While Washington plays at Fourth Generation cabinet wars in far-off places, a genuine Fourth Generation threat is brewing up on America's southern border. After 70 years of stability under PRI dictatorship, Mexico drank deeply of the neo-cons' patent medicine, democracy, in the 1990s. At first, all hailed the seemingly happy results.

But Mexico's recent Presidential vote resulted in a razor-thin victory for the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, over a far-left challenger, Lopez Obrador. Obrador and his supporters now refuse to recognize Calderon's win. They have set up blockades in the streets of Mexico City, prevented the current President, Vicente Fox, from delivering his state of the union speech, and threatened worse, specifically that if Mexico's electoral commission certifies Calderon's victory this week, Lopez Obrador will declare himself the real President of Mexico and set up a parallel government. Isn't democracy wonderful?

In itself, this crisis is not a Fourth Generation phenomenon. It is an old story in Mexican history. Calderon and Obrador are battling within the framework of the state, for the prize control of the state brings, namely, endless riches squeezed from a poor country. If either wins, and wins quickly, American interests are probably safe.

The problem takes on a Fourth Generation nature if neither wins and Mexico descends into civil war and anarchy. This, too, is an old Mexican story; in Mexico as in most of the world, the only real alternatives are tyranny or anarchy. Democracy is merely a way-station between the former and the latter. The neo-cons' patent medicine, it seems, has arsenic as a principal ingredient; one suspects their successors will once again give stability the high rank it merits among political virtues.

One certain result of chaos in Mexico will be a vast increase in the rate of illegal Mexican immigration into the United States -- the “big push” of all “big pushes” 4GW has so far served up. Such an invasion will offer dire consequences to the U.S., in the form of disorder, crime, the expense of taking care of the “refugees,” and perhaps most challenging of all, the necessity of sending them all back at some point. Any such repatriation would have to be, for the most part, forced.

Here we come face-to-face with one of 4GW's basic ingredients, the West's moral incapacity to defend itself. No one can doubt that the rapid arrival of tens of millions more Mexicans will be catastrophic. But no one can also doubt that the usual games will be played by the Politically Correct Establishment, with the usual results. We will get endless images of crying women and children, demands that we accept any and all “refugees,” blather about “human rights” and “humanitarian principles,” and in response we will cave and open the gates to the barbarians. The Establishment is morally incapable of manning the walls and repelling the invaders. Nor will it be able to send any of them back if they don't want to go, which means they will all stay. Perhaps Maine and New Hampshire will end up still speaking English.

Worse, if anything can be worse, the neo-con drugged Bush administration will bring Wilsonianism full circle and intervene in Mexico. One can almost hear President Bush solemnly informing the American people that we must teach the Mexicans to elect good men. The result will be the same kind of fiasco we are engulfed by in Iraq and Afghanistan, just a streetcar ride away from San Diego. (In 1945, a witty junior SS officer told Hitler that Berlin was the best place for his headquarters, since it would soon be possible to take a streetcar between the Eastern and Western Fronts.)

By this point, Wilsonianism will have gone from tragedy to farce and back to tragedy again. Fourth Generation war will have arrived at our doorstep, and crossed it in great strength. This will be, not another cabinet war, but a war for national survival. Perhaps, just perhaps, the vast defeat we will suffer at the beginning of this war will bring the PC Establishment's eviction from Washington and its replacement with genuine national leaders, though where such are to be found is hard to imagine -- President Buchanan, perhaps?

More is riding on a quick solution to Mexico's political crisis than anyone who does not understand 4GW can possibly imagine.