Or more broadly construed, oikophobia, the opposite of xenophobia, the distaste and hatred of the familiar, the home, the hearth, one’s own land. It’s a topic I’ve touched on before (here, for example; or dig around in this tag). But a trio of good articles at National Review Online this morning provides a topical lesson in the wide—and mostly malign—practical implications of having our country run by faculty-lounge leftists who ardently desire the diminishment of American influence.

First, Mona Charen indicts Obama’s foreign policy as exacerbating and creating the crises which seem to be growing abroad:

Most Americans who are dissatisfied with Barack Obama’s leadership are thinking about the poor economy and the misbegotten health-care law. That disillusionment is justified — if tardy. But the foreign-policy failures of this administration are likely to be far more consequential, lasting, and possibly catastrophic.

What we are seeing is the collapse of American influence in the world.

Read on for the terms of the indictment. Charles C.W. Cooke (whom we like in addition to the CCW in his moniker) writes of an additional consequence to the practical oikophobia that our left-wing élite considers a mark of moral sophistication: we may turn control of the internet’s backbones over to the coterie of thugs, fanatics, bluenoses, and weirdos colloquially known as “the global community.”

“The United Nations has been angling quietly to become the epicenter of Internet governance,” warned Mary Bono Mack, a Republican from California, after the unanimous House vote. “We cannot let this happen,” she vowed gravely. Just a year later, we are. Yesterday, the United States found itself in an advantageous and virtuous position: the benign steward of an astonishing network that it developed, refined, and then gave to the world without caveat. Today, provoked and shamed into action by actors who have neither the moral nor legal claim to its work, it is on the cusp of giving up control. An unforced error. For shame.

For the potential unhappy consequences thereof, roughly summarized as “Goodbye, free speech on the Internet,” read on.

Left-wingers with a distaste for American preeminence have run the country before, with similarly disastrous results. Victor Davis Hanson explains how they belatedly saw the light and tried to change course—and why this crew likely will not.

Carter was dazed. He had come as a Light into the world to save it, and now the world had rejected him. Why was his magnanimity sneered at as weakness rather than appreciated and reciprocated with good will? Did these ungrateful countries not realize that they were only making American realpolitikers and reactionaries look good — and thus undermining a rare American internationalist who was more a citizen of the world?

Burning the “Amerikkan flag” in the People’s Park, Berkeley, in an “annual tradition.” Watching the world burn may be next for all of us, thanks to self-appointed moral superiors like these assclowns.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.