Where Do These !@#$%^& Wilsonians Come From, Anyway?

Over at National Interest Robert Merry devotes a substantial amount of teeth-gnashing to Americans’ bad habit of electing interventionist presidents:

The United States has suffered through thirteen years of foreign-policy incompetence in the Oval Office, with little likelihood that the pattern will change before the next president is inaugurated. The country desperately needs salvation from such consistent blundering, but there’s no particular reason to believe the next president will be any better. And thus, the gnawing question is: What accounts for so many years under two presidents when foreign policy turned out to be one fiasco after another?

It is not as hard to explain as he makes it out to be. Americans tend to elect the candidate who presents the more positive, optimistic view of America and its future. Wilsonianism, liberal interventionism, is an optimistic view. If we elect candidates with optimistic views, we’ll get Wilsonians. See how easy that was?

BTW, what in the heck is the comma doing in this sentence:

The problem with that thesis is that neither George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama lacks serious native intelligence.

Is punctuation no longer taught in the schools? I realize that publications are trimming budgets and cutting back on editors but you’d think that people would have the self-respect to proofread their own published material.

6 comments… add one
  • I’ve written a lot for The National Interest and like their editors a lot. But they devote zero effort to editing online articles and thus don’t catch obvious errors. Given that a lot of the pieces are written on breaking topics and under tight deadlines, I’ve often turned in and had published articles with various typos which I then find myself and send in as errata to be fixed. It’s all rather embarrassing.

    They’re much more fastidious with the print edition, including book reviews, to the point of (for my tastes) over-editing.

  • Just thirteen years? I’d probably add about ten years to that. Come 1991, decades of foreign policy establishment thought, training, ideology, and purpose became moot.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I agree that Wilsonianism is a more optimal extension of domestic policies. But I also wonder about the impact of the Cold War. To the extent the Cold War was an ideological struggle, it played to the strengths of Wilsonians. There was also a significant role played by Hamiltonians, so I wonder where the Hamiltonians are? I don’t think Obama has a Hamiltonian fiber in his body, and while I think George W. Bush was probably Hamiltonian prior to 9/11, his legacy became the forging of a Wilsonian/Jacksonian foreign policy mainstream within the G.O.P.

  • As should be clear from the WSJ’s editorial policy, the governor was removed from Hamiltonians’ interventionist aspirations when Treasury started borrowing to pay for wars without any need for ever paying off that debt. IMO George H. W. Bush was our most recent clearly Hamiltonian president.

    I think that this:

    I think George W. Bush was probably Hamiltonian prior to 9/11, his legacy became the forging of a Wilsonian/Jacksonian foreign policy mainstream within the G.O.P.

    is a good characterization.

  • Jimbino Link

    They must have taken a hint from those 1st & 3rd commas in “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

  • TastyBits Link

    Regarding the stray comma: I will restructure a sentence or paragraph using cut & paste or drag & drop, but sometimes, things get left behind. Originally, it might have been ” that George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama, lacks”, but he later added the “neither”.

    He may know the rules of punctuation, but if he is being paid, it should have been proofread.

Leave a Comment