> Dude, I grew up here and I don't get it.
It's just the Empire. This particular model of Empire was very much founded on appearances -- Hollywood, ads, PR, consumerism. So all the glossy financialized surfaces seemed shiny and new, while the infrastructures rotted away for 35 years. The mistake is to assume, like Noam Chomsky, that you can just point to the rot to dispel the fetishism of surfaces. It works the other way around: the worse things got, the more Americans desperately wanted to believe in those surfaces.
Any Left worth its salt wouldn't dismiss the cultural, but draw out its utopian kernel and tie it to social struggles to rejuvenate that infrastructure. (Easier said than done, I know).
-- DRR