The United States began its history
as an anti-imperial revolutionary nation. For most of human history revolt
against concentrated power has been the struggle of mankind's politics. From
time to time the masses acquiesce under the rule of oppressive minorities, and
in the modern world something like democracy is brought to exist yet the will
to power of minorities always persists.
Russian
revolted against concentrated wealth and power in 1917. In the 1989 revolution
that nation sought relief from the inefficiency of communism and state
totalitarianism. The west featured free trade, free speech, freedom of religion
and national self-determination as moral arguments against state
totalitarianism in the form of the Soviet Union.
After
the transition; a remarkably nonviolent transition that could almost be
described as an evolution rather than a revolution, Russia faced the unprecedented
challenge of creating de novo a free market economy. Unfortunately the west and
the United States in particular under President Bill Clinton took the lack of
military and ideological resistance from Russia for an opportunity to plunder
and take as much business advantage as they could. Probably the U.S. would have
better developed a Marshall plan for the reconstruction of Russia. Without any
real tradition or establishment of democracy the Russia faced decades of
evolution toward a better society. The United States and its media of course
were impatient with that and found it more convenient to be critical and adversarial.
A new cold war could replace the old and traditional roles and attitudes
resumed with a geographically smaller Russia.
The
Soviet Union provided a governor on the extremes that concentrated wealth in
the United States could force on the public. There was a debate in a global
communism versus capitalism political struggle about who really cared more for
humanity. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's fall the west evolved the
viewpoint that pure greed rather than enlightened self-interest works best politically.
Fundamentally they selected corporatism and plutocracy to replace democracy.
That meant that imperialism returned to the United States as the corporate
state.
An irony is that the Democratic Party evolved to become the leftist branch of
corporatism with just a mild dialectical competition with the Republican right
wing branch of corporatism. Effectively it is a one-party system that generates
the same imperial and corporate results. That isn't good for the United States
and it isn’t good for mankind.
It
is challenging to predict what a global corporate empire will be like; one
driven by greed, godless in its atheist evolution toward extreme minority
power. It is certain that there are not sufficient natural resources in the
world today to sustain an American standard of living for 9 to 12 billion
people. The environment too cannot sustain the ongoing mass extinction of
species and degradation of habitat. If the U.S.A. could return to democracy and
individual self-determination with an adequate safety net to keep people out of
poverty and restore the environment to its best condition realistically
possible, if strong boundaries were respected for nations, if the differences
between rich and poor were not so great, it is possible that the world's
population would have better prospects for continuing progress that in a
self-reinforcing system of greed and ecospheric indifference.
