I have been pacified – I dont intend to do anything about the current situation.

Adolph Hitler must be spinning with envy in his grave!
I made just a little incursion into Poland, so he gripes, and the whole
world jumps on me, calling me a fascist!…These guys smart bomb half the world to smithereens and what do they call them? LIBERATORS!

Joseph, you were a DumbAss as my propagandist! Look how this guy Murdoch does it, he keeps all these minds under control. Feeds them all garbage and they think it’s manna from heaven!

Then he slumps back into his recurrent deppresion groaning that if he lost it all, it was because his collaborators were never up to scratch…

NB. Hey,Bob, I agree, it is a waste.

For what its worth, Wolin has a chapter on the antidemocatic philophies and actions of the Founders.

I disagree with the commenter who thinks we can reconcile democracy and wealth inequality (the latter is an inherently deepening characteristic aspect of capitalism, which is about more than monetary control). I’m with Aristotle, Jefferson, Marx, Lenin (who used Marx’s “dictatorship of the bourgeoise” phrase to desceibe so-called capitalist democracy) and Chomsky on that.

Capitalism (and I would say class society) and democracy are not just merely different – they are opposed and work at cross purposes. That’s part of why the Founders created a proprietors’ republic, not a democracy.

Dogger’s reflections strike me as understandable.

DanE.’s South Africa reference takes things to a new level of bizarre.

The comparison Street forgets to make is to the pre-Freed Mandela Republic of South Africa, which was quite democratic in its reflection of the popular will of the White minority in its classic Liberal parliamentary & judicial institutions while ruling the Majority with an Iron Hand no softer than Hitler’s.

Maybe some wd benefit from considering Woodrow Wilson and WWI which he sold as necessary “To make the world safe for Democracy”, by which he apparently meant the then all-encompassing (nd by Wilson consistently defended)Jim Crow System which formed the basis of the Demock-rat Pty’s “Solid South” so important to FDR’s “New Deal” snowjob.

Street might also ponder the institutional framework installed by the “Founding Fathers” of the Confederate States of America which was at least as “democratic” in form as the institutions of the US of A at the time of the Fort Sumter attack.

Troops are little worse than the “good” people who support multinational corporations either directly (by being employed by them) or indirectly (by being employed in a structure that interacts positively with them).

Even if Americans were so “moral” as to not join the military, the state would merely turn to non-American mercenaries, using tax dollars gained from the “good” Americans who refuse themselves to fight.

The state as a capitalist, imperialist, dominative structure has to be shut down. Quibbling about the morality of troops doesn’t solve anything.

As for the vaunted invading troops that everyone wants ‘safe’. (What about the killer mercenaries? Do we want them safe as well?) Not me. I care about as much for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as I would have for German ones in Poland or France. Less, in fact, because the Germans were conscripted.

It is immediately obvious that Paul Street needs to examine his fundamental assumptions when one considers that democracy has never existed in the US. The Constitution describes a representative republican form of government. In the minds of James Madison and other founders, democracy was a synonym for “mob rule”.

This is no mere word quibbling. A democratic system and a representative republic are distinct political structures. The founders laid the framework for corporate oligarchy and that is what we are experiencing today, “representative” corporate oligarchy.

The question is then how did this corporate oligarchy achieve its preeminence and overwhelm the restraints imposed by the need to seek public approval that elections imply? The answer lies in the privatized monetary system. The golden rule is that those who have the gold make the rules. If you own the goose that lays the golden egg, the Federal Reserve System, you can buy everything that money will buy, votes, media, essential industries, resources, and the souls of those who put them up for sale.

I would judge that the book under review and the reviewer are both well-intentioned but naive and uninformed.

I think this may be a crucial error in left thinking: democracy is a form of political philosophy and capitalism is a form of economic philosophy. So to say they never mix is a little like saying oil and water never mix – but it doesn’t mean they can’t exist side by side.

