Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

by Walter Brueggemann

If you wish to understand U.S. domestic and foreign policy since World War II, even World War I, and if you wish to know why the U.S. will seek to exercise imperial power for the foreseeable future, no matter who is president, you need understand only one thing: the exacting requirements of U.S. American affluence. Both Presidents Bush have said exactly the same thing, the first at the Earth Summit in 1992, the second after September 11, 2001: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” They were not aberrant in this, or partisan. We will do all we need and can to keep the American way of life as American Affluence from the negotiating table. With our inordinate power, that means an imperial posture virtuously clad in an ideology of democratic capitalism, with freedom and prosperity the promise and the lure. Such prosperity is in fact the validation of faith, freedom, and free markets as the creed of a redeemer nation, indeed the creed of a righteous empire that does not understand its unrighteousness.