing at all.  Working through bilateral relations is apparently not supposed to be an option.  This objection got me to thinking about different foreign policy schools. 

The liberal internationalist seems to prefer a faculty meeting approach to international relations–hence the enthusiasm for international institutions.  International institutions really are surprisingly like faculty meetings: people who don’t like each other gather, get very little done and trade unpleasantries and thinly-veiled slights when any two of those in the room might come to some mutually beneficial collaborative arrangement on their own.   

The neoconservative and generic interventionists are very much opposed to their own “isolation,” preferring instead to isolate and occasionally strike others.  This is the international relations-as-prison facility approach.  Naturally, the interventionists have a condition for running things this way–they get to be the warden and the guards.  When the “prisoners” (i.e., other countries) react badly, they are in need of discipline and punishment, which the interventionist seems only too keen to mete out.

The non-interventionist has a radical and “kooky” notion that international relations ought to work much more like an engaging conversation for the purpose of mutual benefit.  Instead of sacrificing interests and sovereignty to generally useless, but sometimes actually dangerous, talking shops or trying to treat the rest of the world like the inhabitants of a jail, the non-interventionist imagines that America’s international relations might return to the way our government ran them for close to a century and a half.

If Belgium falls to sectarianism, what does that say about prospects for making Europe into a super-Belgium? ~Jonah Goldberg

But it isn’t sectarianism that is dividing Belgium, since sectarianism would imply, well, the existence of rival sects that serve as the basis for political and social divides.  In fact, one of the reasons for the creation of Belgium was the decided lack of sectarian divides among the Flemings and Walloons of the southern half of the southern provinces.  It was through common identity as Catholics that Belgians were originally lumped together.  With secularisation and the general decline of religion as a primary political loyalty, ethnic and linguistic differences inevitably have become more salient.  If Belgium breaks up, it will be partly on account of the breakdown in the original “sectarian” character of Belgian identity.

Alex Massie has more.

Huckabee could probably do without this kind of “help”:

As it happens, the Bush adviser [Bartlett] was most enthusiastic about a contender who seems to have even less chance. He called Huckabee the “best candidate,” one who seems to most mirror Bush’s own vision of compassionate conservatism [bold mine-DL].

At his latest press conference, Gordon Brown uttered the seemingly banal phrase, “With power comes responsibility,” which several people have noticed to be a close rip-off from one of the lines of Spiderman.  That ‘s perhaps not the best association to conjure up for a government now desperately trying to rid itself of a reputation for “spin.”  (Drumroll, please.)

Speaking of Bernard Lewis, one of the more unpleasant facts about the man is that he has made a point, using his reputation as a serious Ottomanist, of maintaining the Ankara line on the Armenian genocide (i.e., that it wasn’t planned and wasn’t genocide).  Naturally, Armenian-Americans are rather unhappy that genocide deniers receive presidential awards, and I should think most everyone should be unsettled at the thought that one of the more influential historians advising or inspiring Republican views on the region is committed to denying a genocide.  Lewis’ privileged place as the administration’s reliable Middle East expert helps explain the White House’s fairly despicable attitude on the question of recognition.

We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth. ~Barack Obama 

Establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth always means rendering more to Caesar than what was originally due. ~Nick Gillespie

 It is also, from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, impossible to do and it is impious to believe that men can build the Kingdom.  Also, chiliasm has long been regarded as a dangerous heresy.  Christians are citizens of the civitas Dei, and we should live accordingly, but we cannot replace the earthly city.  Christians are called to be the leaven in the world.  They are not called to be utopians.

It is not we non-interventionists who are isolationsists. The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example. ~Rep. Ron Paul

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has reminded us that we do not actually have either a functioning democratic or republican system, but instead suffer through a series of inept family-based cliques in a kakistocratic oligarchy (there are certainly no aristoi in our political class) in which connections are decisive and merit painfully irrelevant.  The latest example of this is the accession to the throne presidential campaign of Clinton.  In other words, things are running much as they have done for much of my lifetime (and almost certainly longer than that).  The idea that Bush-Clinton fatigue will set in among voters this time derives from the average pundit’s impatience with the dreariness of dynastic cycles and the continued belief that democracy results in generally better, more dynamic and less squalid government.  Our system keeps doing its best to prove that belief wrong, but it persists anyway. 

There will be no fatigue.  This dynastic cycle is, unless I am very much mistaken, what most Americans want, or at least it is what they will accept if it is offered to them.  Like Clinton, Bush the Younger was not called forth by an enthusiastic public, but was dropped on the country by his establishment chums and his family, and people accepted it out of sheer loathing of the other family and its allies.  

