Contra Palinism

Here are excerpts from an editorial from Roger Cohen that carries insight into this anti-international Palinism. Palinism versus global connectedness.

"Exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It's become the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.

From an inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty, American exceptionalism has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by "one-worlders" and who believe it's more important to know how to dress moose than find Mumbai.

That's Palinism, a philosophy delivered without a passport and with a view (on a clear day) of Russia.

Behind Palinism lies anger. It's been growing as America's relative decline has become more manifest in stagnant or falling incomes, imploding markets, massive debt, and rising new centers of wealth and power from Shanghai to Dubai.

The damn-the-world, God-chose-us rage of that America has sharpened as U.S. exceptionalism has become harder to square with the 21st-century world's interconnectedness. How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?

To persist with a philosophy grounded in America's separateness rather than its connectedness would be devastating at a time when the country faces two wars, a financial collapse unseen since 1929, commodity inflation, a huge transfer of resources to the Middle East, and the imperative to develop new sources of energy.
Enough is enough.

The basic shift from the Cold War to the New World is from MAD (mutual assured destruction) to MAC (mutual assured connectedness.)
Which brings us to the first debate Friday between Obama and McCain on foreign policy. It will pit the former's universalism against the latter's exceptionalism.

I'm going to try to make this simple. On the Democratic side you have a guy whose campaign has been based on the Internet, who believes America may have something to learn from other countries (like universal health care), and who's unafraid in 2008 to say he's a "proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world."

On the Republican side, you have a guy who, in 2008, is just discovering the Net and Google and whose number two is a woman who got a passport last year and believes she understands Russia because Alaska is closer to Siberia than Alabama.

A new century demands new thinking. "