Концепция империалистического реализма: почему конец США кажется невозможным

“May you live in interesting times.” So says the apocryphal Chinese proverb that may well have been more properly attributed to Austen and Neville Chamberlain’s father. All of us here can be said to have lived in interesting times, if interesting means, among other things, unsettled and inscrutable, not to mention ugly and unstable. But this generally means only that the proper perspective has not yet been attained. Digging beneath the surface usually reveals connections the powers of the day want to keep hidden. Many Americans will deny the American Empire exists, and it is true that these children of British colonists have never frankly admitted to empire, with all its violence, as did the British. While there can be no doubt about the fact of American imperialism, I have also found it difficult to put American Empire in its proper place, other than the famous title that imperialism is the highest (and perhaps final) stage of capitalism. Even if this is true it always seemed a little too simple to be the final explanation. Over the past several years I have read occasional essays on American politics by Daniel Bessner of the University of Washington. Many of these have now been collected in the book Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century. Even if a substantial number of Americans have begun, at last, to dispute the national consensus that the American imperium is and has been an unalloyed force for good in the world, there has been little opposition to American Empire: To answer this question, this (book) introduces the concept of imperialist realism – the notion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the U.S. Empire…I argue that the primary reason Americans accept and make use of their empire is their belief, whether consciously or unconsciously held, that they are unable to change it. Americans…have become alienated from their empire – it appears to be something outside their control – even as they deploy it abroad. It is the seeming immovability of the U.S. Empire, its apparently obdurate character, that is the primary reason Americans accept it. Imperialist realism is, of course, an echo of the late Mark Fisher, who wrote that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. [1] Throughout his collection Bessner describes the Cold War Liberal Internationalism of the American political mis-leadership class very well. The fundaments of their world are that the United States is the essential force for good in this world, that the world is the rightful beneficiary of a benign American hegemony, and above all that the Cold War was absolutely necessary for “civilization” to flourish. Bessner describes the work of two exemplars of liberal internationalism, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, in their The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership: To say that Daalder and Lindsay embrace a sanguine view of the Cold War’s history would be an understatement. Here’s another, more accurate way to tell the story that Daalder and Lindsay narrate. In the mid-1940s, U.S. policymakers decided to construct a world order based not on liberal principles of cooperation, reason, and law but on imperial principles of military, political economic, and cultural supremacy…Americans, in effect, arrogated to themselves the right to act on behalf of humanity writ large…(while at the same time according to Lindsey O’Roarke)…during the Cold War the United States attempted to covertly overthrow foreign regimes 64 times and that ‘states targeted in a covert regime change operation appear less likely to be democratic afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human rights abuses’…(According to Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft)…between 1946 and 1989, the United States militarily intervened in foreign societies 104 times, at the rate of 2.42 interventions per year. One can hardly call this a “rules-based world order,” as Daalder and Lindsay do. Well, that all depends on the real rules that provide aid and comfort to the liberal internationalist. Blowback, anyone? Chalmers Johnson was correct. This should have been obvious to any and all intelligent men and women, but their particular brand of a powdered soft drink mix was so strong that these liberal internationalists simply “can’t imagine a world absent American domination. For them, the United States has a holy mission forged in the fires of World War II – to lead the world.” But these arguments are based solely on false belief rather than reason. The outcomes have been predictable. Contrary to President George W. Bush and many others, “they” do not hate us for what we are, they hate us for what we do. And unless and until the United States resurrects the canonical better angels of its nature, nothing will improve, anywhere. In “Empire Burlesque” (from Harper’s in 2022) Bessner describes how the “shining city on a hill” of John Winthrop, blind as he was to so much he might have seen, has evolved into a fortified metropole. In Stephen Wertheim’s words the U.S. has a grand strategy of “armed primacy” in which “human flourishing, international order, and the future of liberal democratic capitalism (sic) depended on the (United States) spreading its tentacles across the world,” using our 750+ military establishments of one kind or another. In contrast, China has one formal base in Djibouti, a joint base in Cambodia, and a facility in eastern Tajikistan. Still, those “better angels” mentioned