SPENGLER: “Violent antipathy to America measures the triumph of the American principle, and the ascendance of America’s influence in the world. America’s enemies make more noise than her friends, but her friends are increasing faster than her enemies.”

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Daniel Schensul doesn’t like the Spengler piece: “It ends with an astonishingly stupid critique of Obama.”

I think he’s right. Spengler quotes a passage from Obama’s Dreams of My Father in which Obama contrasts the poor of traditional societies in Indonesia with the — much richer but much less grounded — poor of American slums. I don’t agree with Spengler that this is necessarily a put-down of America in favor of traditional societies, and in fact P.J. O’Rourke has made the same point more than once in comparing U.S. housing projects with third-world slums. To say that inhabitants of housing projects lack the useful social structure that people in traditional societies have isn’t to say that a traditional society would be better for America; it’s more a way of saying that you have to have a degree of civic culture to sustain a worthwhile society — especially if you’re poor.