American Exception Quotes

“Thus, again, the national interest appears to be defined as being largely synonymous with the interests of the overworld of private wealth.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“These Southern Cone intelligence agencies functioned essentially as CIA franchises, carrying out Operation Condor in which tens of thousands of South American leftists, labor leaders, and religious clergy were assassinated, tortured, disappeared, or forced into exile.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Then as now, politicians and the media could not diagnose the problems. The failure can be attributed to a Cold War superstructure in which empire was not honestly acknowledged or grappled with, in part because the imperial project had been legitimized by mythical references to the empire’s antithesis and to the empire’s “defensive” strategy—communism and containment, respectively. Belying liberal democratic myths about public sovereignty and the rule of law, the exceptionist pursuit of empire was driven by the pinnacle of American wealth and power. In this context, the state’s crimes or “abuses” at home and abroad are much easier to comprehend, as are the media’s otherwise inexplicable 1970s vacillations between being the public’s watchdog and being the lapdog of official Washington, so to speak.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The amount of evidence for US authorship of the oil shocks is overwhelming, and yet—as with so many other deep political episodes—historical truth cannot supplant the mythical cover story. The deep state is here again utterly unaccountable.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The basis of US hegemony shifted from being a constellation of one-to-one power relationships and into being a structural, market-based type of power.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission activities of 1973 further suggest that Nixon had lost the support of the “traders,”—i.e., the transnational capitalist class—and that he had lost control of policy to some degree as a consequence of the rolling Watergate scandal.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“While it may seem implausible that the US could have orchestrated the OPEC crisis, there is much evidence to support such a conclusion. For starters, all the key Middle Eastern actors in the affair—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran—were US allies. Given the disparity in power, it would be more precise to describe them as client states. Client states do not harm the interests of their patron state.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“This group was most clearly embodied in the personage of David Rockefeller, an overworld plutocrat who opposed barriers to “free trade” and whose Trilateral Commission was founded in July of 1973 to bring together elites from the US, Western Europe, and Japan in order to facilitate cooperation between these three leading centers of capitalism.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“When progressive activism threatened the power elite’s monopoly on power, the response—besides a slew of assassinations—was a massive surge in right-wing elite activism, a counterrevolutionary crusade which fundamentally altered American politics and society.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“On the eve of the JFK assassination, the political future of Lyndon Baines Johnson was imperiled. Bobby Baker, LBJ’s protégé and bagman, was under investigation by the Kennedy Justice Department for myriad crimes including tax evasion, fraud, and the procuring of congressional votes through sexual favors.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Even setting aside the CIA, the deep state permeated his administration. For example, twenty-six high-ranking Kennedy officials had previously been panelists on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Economic insecurity and deprivation are key components of a hierarchical society. If they are eliminated, and if literacy and education are widespread, the elites have to deal with a population that is not as easily mesmerized by power and not compelled by necessity to submit to subjugation and exploitation in exchange for material security.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The point here, articulated by Orwell, is that technological progress in production and in economic planning should have ushered in a golden age of civilization. Instead, activist elites recognized the implications of this dynamic and responded by using their wealth and power to maintain the inequality and material insecurity that are preconditions for their continued dominance over society.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“There were massive worker uprisings in the US after World War II. The anti-New Deal Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947 in response to labor militancy and couched with anti-communist pretenses. For example, under the law, union officers were required to sign anti-communist affidavits for the federal government.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In reality, it was not Soviet communists, but US elites who had directed all planning to achieve dominance over as much of the globe as possible.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In general. the global communist meta-conspiracy theory is absurd given the historical realities at the time. In World War II, the Soviets lost 26.6 million people to America’s roughly 400,000 dead. Large swaths of Soviet territory had been destroyed by the Nazi invaders. As a finale, the US ended the war with a gratuitous atomic massacre carried out largely to intimidate the Soviet Union.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In general. the global communist meta-conspiracy theory is absurd given the historical realities at the time. In World War II, the Soviets lost 26.6 million people to America’s roughly 400,000 dead. Large swaths of Soviet territory had been destroyed by the Nazi invaders.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“the national interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of its upper class.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Given that convention requires the cloaking of imperialist policy with liberal rhetoric, Hillary Clinton committed an unusual faux pas when she chose to paraphrase imperialist par excellence Julius Caesar.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“From the beginning, the English colonists and the early United States had comparatively open, democratic methods of handling affairs with themselves in comparison to the violent coercion deployed against “others,” including American Indians, African slaves, Mexicans, Japanese, and Hawaiians.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“For a recent example, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was an executive at Booz Allen, a private intelligence firm that is dependent on government contracts for nearly all of its revenue.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“US politicoeconomic elites enjoy the benefits of living in a society with a considerable—if declining—degree of democratic legitimacy while simultaneously retaining unacknowledged authoritarian agency.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Scott describes the deep state as the realm of accumulated extralegal powers within the government and outside it. This would include the covert agencies—as well as their allies in media, overworld, and underworld circles.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The mainstream media must be considered part of the deep state. Its assumptions, biases, priorities, and defaults are very much a function of the interests of a tiny elite of corporate wealth whose interests the media necessarily serves regardless of this or that outlet’s position along the ever-narrowing spectrum of allowable political perspective.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“At present, the neoliberal/neoconservative bipartisan consensus so greatly narrows the spectrum of contestable policy debate that effectual public discourse is largely relegated to cultural issues with little to no bearing upon issues of justice which animated the democratic struggles of previous eras.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“When the system is characterized by co-optation from higher levels, one’s success merely reveals the principles of the men who get to anoint the successful.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Society at the top and middle was widely believed to be a of network of clever rackets. In a society where big money is the definition of success, failure on those terms becomes the deadly sin.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In the absence of any firm prevailing morality, people in the mass are increasingly vulnerable to being manipulated and distracted by celebrity.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“American educational institutions were failing at this, instead becoming politically craven institutions offering, at best, upward mobility. Rather than promoting intellectualism and cultural enrichment, they are purveyors of “the trivia of vocational tricks and adjustment to life—meaning the slack life of the masses.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State