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Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Paul Street at Mar 03, 2005

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Remember how certain folks on the left (e.g. Alexander Cockburn and Gabriel Kolko) argued that "messianic militarist" (Nader's desctiption) neocon Bush might actually be “the lesser evil” in the 2004 election? This thesis was based on the notion that the relatively sophisticated neo-liberal John F. Kerry promised to be the more intelligent and competent manager of America's inherently rapacious and militarist global, corporate-polyarchic empire. Their argument was based on the notion that the decline of the American empire would be a good thing, all things considered, both at home and abroad, given the toxic, dialectically inseparable relationships between empire and inequality....and that Bush would push us further along the welcome road to imperial decline. I didn'tand don't embrace the full conclusion that Bush was the "lesser evil" for a number of reasons, including ther supreme danger I thought Dubya posed (people who care can go back an review all that if they wish), but I maintained respect for the notion that Bush might be a less effective grand imperialist than Kerry and that there would in fact be anti-imperial opportunity (as well as terrible danger) in Boy George's re-coronation. Above all, I was fairly sickened by the significant extent to which Kerry ran precisely on the notion that he would be the better corporate imperialist ---- see my Dissident Voices pieces linked below ---- and by Democratic "left liberals" who couldn't seem to grasp the contradictions between imperialism and democracy. On that note check out the special monthly foreign policy issue of the "progressive" liberal Democratiic magazine American Prospect: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=Current+Issue The first thing that will catch ZNet readers' eyes is the ridiculous cover title “BETWEEN CHOMSKY AND CHENEY: American power in the service of liberal ideals," accompanied by a cartoon that shows these two apparent (for American Prospect) lunatic moral equivalents Noam Chomsky (the world's leading left critic of American imperialism and thought control) and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney (one of the world's leading Orwellian imperialists) scowling at each other. The cover, however, is the last you hear of Chomsky. The issue focuses on the sins of George W. Bush and his neoconservative cabal, who are accused of besmirching the noble legacy of progressive foreign policy practiced by such admirable liberal forebears as Harry (Hiroshima) Truman, George (Sustain Global Inequality) Kennan, Dean Acheson, and John F. (Missile Gap) Kennedy. And what is Bush's real foreign policy sin, according to the "progressives" over at Prospect? The murder of tens of thousands and perhaps more than 100,000 Iraqis in the commission of the Nuremberg Trials' “supreme crime” – the launching of an unjustified war of aggression on a formerly sovereign state? The imperial occupation of that state (Iraq) in the false name of exporting “freedom” and “democracy,” a belatedly declared U.S. objective that is revealed as coldly disingenuous when we seriously examine US policy (including what what Edward S. Herman calls “neo-liberalizing Iraq without the consent of the [Iraqi] people”) within and beyond Iraq? The massive deception practiced against the American populace by the Bush administration to justify this monumentally illegal, immoral, and bloody imperial operation? Not really. According to The American Prospect's writers Paul Starr, Michael Tomasky, and (journal editor) Robert Kuttner, the real problem is that Bush's “overoptimistic” and “inadequately planned” invasion of Iraq has “undermined American power and influence in the world.” “Three and a half years after September 11,” these authors note, “U.S. military forces are stretched to the limit, anti-Americanism has intensified in Europe and the Middle East, and our traditional allies are increasingly distrustful of U.S. leadership and are setting an independent path in foreign affairs.” To make matters worse, Bush's “fiscal policies have created a dangerous dependence on foreign borrowing to finance our budget and trade deficits, and its energy policies have increased our dependence on foreign oil.” All in all, “the war and other administration policies are weakening our power and security, undermining our alliances and freedom of action.” The weakening of American global power is the central charge made by two other contributors to the same issue. According to senior Prospect correspondent Michael Steinberg, the Bush White House's obsession with military might has led it to “calamitously” “sacrifice U.S. global economic leadership,” thereby threatening to bring “America's unipolar [post-Cold War] moment …to a premature close.” Bush's crime it that he has blown the chance to turn that “moment” into a welcome “unipolar era.” “The administration's indifference to global economics,” Steinberg argues, “has created a void that is being filled by both the European Union, and, more ominously, China.” After pausing to “savor the irony that an administration determined never to surrender an inch of American sovereignty has created a situation in which several Asian central banks control the fate of the dollar,” Steinberg notes that Bush's acceleration of the decline of the American greenback threatens the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. This confronts the U.S. with the (classic late-imperial) task of trying to “sustain an empire that is broke.” It's too bad, Steinberg feels, that the fiscally reckless, hyper-militarist Bush administration lacks “the Clintonites” recognition that “America's economic strength could be a critical tool in keeping the peace while extending U.S. dominance.” Steinberg's concern over lost American economic dominance is shared by Prospect contributor Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute. According to Prestowitz, America's massive indebtedness to “the world's biggest dictatorship” (China) is both “symptom and cause of America's dwindling economic leadership.” It “mocks Bush's hegemonic grand design…At this rate,” Prestowitz concludes ominously, “we risk becoming the Venice of the 21st century.” Sounds like an advertisement for Bush and for Cockburn's take on the election. There's a lot to say about this special issue on various levels but I'm saving that for a full article (consistent with earlier work on the liberal-left...see http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/streetdecent.cfm) [Note, see comments 17, 18, and 19 for some crucial qualifications/clarifications of this argument that were made in response to an excellent critique I received off-blog on March 6th, 2005] Election season DV pieces on Kerry http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept04/Street0908.htm and http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug04/Street0820.htm and http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept04/Street0915.htm

