John Pilger's article is not libertarian screed. This business of the 'not a dime's worth of difference crowd not caring about the working class' is simply untrue and pretends that a different ideological ethos runs foreign contra domestic policy.
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nscoverstory.htm
Bush or Kerry? No difference Cover story John Pilger Monday 8th March 2004
The man who, after Super Tuesday, is all but certain to become the Democrats' candidate for president is as dedicated as any Republican to the American empire. By John Pilger
The "anyone but Bush" movement objects to the Coke-Pepsi analogy, and Ralph Nader is the current source of their ire. In Britain, seven years ago, similar derision was heaped upon those who pointed out the similarities between Tony Blair and his heroine Margaret Thatcher - similarities which have since been proven. "It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the Guardian commentator Hywel Williams. "But the imperialism of the liberal may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life."
Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New Democrats come from a tradition of liberalism that has built and defended empires as "moral" enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle.
As the New Democrats' manifesto rightly points out, the Democrats' "tough-minded internationalism" began with Woodrow Wilson, a Christian megalomaniac who believed that America had been chosen by God "to show the way to the nations of this world, how they shall walk in the paths of liberty". In his wonderful new book, The Sorrows of Empire (Verso), Chalmers Johnson writes:
With Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual foundations of
American imperialism were set in place. Theodore Roosevelt . . .
had represented a European-driven, militaristic vision of imperialism backed by nothing more substantial than the notion that the manifest destiny of the United States was to govern racially inferior Latin Americans and east Asians. Wilson laid over that his own hyper-idealistic, sentimental and ahistorical idea [of American world dominance]. It was a political project no less ambitious and no less passionately held than the vision of world communism launched at almost the same time by the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution.
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