Today’s bipartisan elite are more hesitant to take a position of advocacy of a wholly ” American” position and are more apt to be viscerally critical of those who do ( they are also critical of excessively hostile attacks on the “American” position as well – “exceptionalism” is what is being rejected in either case) . When commenting on conflicts between the United States and some third party, unless they are serving in a sitting administration, you will frequently hear the elite adopting the pose of a morally neutral arbiter who is above the fray. This is a pose that satisfies no one except themselves.

This ” hands-off” approach to American interests is an attitude that trickles down culturally from the elite to the larger society. Some segments of the American media cannot bear to use the word “terrorist“, when reporting stories about Islamist terrorism, even when that label plainly fits. Some leading media journals are uncomfortable with reporters even aspiring to objectivity in regard to American foreign policy and want to move to overtly critical stances. In the realm of public education, we have forsworn assimilation in favor of an intellectually vapid and ahistorical multiculturalism; a premise which leads to inane actions like banning American flags ( as if the flag was somehow on par with the flag of a foreign state) that would have been inconceivable at one time. Patriotism, if education journals like Phi Delta Kappan are to be believed, is either a suspect concept or is best expressed by critical suspicion of American motives. This is a policy of deliberately cultivating Post-Nationalist detachment in the young.

Secondly, having studied more than their share of abstruse theory, the elite manifests idealism in the sense of emotional attachment to certain universal abstractions. A factor that explains the dominance of Liberalism as an IR theory in graduate schools and the Foreign Service as well as an increasingly expansive and aggressive interpretation of the authority of International Law and foreign laws being asserted in Law Schools and even in the judicial branch. There is a perspective here that evaluates potential actions not on the grounds of morality or strategic effect but on how well those actions might fit into these conceptual schemas or disrupt them.

These complex and legalistic arguments favored by the bipartisan elite do not resonate particularly well with ordinary Americans who are apt to argue pragmatically as to national self- interest or using the simple morality of right and wrong. These arguments also sit poorly because these debates are also about the elite preference for an eternally evolving process over a clarifying foreign policy decision that would require action and incur political and personal consequences. This careerist preference for inaction is a hallmark of the new bipartisan elite and is a stark contrast with the Eastern Establishment who generally sought office as a means to certain strategic ends. The self-interest of today’s elite class is not invisible to the larger public.

What does the bipartisan and Post-nationalist elite hold to be important? They are robustly in favor of globalization, which earns them the sobriquet of “Neoliberal” from the hard Left; they revere multilateralism and international institutions such as the UN, NATO, IMF, WTO, Partnership for Peace and so on for their intrinsic value as well as their utility in implementing ( or avoiding) policy choices. This makes them mildly transnationalist and accepting of new institutions that might restrict sovereignty – though they have yet to show a preference for clearly written rule-sets to go with these institutions; they are “stabilitarians” who prefer to nibble at the edges of problem states; they are legalists concerned with finer aspects of the formal process of diplomacy. Some of these qualities, many of them in fact, are good and useful things but not at every time and place. These are the attributes of an era of peace and some of them fit less well for a moment of crisis.

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