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 22:02 PM
2. The American Prospect is correct, moreover, to criticize Bush for “intensify[ing] anti-Americanism…in Europe and the Middle East.” As my corrsepondent notes, “the American populace is not wrong to care about their security. What's wrong is to want it at the expense of others. Our (the left's) solution to the problem of security is that we need a different foreign policy, one that doesn't drive people to hate us and serve as recruits for terrorism….and Bush's policies of increasing anti-Americanism in the Middle East are exactly the opposite of what is required to enhance the security of the American people.” I agree.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 21:58 PM
Such reckless radical reasoning was far too relaxed in the face of the truly dangerous and bloody record, ambitions, and philosophy of the “messianic militarist” (Ralph Nader's description) Bush administration's foreign policy, not to mention the related radicalism of Bush's ongoing assault on what's left of the American welfare state and social contract. It also ignored the strong likelihood that the climate for left organizing would be better with Democrats in the White House and the fact that it is better for people overseas to focus their resistance to American hegemony on bipartisan institutions and structures of empire (including economic empire), not just (or so much on) an evil cabal of over-the-top jingoists....

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2005 21:57 PM
I got some good critical commentary on this piece. It came outside the comments section - through personal e-mail (imagine, someone has some serious criticism but doesn't want to publicly blast the writer but just writes privately to say "consider this"). On the basis of that valuable criticism, which reminded me of what I myself said in the fall of 2004, I want to maketwo key qualifications of the argument I made and/or implied in "Bush's Primary Sin." 1. There were numerous good reasons that deserve explicit reiteration for even strongly anti-imperial leftists to join American Prospect in preferring the more sanely imperialist John F. Kerry over the radical-nationalist Bushcons last fall. Some on the left, most prominently Alexander Cockburn, advanced an irresponsible perspective when they claimed that Bush was actually “the lesser evil” because he would be the less effective and sophisticated imperialist – the one most likely to speed the evil empire's demise....

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 02:26 AM
nemo you want to see stability for propertied elites trumping democracy, read the Federalist Papers: democracy is the Founders' worst nightmare and the result is the Constitution (Jefferson, something of a true democrat is not one of the constitution writers...he's off in France)....a brilliantly conservative document. At some point in the 1990s, the US Supreme Court ruled against "fusion" with I think an explicit judgment that there should be only two parties because...because...well find the decision but as I recall they found some convoluted way to say that stability requires a party duopoly. Fusion would let me vote for a Democratic Party candidate under the banner of a different party. I could have voted to fire Bush and thus "for" a Kerry but in the name of a left party. This is what the Populists did in the 1890s: voted against evil Republican McKinley and for goofy Democrat William Jennings Bryan as Populists. It helped them maintain party cohesion and identity outside the duopoly even while they realized that they had no choice but to vote for one of the two mainstream candidates. The Supreme Court outlawed fusion in the early 20th century (if not earlier) and then did the same thing again (in connection with a case involving the left New Party) in the 1990s.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 06, 2005 02:17 AM
NoherosNomasters that's an interesting story and rather sad the way politicos just close their minds to an idea they might actually like (instant runoff would have allowed Gore to win Florida and hence the election in 2000 I think...of course so would have allowing ex-felons to vote in tnat state and preventing the Jeb Bush hacks from purging blacks from the voter rolls) and ought to know about. College political discourse is going to be pretty freaky during a tightly contested presidential race. nemo I support instant run-off and proportional representation and also fusion (below) but hasten to add that the real revolution would the real revolution, by which I mean that great inequality of wealth will always work to undermine real democracy; but it sure would help to get those reforms and its obviously going to be up to the people not the politicos to force the electoral reform issue....

