Mr. Beinart has perfected the art of ‘Liberal’ bourgeois political chatter, that hews to the current iteration of Political Orthodoxy. Along the way the names of Kissinger and Kennan are dropped, and the idea of ‘Civilizational Conservative’, and other foreshortened forms of this idea, are used as garnish for his essay. Yet not one mention of the notorious Samuel P. Huntington and his two books ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ and ‘Who Are We’ that just might be considered as the part of the founding principals, in a highly vulgarized form, of both Trumpism and the ‘Alt-Right’ Know-Nothings.

Mr. Huntington’s galloping paranoia of the ‘Other’ was established in ‘The Clash’ and  particularized in ‘Who Are We’, in the the form of the imagined Mestizo Hordes that are invading the sanctity of the English speaking, Anglo-Protestant Virtue of America. Mr. Huntington political sensibility is that of a Henry Adams, Cosmopolitanism is an active subversion of an imagined ‘purity’: The Other, slaves, built the America that was never purely Anglo-Protestant. And the genocide against Indigenous Peoples was part of the sacred idea/practice of Manifest Destiny. The inconvenience of History!

Political Observer

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/the-conservative-split-on-russia/510317/