The essential problem in our modern ‘democracies’ is the link between wealth and political power. Cut that link and humane society becomes a real possibility. Wealth is not the problem. If you compare some rich and famous movie star with the CEO of some multi national corporation, both of whom are rich far beyond their needs, only the CEO is a serious threat to society because of her almost certain influence in government. Their wealth per se, is irrelevant.

The left is missing an important point here, because its traditional wealth distribution message alienates the rich, many of whom have more genuine social consciences than socialists; and wealth distribution simply isn’t necessary – what’s necessary is to eliminate the existing link between wealth and power, and to equalise justice and opportunities for all. Wealth can exist within a humane society – they do not have to be contradictions in terms.

Free Democracy is a solution.
http://www.freedemocrats.co.uk.

That’s false. Poor Americans are far richer than the world’s poor, a testament to the results of successful imperialism and the corporate-totalitarian political order. The Mob Underlings reap the benefits of Mob successes, however disproportionately in relation to the Mob Boss.

Whether it’s a “grave threat to human survival” is dependent upon the degree of success of the American-led multinational-corporate empire in perpetuating worldwide slavery. If it’s successful the world will become enslaved rather than killed – if things get out of control a worldwide or small-scale holocaust may occur.

As for “peace, justice, and democracy” – there have never been any of those things in the United States. The state was founded on a war to secure power for the domestic elite, it proceeded by capitalist logic, including the internal colonization of the genocided native population, perpetual war against both them and the imported Africans, repression of women, perpetual exploitation of non-Americans, and theft and exploitation of the domestic poor by the rich. “Peace”, “justice”, and “democracy” are words in a dictionary, as well as words that sometimes are reflected in other places or in small-scale incidents.

By “grave threat” you can only mean that it threatens a demographic previously unthreatened – privileged (middle-class) whites. When the Neocons and their neoliberal doctrine came to power middle class whites panicked – they were no longer safe and would have to join (in a far muted form of exploitation) the ranks of so many other victims of the American state. It’s only been with the rise of neoliberalism that the white bourgeois intelligentsia has “discovered the horrors of imperialism” – where were these horrors during the supposed “Golden Age of American Democracy” – the Bretton-Woods post-WWII period?

An alien, observing this, cannot be blamed for having little sympathy for the suddenly fearful bourgeois whites, who write treatises on the horrors of neoliberalism.

“Peace, justice, and democracy”? Those concepts cannot have true meaning until such time as the “good” people of the world operate by something other than selfishness, greed, and fear.

The mantra of the modern Western left is “neoliberalism is going too far” – summed up in Naomi Klein’s ideology. This left, which complains so much about the “narrow political spectrum in America” might want to explore the narrow ideological spectrum they themselves exist in.

The Imperial Left exists within an imperial society. For all their knowledge of imperialism, they don’t know themselves.

That none of these adjectives nail the point is entailed by the fact that they are so diverse. They are plausible only inasmuch as no further adjectives are closer to the central point of inversion: Instead of the cruelty raining down, it seeps up from below. So why not hit the point on the head?

Concrete history is a kaliedoscope of superficial labels. Abstract terms force you engage at a deeper level.

