AMERICA: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE (AND BACK AGAIN), PART II

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- Herman Goering

It is obvious who benefits from the existence of the Empire: arms manufacturers and their employees. The entire professional military and intelligence class, which is large and growing larger every year. Corporations of all types who can only operate with impunity overseas if they are backed up by the American military. Wealthy individuals whose fortunes ride on strength of those corporations' stock. The ordinary American benefits little, if it all. But he does foot the bill. From a financial standpoint, the maintenance of this Empire represents a staggering burden on our people. The United States spends more money on its military than the next seven most powerful nations combined: $652.6 billion is the projected budget for 2018, or one-fifth of our gross national product. Of that, $150 billion is spent operating our vast network of foreign bases. When one considers the sorry, near disastrous condition of America's infrastructure -- bridges, roads, railways and even airports all crumbling and falling apart -- the terrible condition of many of our inner cities, and the 45 million Americans who live in poverty every day, justification for this sort of expense becomes increasingly difficult, especially when one considers the fact that you are six times more likely to be killed by a shark than a terrorist bomb. And yet the justifications continue, and the majority of Americans seem to swallow them almost unexamined. Why?

What has happened since the Korean War (1950 - 1953) is not merely a massive increase in the size, power and influence of our military and its adjunct, the intelligence community; it is a change in how Americans see themselves as a nation and their role in the world, a process I refer to as “the normalization of Empire.” During the era of the Republic, America saw itself (rightly or wrongly) as a nation which minded its business and expected the rest of the world to do the same (for the purposes of this essay I am setting aside the treatment of the Natives and the Mexican War, which I will address later). We had little interest in foreign affairs and rested comfortably on the knowledge that two very broad oceans, and the willingness of the population to answer any legitimate call to arms, protected us from any possible aggression. The rapid expansion and contraction of America's armed forces after the Civil War, WW1 and WW2 was not merely an expression of the American willingness to fight if a fight was deemed necessary, but our distrust of large standing armies and the whole culture of militarism which inevitably results from them. One man who clearly grasped the danger of militarism invading the American psyche was President Eisenhower, whose farewell speech in 1961 contained an explicit warning:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Ike's warning went unheeded, and the power of the “military-industrial complex” (and the intelligence community, which is certainly an important part of the same) continued to grow, shaping not only domestic issues such as the budget, but “the very structure of our society.” The ordinary American, who gains nothing from it, became increasingly invested emotionally in the idea of America as a superpower (empire) with a worldwide presence. Expressing hope that such presence could be lessened or eliminated entirely became tantamount to cowardice or even a form of low-grade treason. Nowhere was this reality reversal more evident than in the Republican Party. Prior to WW2, Republicans had held fast to the principles of small government, isolationism and demilitarization. With the onset of the Cold War, the GOP took upon itself to upend each and every one of these identifying principles: government expansionism, an aggressive foreign policy and a massive increase in military funding became their watchwords and remain so to this day. But the Democratic Party is only superficially different in its outlook. No candidate in the last national election was more openly hawkish than Hillary Clinton, and Obama's tenure in office, though marked by a certain comparative flaccidity in its military policy, was sometimes referred to as “the drone Presidency” due to his propensity for using those weapons all over the planet, including against American citizens. Moreover, while the Patriot Act was signed into law by the Republican Bush (43), the National Defense Authorization Act was penned by Obama, thus forming bookends which crush many of our most vital civil liberties between them. Both parties have endorsed warrantless mass surveillance of the population and both have waged aggressive war against the press, and in particular the "whistleblowers" who enable the press in its watchdog-role vis-a-vis the government. The ultimate result of 9/11 was thus not merely to expand the Empire and bring the imperial mentality to our foreign policy, but to turn the metaphorical screws inward, and begin the process of undercutting and destabilizing our freedoms at home -- not only with the passive acceptance, but the actual support of the brainwashed American citizen.

