The Pox Americana

With Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the Right-wing Revanchement in the U.S. began to chip away at the political gains made not only in the 1960s and '70s, but going all the way back to the New Deal. The Clinton Era was the Great Capitulation by the Democratic Party. For three decades now, the majority party has allowed the minority party to rule indirectly through the majority (Clinton, Obama, Biden) or directly (Bush and Trump). This effective duopoly serves the interests not of the American people as a whole but of the militarized corporatocracy which runs the government through its civilian proxies in Congress and the White House. Anyone who still imagines that we can change this situation by "voting the bums out" is living a political fantasy. Nothing short of mass demonstrations and general strikes will even make a dent in the regressive policies of the political class. And nothing even remotely like that kind of popular revolt is anywhere on the horizon in the United States today or in the foreseeable future. In short, we are not the free citizens of a democratic republic we imagine ourselves to be but the subjects of an empire. Over the past half century, we sold our political birthright for a mess of consumer-goods and virtual reality gadgets that keep us intellectually distracted and politically impotent. We have the government we deserve. And that is tragic enough, but compounding the tragedy is the fact that the Empire, being an Empire, isn't content to rule only those subjects who happen to reside within its internationally recognized legal borders, but extends its (mis)rule to the rest of the world through its nation state proxies (Israel, NATO, all the complicit governments in Arab, African, and South American countries). In the latest edition of the Orwellian Newspeak dictionary, this state of affairs is called the "pax Americana" but it is, in fact, a vortex of violence, immiseration, and despair.