We live today in a country that has invaded another country for no good reason. The reasons given by the administration for invasion have been shown to be difinitively untrue, even likely to have been lies.
Still the general American public to a large extent is patriotic and proud.
Support today for American militaristic imperialism is roughly equal to German Nationalistic pride in 1939 following the invasion of Poland. Both invasions were justified by the governments and national medias as acts of defense, protecting fearful publics from attack.
We invaded in foreign nation with no just cause, killing thousands to millions, and destroying infrastructure and uprooting and displacing millions. And yet there is today political discourse about victory and success in Iraq, and of troops coming home with honor. And our soldiers are called heroes; what is heroic about defeating a vastly inferior army seeking to defend its own homeland; what is heroic about unjustly invading a foreign sovereign nation?
The invasion of Iraq was no act of defense, not at all. Any statement about winning a war of conquest ignores entirely any small measure of ethics. To frame decisions about bringing troops home around concepts of victory and honor is to ignore the reality of the unjust military invasion that began the occupation. The only factors of importance in troop withdrawal should be the minimization of troop casualties, and minimization of further harm done to Iraqi citizens and the Iraqi nation. Issues of pride and glory show a level of inhumanity that is all too present in the manipulation of American identity and values. Our troops should be brought home safely and quickly, and they should be given the greatest of care for their futures, for their health and education and overall well being. To care about the troops is to bring them safely home; to support the continued occupation of a nation, to continue to keep American soldiers in harms way for no good reason is to be arrogantly egotistical.
Our nation’s military continues to increasingly benefit corporate wealth interests while having less and less impact directly upon the public. Haliburton, Blackwater Etc. are replacing public troops, with private interests. We are burdened with the costs of war, with financing a military that costs exponentially more than that of any other nation in the world. Our financial burden for the milotary is immense, while our economy is collapsing, like the soviet’s in the 80′s.
The “safely segregated caste of mostly working class imperial mercenaries” is increasingly promoting public apathy as private interests enlist foreign mercenaries to replace the traditional American soldier. We are outsourcing our military, and in doing so, reducing troop pay and benefits, while increasing corporate profit and influence.
As a public we have become so detatched from involvement in and responsiblility for our federal government. The conflation of nationalistic, militaristic, patriotism with apathetic misinformed awareness should be an embarrassment to us all.
American democracy is dead. The American public is too stupid, apathetic and misinformed to make decisions even in its own interest. As individuals we struggle and compete to survive, while the wealth and resources that we could share are disributed upward to an immensely empowered few.
As a public we have failed to take care of ourselves. We are brainwashed, incompetent fools. Our democracy is dead because we have given it away.
The American dream has become a selfish pursuit of individual wealth and prosperity. We don’t care about one another. We try to take care of ourselves and in our selfish pursuit of individual well being we have lost community. Without community there is not democracy. We struggle against each other while our rulers work together to continue to further entrench their power.
Our education and health care systems are inferior to most of the rest of the developed world. Our prison and justice systems are a mess and money and population.
I am embarrassed to be an American. I am embarrassed to be part of a public that has chosen militaristic excess over general wellfare. I am embarrassed that my nation has unjustly invaded another nation seeking wealth, and continuing occupation seeking victory and pride. I am embarrassed mostly by the general apathy of the American public to it all.

The Brave New World we’re taking on has constructed the most insidious and effective form of state violence and repression ever seen by people. CLR James commented in his essay “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” (1950) that the postwar imperium would reach levels of barbarity that made Hitler and Stalin look like amateurs, and given the levels of carnage our so-called leaders have introduced to Iraq, I think James pegged it right. 1.2 million dead and 4 million displaced as a result of a civil war that our “government” generated is a war crime of Stalinist dimensions, but these jackasses who govern us plow this little fact under just as readily as the Hitlerians they condemn. And on we go.

I will be looking for both books. I have to say I don’t think it’s so essential that radical historians always be included in the credits so long as dialectical method is present, I think historians like Richard Hofstadter employed such technique without ever using the word, and most effectively too. I think the hardest thing, as a teacher, is getting students to understand that the spirit of a theory is entangled even with its backwards practice, and I do believe we owe the postmodernists much hell for this problem they’ve created for us. Certainly one result of their moralistic blathering are students of history who reject the whole of democratic theory on the basis of how the imperium and white supremacy have manipulated the term “democracy”, and so-called socialists who dismiss Bolshevism on the basis of its own worst excesses and crimes. Students of history, however, and particularly people who think of themselves as radicals, now more than ever have a responsibility to work with the dialectic, and be the dialectic, or model the dialectic, as opposed to just pointing out masters of the form.