by Abraham Lincoln have existed, as described in George Washington’s Farewell Address that included warning against “entangling our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice.” Twenty-five years later, John Quincy Adams identified the United States a nation that had “abstained from interference in the concerns of others…She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” If only. But in Bessner’s view it could be that the people are getting fed up, and the doings of the Current Administration, which are too recent for most of this book, may have exacerbated this tendency. We shall see, but Bessner is surely correct when he writes: Since the late seventies, Americans have been suffering the negative consequences of empire – a militarized political culture, racism, xenophobia, police forces armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry, a bloated defense (sic) budget, and endless wars (amen) – without receiving much in return, save for the psychic wages of living in the imperial metropole. Psychic wages have been a constant in American history. The Bourbons of the American South, after the Civil War, used psychic wages to pay those who were the foundation upon which their wealth rested. This continued, in the South and everywhere else in the United States, until the end of WWII. During the Great Compression from the end of WWII to about 1975, there was a reversal of poor fortune for the working class, despite manifestly uneven progress that is now being extirpated by the Current Administration. Since the mid-to-late 1970s, when I began my working life, Neoliberalism has steadily eroded the equality had been attained in the immediate post-war world. Will this be enough for the scales to drop from the eyes of those who have no choice but to work for a living? Perhaps not. But current behavior of our oligarchs indicates they are getting nervous. Psychic wages do not pay for food, fuel, housing, health care, and education. They certainly do not pay for a stolen week or two at the beach or in the mountains, away from the unnecessary drudgery of modern work well before the predicted deluge of AI shop and slop (see Harry Braverman, 50+ years later). The middle of the book includes contemporary analyses of usual suspects, including Barack Obama, George Soros, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Gates, Samantha Power, Noam Chomsky, Michael Walzer, and John Mearsheimer. They are a good reminder of where we have been and do not need to return. Mearsheimer has become one of the more cogent realist critics of the current Ramadan War in West Asia as a futile and stupid attempt to exert hegemony that is rapidly expiring due to a plethora of stubborn facts on the ground. Bessner’s take on Soros is revelatory to those who have not been paying attention: Soros has correctly attributed Trump’s victory (2016) to the deleterious effects that market fundamentalism and the Great Recession had on American society…(because this)…con artist and would be dictator…(emphasized)…that elected leaders failed to meet voters’ legitimate expectations and aspirations and that this failure let electorates to become disenchanted with the prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism. But, as Bessner notes, Soros was no different from the masters of the universe on the erstwhile other side and their minions in the Professional Managerial Class who have a natural disdain for working people: For Soros, the majority of the Demos is little more than a phantasm, occasionally glimpsed but seldom engaged; it is the elites who truly matter. In this, Soros is a typical meritocrat, speaking in grand terms about making the world a better place, but always reliant of a supposedly cognitively superior elite. Soros’s attitude is the original sin of American political economy. Bessner ends with two essays on contemporary American politics. The first sentence of the penultimate essay, “It Didn’t Happen Here,” [2] treads on more than a few nerves: “Since the (2016) election of Donald Trump, a specter has haunted the United States – the specter of fascism.” Bessner’s discussion of Fascism Comes to America by Bruce Kuklick is concerned with “how the term itself has been used in the last century of American discourse.” Nevertheless, the question of whether the United States (plus more than a few other countries) will eventually meet Robert O. Paxton’s definition of fascism remains valid. But it is also true that fascism has also become a trope. Or to put it in anthropological terms, fascism is a “floating signifier” that according to Claude Lévi-Strauss is a term “devoid of meaning and thus susceptible to any meaning at all.” [3] “Fascist” as an epithet or accusation (or projection) has become the equivalent of calling someone in the United States a “Marxist” or a “heathen” or a “terrorist” or a “radical leftist.” These are little more than the equivalent of calling that person a satanist, or worse. Jonah Goldberg excoriated “liberal fascists.” Chris Hedges, who has seen much up close and personal as a war correspondent, identified the Christian Right as “American fascists.” The pardoned (by Donald Trump) felon Dinesh D’Souza called Hillary Clinton a fascist, and Paul Krugman has said the same of Donald Trump. The late, great historian of the Slave South, Eugene Genovese, has written convincingly that, “the personal is political” of second wave feminism can be traced back to Mussolini’s house philosopher, the fascist Giovanni Gentile. That deserves more thought. The only common