I used to feel this way, although I haven't really ever since Helmut Kohl lost in Germany and especially not since Mrs. Thatcher was ousted in England (not, for Mrs. Thatcher, the U.K.). Since then, I have tended to support only incumbent parties, on the selfish basis that it is easier for me to remember the name of the Italian Prime Minister if he stays in office for longer than six weeks at a stretch. (This was a big problem in Italian politics pre-Berlusconi.) I have real reasons for this, of course--in many of the countries I care most about, a change in regime is apt to bring to power countries whose foreign policies I find distasteful, as happened when the KMT lost in Taiwan and the younger generation of Korean politicians triumphed in South Korea.

The country whose political parties have the deepest bonds of affection with American politicos and commentators is, of course, the U.K. Who should American conservatives support in the British elections? I have written lukewarmly of the British Labour Party in its new, post-Kinnock form, while other conservative partisans look to less profound reasons to prefer Blair. Ideologically, I find more to approve of in the Labour government as realized (often, of course, against the wishes of its core voters and backbenchers) than in the current Conservative Party under Michael Howard, which is reactionary in the worst Buchananite sense (though without the anti-gay bigotry).

But why do I care? Why, indeed, does anyone care? Foreign policy, it seems to me, is the only thing an American should really have a forceful opinion about in regards to other countries' leaders, as long as their domestic politics don't threaten our interests. And foreign policy, as practiced by respectable nations (the ones that have the settled, stable political party systems that give rise to these feelings of transnational political kinship), is the least partisan part of foreign policy.

Europeans, of course, live cheek-by-jowl with their fellow continentals, and so I can understand a member of the Partido Popular tending to support the Christian Democrats or a French Socialist cheering the parties allied with Romano Prodi. European integration only formalizes the links that have long existed, especially in working-class politics: It is not for nothing that one of the anthems of socialism is called "L'Internationale."

Americans, though, have no such real immediate interest in the domestic affairs of other nations. To confine myself to British examples: I have no experience with the National Health; I do not pay a council tax; I vastly prefer the American tertiary educational system to the Oxford "tute"; and my political thought on the issue of regional devolution is confined to a mushy, Thatcherite and Churchillian belief that "There will always be an England" equates to "There will always be an England ruling a United Kingdom." In other words, I have no basis on an experiential or even, really, a bookish level to prefer one party's specific policies over another, especially in these days when the trade unions and international Communism are dead.

These warm and ill-defined friendly feelings toward various political parties spontaneously emerge everywhere in the commentariat. Leftists in Europe always favor labour movements or other practioners of "resistance" politics, no matter how cruel they are in power or out; conservatives in America are willing to tolerate authoritarian governments abroad, so long as they only lock up peasants and leave American tourists unmolested. These are extreme cases, of course, but I think a moment's reflection will suffice to translate them into First World norms. (Or even Third World norms, unless you've forgotten how we all spontaneously rallied around Yushchenko.)

Why are these feelings generated? It is because the principal preoccupation of political scriveners is ideology divorced from reality. Writing is an exercise in abstraction, but professional politics is a constant grappling with the concrete. We should not, therefore, be surprised when Western observers return from this or that country to find that the local government is either the herald of a new golden age or the beginning of a gulag era, depending on the ideological beliefs of the observer. In democratic political terms, writers will focus less on the day-to-day and intensely local issues that the electorate considers and more on the party platforms and explicit statements of the candidates.

We should know better from reading, say, the Guardian's coverage of the American election. Foreign observers, lacking the long experience with a wide experience of subgroups in a country, will always miss the most important events in a campaign, or fail to recognize their significance. Why should we expect our own predictions to be any different, especially given that our own ideas and experiences are drawn from our lives in the States, an environment so unique as to be sui generis?

So it is that we should be wary of choosing sides in other countries' politics, unless to oppose a Chavez or support an Aquino. We will likely not know what we're talking about otherwise.