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 06, 2005 00:43 AM
Actually the real revolution would be the introduction of a proportional representation system (with a threshold anywhere between 5 and 10%). U.S. elites, however deeply distrust any system that in their perception will (allegedly) introduce instability or allow more diverse voices in the congress. Admittedly such voices could include those of the extreme right (racial supremacists)provided they met the threshold. In fact if you read the scholarly literature on U.S. federalism--especially the economics inspired "rational choice" literature-- you will see how much such "scholars" value stability over all else. Of course they blithely forget (or purposefully neglect to mention) some of the other consequences of this "stability".

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Rastafarianrobot, Noherosnomasters at Mar 05, 2005 23:54 PM
After explaining the premises and reasoning behind the concept the main organizer on campus went so far as to try and refute me and the concept. I literally almost laughed in her face. So many people want to believe we live in a democracy...

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Rastafarianrobot, Noherosnomasters at Mar 05, 2005 23:51 PM
1). Why didn't her father support Ralph Nader's right to be in the Presidential Debates (of course we know the obvious reasons) and 2). What was her father's view on instant run off voting. Well I touched a nerve with the first question and she denied that he didn't support his right to participate but was interesting was her response to the latter. She had to admit in front of about 50 people and camera that she didn't even know what instant run off voting was. To which I responded well Mr. Cobb has discussed at length in his campaign. Afterwards two fiercely loyal Dems pulled me aside and caviled me as to where on earth I came up with that question and what I was taking about.

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Rastafarianrobot, Noherosnomasters at Mar 05, 2005 23:40 PM
Mr. Steet, I agree the problem lies with the system the mythical and infallible founding demigods constructed. I have a hard to time conceive of a way there can be any meaningful change in this country without destruction of this BS winner-take-all system. But where is the movement for this? After the last two elections you would thing there would be some popular uprising against the anti-democratic filter we call the electoral college. I mean I've heard David Cobb espouse instant run-off voting last election and I thought it was a brillant solution. In fact I have a telling anecdote about so-called political experts. John Kerry Daughter came to CU about 5 months ago and all the other students were asking her run-of-the-mill media-parrot questions. So I jumped on the chance to ask her two questions

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 05, 2005 03:15 AM
Bush et al. represent an amazingly open, unabashed determination to maintain hegemony purely through sheer preponderance of arms and in fact to make militarism the vehicle for boosting an economic power that has faded badly in classically late-imperial ways. This is dangerous as Hell in a thermonuclear age. I don't know if Kerry would or could be entirely different at the end of the imperial day. Maybe this classic late-imperial moment --- replete with massive foreign and domestic indebtedness, hyper-financialization, eviscerated internal productive base, and over-reliance on overseas investment (selling others the tools to hang us economically, not new) and military spending and investment (see Thomas McCormick, America's Half-Century) --- is ....structural and it doesn't matter who the chief operatives are: Bill Frist or Hilary Clinton will oversee the same basic reality.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 05, 2005 03:07 AM
The reasons to vote to fire Bush ("for" Kerry in our idiotic "winner-take-all" system of pseudo-democratic corporate polyarchy)were multiple and included domestic policy issues, the frankly proto-fascist and radically (not conservative) regressive/repressive tendencies of Bush/Cheney Inc., and the increased likelihood of war under Dubya, including nuclear war...which would obviously make questions of real radical change mute. What I'm saying with this piece is, I think, that (1) for what it's worth, I did not and do not discount the argument that there is in fact anti-imperial opportunity in a second Bush administration (it would up to us to realize that opportunity of course); (2) geez but isn't it curious and revealing (and a little revolting) to see left-liberals (ie American Prospect) ripping Bush basically and above all for not being a good imperialist; real leftists understand that America''s domestic inequities and authoritarianism are furthered by Empire (including economic empire, which always has its military component) as a Way of Life; (3) this (#2 that is) speaks volumes for the need to keep radical politics decently autonomous from the party duopoly and to develop electoral reforms that will allow left voices to be something more than political and policy roadkill (as occasional blog commener cryofan calls us).

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 05, 2005 03:06 AM
NoherosNomasters (great alias), I didn't say I now buy the Cockburn assessment that Bush was in fact the lesser evil. The argument in that assessment wasn't that Bush wouldn't try to further US hegemony. It was about how. It was that the messianic radical nationalist jingoistic neocons would be less effective and more clumsy in seeking to further hegemony and that the smoother, more purely neoliberal and diplomatic Kerrymods would be better able to calm global fears, create a more believable facade of multilateralism, put a better-fitting velvet glove on the iron fist of empire, and generally put the imperial house in better, more durably sustainable order.