Americans’ affection for the Royal Family (or our pop culture’s fascination with the mafia, on the other end of the family spectrum) has always hinted at a sneaking admiration for hereditary and family power, and perhaps our national obsession with genealogy was also bound to catch up with us sooner or later.  It was only a matter of time before some sizeable number of us would embrace (or rather re-embrace, since this sort of thing has been happening for quite a while, as the Roosevelts and Tafts could testify) a politics defined by lineages.  There is every chance that the dynastic cycle could continue beyond 2016, and it would eventually have to be crowned by a joining of the two houses, like the joining of York and Lancaster or Komnenos and Doukas.  People have joked about this possibility in the past, but it’s not so far-fetched.  As a wise man once said of another proposed alliance of major political clans, “Then you can challenge the Klingons for interstellar domination.”  And what red-blooded American will want to turn away from that destiny?   

The only thing that is curious about Wheatcroft’s op-ed is that he expresses a degree of shock that this has happened.  Is it any wonder that a dysfunctional managed democracy has started to fall into the same sets of hands in election after election, distinguished only by the larger factions (i.e., political party and other interests) on whose behalf those hands rob empower the people?  Is it strange that a government that has what many people routinely call an “imperial presidency” should also have hangers-on and entire networks of family loyalists and retainers cultivated over decades of patronage?  The concentrated power there is, the more incentive there is to build up a huge network of allies to acquire and retain control over that concentrated power–and the more incentive there is for people to abase themselves in service to a dynasty.  The worse educated and worse informed the public is, the easier it will be to push candidates based on name and family association.   

One sympathises with the despair of Choniates as he surveyed the late twelfth century of Byzantium with its squabbling Angeloi and lesser Komnenoi, though right about now we could do worse–and probably will do worse–than a John the Fat.  We may hope that the outcome for us will be less traumatic, but if so it won’t be on account of wise and prudent government.

Dan McCarthy is making his “rash” predictions, so I thought it would be time to update my own.  Of course, once upon a time I made some really ridiculous predictions that were based more in contempt for the media-anointed candidates than in careful analysis.  The top six (or, now, seven) all seemed so preposterous and undesirable–how could any of them win?  But, of course, two of them are likely to emerge as the nominees.  More on that in a moment.  

Nine months later, I see just how wrong my painfully counterintuitive claims for a Duncan Hunter grassroots surge were.  Restrictionists evidently like their candidates to be preoccupied with nothing else, and so have backed Tancredo, leaving Hunter in asterisk country.  Rather embarrassingly, I assumed that Ron Paul’s position on the war would make him so unwelcome in the GOP primaries and would prevent him from playing any significant role, and yet it is Rep. Paul who has enjoyed the grassroots explosion of support and Rep. Paul who has made the biggest splash in the debates.  In theory, there was nothing more implausible about a Hunter candidacy enjoying this kind of success, since both Hunter and Paul are relatively little-known Congressmen, but I clearly overestimated the draw of Hunter’s trade and immigration views and neglected to consider that he would be dreadfully conformist on all questions pertaining to the war.  I actually underestimated the depth of frustration with the war, or at least I assumed it would work to the advantage of the Democrats.  Among other reasons, Hunter has generated so little enthusiasm because there is nothing particularly distinctive about Hunter’s campaign that mobilises many people.

Dan suggests an eventual Giuliani-Huckabee ticket.  This ticket seems designed to alienate two-thirds, so to speak, of the Republican coalition.  Huckabee’s social-con credentials will not be enough to stifle dissenters against Giuliani as the presidential nominee, and if Giuliani chooses Huckabee he will have sent a signal that will be deeply worrying to economic conservatives.  I have previously made light of such a combination of candidates, and I am still convinced that neither of these two will be on the national ticket.  Huckabee is arguably as personally likeable as Giuliani is obnoxious, and putting the two of them together will simply make people wonder, “Why isn’t the VP nominee on the top of the ticket?  This other guy is crazy!”  Besides, the GOP has never nominated an ethnic Catholic, nominal or otherwise, to either of its top two slots.  It isn’t going to start this year or next.  Romney will start failing early, and Thompson will benefit from this.  McCain will be gone or all but gone by the end of January.  Romney will probably still hang on to win Iowa.  Thompson, Romney and Paul will go 1-2-3 in N.H.  Giuliani will place maybe fifth in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire.  It’s frankly inconceivable to me that Giuliani can fare well in these states.  Thompson wins South Carolina.  Giuliani will persist, but find no success until Feb. 5 and even then not much.  Romney has the self-financing to keep going through March, and he will do so, but with ever more diminishing returns.  Thompson ultimately wins the nomination, and Thompson will choose someone from outside the presidential race as a running mate.  Thompson’s general election campaign will be unsuccessful, losing to the Democratic nominee by a sizeable margin.  A Clinton-Biden or Clinton-Richardson ticket will prevail.