denominator in these uses of the term, other than fascism’s “negative valence,” is that those so accused are “authoritarians,” depending on one’s worldview. And that is the problem, especially regarding the United States: Kuklick is especially critical of attempts to read fascism into the American past, which many scholars have done since the late 1960s. Finding fascism in U.S. history…“distances U.S. citizens from their own past” by insisting that “dangerous challenges did not come for America but must have migrated from overseas.” There are manifold homegrown American phenomena that shaped the past for worse – genocidal racism, rapacious militarism, and a violent obsession with incarcerating minorities were not fascist inventions – and we hardly need to import a term with a foreign valence to explain, and thus implicitly detach ourselves from, that history. … At first glance, it’s not obvious why so many more critics identified Trump as fascist instead of, say, George W. Bush…(who)…established…Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most Gestapo-like organization in the country, and the Department of Homeland Security, whose name uncomfortably echoes the German Heimatschutz, a term associated with the far right (then and now). That the second President Bush used what had become a Nazi expression representing homeland to describe his new Department of Internal Security (intended to fight the so-called Global War on Terror) flew right over the heads of virtually all American politicians of the Uniparty. Americans are not special. In his final essay, “This is America,” Bessner deals with Trump v2.0 and our further and feckless lamentations about fascism: While those who talk of fascism are honorably (perhaps, I will not grant this without evidence) motivated by a desire to apprehend what’s going on, the use of the term obscures both the nature and the stakes of the present moment. There is a fundamental truth at the heart of Trumpism that makes comparisons to European fascism difficult to sustain…Trump and his hangers-on (Project 2025; thank you, Lewis Powell) are building on long-standing American traditions and are using the normal tools of the American government to dismantle democracy (such as it exists or has ever existed). Trumpism is not a foreign import. It is distinctly homegrown (Palmer raids, various Red Scares, the Klan, Jim Crow, John C. Calhoun, Joe McCarthy, Haymarket, Harlan County, George Armstrong Custer (oops), Andrew Jackson, COINTELPRO, Weather Underground). And if the (genuine) Left (plus a genuine Right) hope to combat this project now and in the future, we (all Americans) must focus on the profoundly American sources of the president’s authoritarianism. Or to repeat yet again, Donald Trump is the symptom of our distemper, not the cause. This is nothing new to anyone who has read Christopher Lasch, who was neither Right nor Left, but correct. In this, President Trump is not unique. He has had many predecessors in our history, some of them very recent – some of them responsible for the election of Donald Trump, twice. Our question is, “What will we, all of us, do about it?” There are no simple answers except for hard but humane work in a shrinking and increasingly inhospitable world. By way of a personal conclusion, the essays in Imperialist Realism finally answered a question that has been nagging me for more than 35 years (slow on the uptake again). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the self-described West’s “glorious victory” in the Cold War, even Dick Cheney (von Halliburton) talked of, at last, a “peace dividend” that would provide the world a welcome respite and reset after the Great War, its bastard child of a world war that lasted six years, and a harsh and essentially incomprehensible Cold War that lasted another forty-five years. Alas, this peace dividend was not to be. It turns out the Liberal Internationalists™, all very smart people, could not say “Yes!” to the win, much less accept it with grace and set about building a better world. As a consequence, they (thanks, Conor) and by extension all of us in their sway are still fighting phantom threats the world over and a Soviet Union that does not exist. And even while the USSR existed after WWII, it was only an “existential” threat if one side (probably the one that birthed Dr. Strangelove) forced the nuclear genie out of her bottle. Some people never learn, another part of the human condition that has us continuing to live in “interesting times” instead of a humane world of natural limits, cooperation, and solidarity. Notes [1] From the author, n.13: “The concept of imperialist realism repurposes critic Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism, which he defined as ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’” The quote about capitalism has also been attributed to Fredric Jameson. [2] This is a play on Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis’s novel is very good. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is better in my view, but perhaps not the outright critique of fascism as the former. And the movie version has Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. In the right hands It Can’t Happen Here would also have been a great movie. [3] When it comes to social anthropology, I tend to be in the Marvin Harris camp rather than the Lévi-Strauss camp, whose structuralism also seems to be a “floating signifier.” But the concept of floating signifier itself is important. We have way too many of them floating about in the aether.