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Rastafarianrobot, Noherosnomasters at Mar 05, 2005 02:42 AM
Eh, I still don't agree with that assessment. Bush's foreign policy incompetence is not a sufficient basis for labeling him the "leser evil." While Kerry might have represented the Washington Consensus status quo persay, at least his domestic policies didn't embody right-wing neo-con radicalism. Bush's failures to further America's hegemony haven't been for lack of trying and the hindsight bias doesn't negate the fact that he is an extremely dangerous state manager. A Catch-22 I guess...

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 04, 2005 21:44 PM
"Mr. Peterson is the Co-Chair of The Conference Board Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprises (Co-Chaired by John Snow, currently Secretary of the Treasury). He was also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2000 to 2004. Prior to founding Blackstone, Mr. Peterson was Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers (1973–1977) and later Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc. (1977–1984). He was Chairman and CEO of Bell and Howell Corporation from 1963 to 1971." Mr. Peterson is one of the "liberals" that Paul is talking about (probably comes closest to the prototypical transnational capitalist that Marx described in the communist manifesto). This is however not to say that his arguments are wrong. Just that it goes on to prove Paul's point.

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Shannon, James at Mar 04, 2005 20:19 PM
I would like to suggest that you take the time to read a very insightful speech by Peter G. Peterson last august. http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/peterson0804.pdf Money rules the world - that is the beginning middle and end of reality. Read Petersons book - he is on the money - $11.7 Trillion dollar swing under the Republican watch and a $45 to $74 TRILION unfunded Social Security - Medicare/Medicaid liability and enormous trade deficits which will untimately bring chaos to the world. No one wants to recognize the China/India effect as human nature and personal greed moves the world toward financial melt down. The Great Depression will pale in comparison to what will devastate the world around 2020. Americans simply don't know what has been done to them as a result of the unconscienable acts of short sighted self serving politicians - Both parties are culpable - what is wrong cannot be fixed without world wide cooperation. Bush and his Religious Right has insured that will never happen. Bully's and con-men all - that is human nature. Personal fortunes will be wothless as humanity starves to near extinction form a world wide economic and financial meltdown.

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 04, 2005 03:24 AM
I agree that the "old-fashioned" neo-liberals would like nothing better than to maintain the present economic order and fear that the policies of the Bush administration would turn even greater portions of the global population against this order. That is why I find all the nostalgia about Clinton (how much "respect" he commanded among foreign elites)very revealing and slightly amusing.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 03, 2005 20:45 PM
And in that regard, a big thing missing in the Prospect special issue (there's a few things missing, including an honest sense of the not so noble reality of "liberals'" US foreign policy...and on that there's no better source than Chomsky, who disappears after appearing on the cover of the special AP issue) is any intelligent sense of how terrible American-led pre-Bush (including "Clintonite") neoliberalism was for much of the rest of the world -- bad enough to spawn a significant global justice movement that was falsely labeled "anti-globalization," See for example "Free to be Poor" at http://www.zmag.org/zmag//articles/june01street.htm "Capitalism and Democracy Don't Mix" at http://www.zmag.org/zmag//articles/feb2000street.htm "People Profit From Trade" at http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2003/0319peopleprofit.htm ...yet more evidence of what happens when American unversities churn out evil "Marxist clones" like yours truly.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Street, Paul at Mar 03, 2005 20:43 PM
Right - that's our great economic whiphandle: we will deny other states access to our phenomenonal, debt-financed consumer market. That and we provide what is considered the safest place to deposit surplus capital, which the great Wal Mart supplier China is generating in vast quantities (touring Latin America for example in search of investment opportunities) through some rather timeworn repressive and super-exploitative techniques in the glorious history of noble "free market" "entrepreneurialism." But I suspect that AP writers would point out that these advantages fade with decline of the dollar, exacerbated by Bush's in fact reckless conduct. I'm quarreling not with their political-economic analyses (and I do not lay claim to special economic expertise) but rather with their notion that loss of American hegemony is a terrible thing for the rest of the world and indeed for Americans ....ctd

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Person

Re: Bush's Primary Sin? According to The American Prospect, It's Dropping the Noble Ball of Empire

By Protocol4, Nemo at Mar 03, 2005 19:45 PM
The one problem with the argument about U.S. indebtedness is that the United States is the biggest market for exports from China (and also I think Japan and South East Asia). So in effect they need this market almost as much as the U.S. needs their credit. Unless Japan and/or the European Union further open up their market for Chinese manufactured goods, China will keep supplying credit (I need to check the latest trade statistics between China on one hand the the U.S. and the E.U or Japan on the other).

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