It follows that the features of the Empire are superficially those of the Republic; but upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that each foundational principal of the 1776 – 1898 period has been set neatly on its head:

1. Political power is concentrated increasingly in the executive branch of government, with an unelected, appointed-for-life federal judiciary simultaneously cutting into the power of the legislature branch from the opposite direction.
2. The legislature itself is largely in the hands of a professional political class which is extremely wealthy and bears little resemblance to its constituency: the average net worth of a U.S. Senator is one million dollars. The Citizens United case has essentially held up public office for sale to the highest bidder, to the point where it is foreseeable that corporations, rather than the States, might one day be represented in our legislature.
3. The political parties no longer have any significant differences in terms of their overall foreign and military policies: acceptance of the empire, and its attendant oppression of civil liberty, is universal.
4. The country is militarized to a high degree, with large standing armies which increasingly exert their cultural influence by displays of strength and various means of cultural propaganda.
5. Foreign policy is aggressive and backed up by economic, clandestine, and military operations carried out regularly all over the planet in complete disregard for the sovereignty of foreign nations: no country in history has dropped more bombs than the United States of America. No country in history has funded more coups or deliberately brought down foreign governments judged to be hostile, potentially hostile, or simply economically inconvenient.
6. The course of foreign policy is set not by politicians but by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and large corporations with overseas interests. This is particularly true since the election of Donald Trump, who is gutting the State Department, leaving the CIA and Pentagon to set the course of foreign policy.
7. The monetary system is almost entirely controlled by a privately controlled central bank called the Federal Reserve, which does not use the gold standard, encourages inflation, and feeds into the general climate of militarism “because war is good for business.”

If you want to see the American Empire, it isn't necessary to travel overseas to some enormous military base (“mini-Americas,” they are called) or ride with a carrier battle group, or drop in on a secret CIA prison somewhere in the back of the beyond. Nor do you have to sit in on the councils of political and corporate power. All you need do is pick up a history book to grasp what America was when it was truly a republic, and how different life was, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy, than it is today, in the age of Empire. To see how attitudes have shifted, not merely among the politicos and the generals but among the ordinary citizen, who can no longer conceive of what life is like without mass surveillance, without endless war, without systemic corruption and the near-extinction of the Bill of Rights. As brutal as the settlement period of the American West was, there has probably never been a period in our history when so many people lived in such a state of complete personal freedom, especially after 1865 -- free from oppressive taxes and government regulations. This period was so central to the development of the American identity that we mythologized it in our popular culture as the "Wild West." But it is precisely this sort of freedom that empire-builders in government and corporate America despise and fear the most. The very last thing they want is an armed populace who will accept only the most token restraints on its collective freedoms, and who actually expect to receive something concrete and specific for such taxes as they are forced to pay. Had the "spirit of the West" been kept alive after 1900 it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the federal-corporate octopus to lay its tentacles into every aspect of American life, to take away freedoms and return them one by one as paid, licensed privileges.
But the trouble with Americans is that we have no sense of history and little interest in it. We are concerned primarily with the here and now, and to a lesser extent, with the future. This makes us perennial optimists and tends to prevent the sort of long-simmering domestic grudges that wrack the rest of the world, but it also prevents us from understanding the extent to which we have changed, and declined, as a nation. As I stated before, the whole process of transitioning from Republic to Empire is one of gradual societal habituation. What was strange becomes normal over time; and what is normal, in the end, not only seems safe to us but somehow inherently right. The word “conservative,” stripped of its present political meaning, is defined as “holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” The change to imperium was a process that took many years, here advancing in great leaps, there crawling ahead by inches, but always in such a way as to remain largely below the awareness of the ordinary American. There is an old adage that if one wants to boil a frog, one need only slowly turn up the temperature; so it is with our people. The changes took place, but so subtly and so gradually, and often with such seemingly good intentions, that few people noticed. What would have been unimaginable in 1776 – or 1876, for that matter – has become commonplace in 2017. Millions can no longer imagine, and do not even want to imagine, what America might be like if we were no longer the key player on the world stage, if we no longer held on to this oversized military and colossal foreign empire.

I stated above that a republic may transition into an empire, but an empire cannot evolve into a new third form; it must either be destroyed, as Rome was, or eventually collapse in on itself, as the British Empire did. Of the two choices, the second is far more attractive, because America, unlike Britain, is an enormous country of nearly unlimited natural resources, which gains almost nothing, and loses much, from the existence of its empire. We have very little to fear from the end of it, and much to gain by its demise. So the question must be answered, “How do we restore the Republic?”