[lbo-talk] Obama reelection prospect

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Fri Feb 18 18:56:47 PST 2011


On Fri, February 18, 2011 5:56 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:


>> Tahrir Square has demolished the ideological underpinnings of the
>> Terror War.
>
> For whom?

For ordinary Americans bamboozled by US elites. The whole scam of Empire operates on a kind of permanent state of emergency -- it can't work without a credible threat. Take away the foreign enemies, and suddenly you have no buy-in for the predations of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.

Now that I think about it, one of the factors which made Seattle 1999 possible was the lack of Cold War-style enemies. There was the economic bubble, true, but there were bubbles in the 1980s and 2000s, but corresponding moment of radicalization.

No bubble + no ideological buy-in = unprecedented legitimation crisis.

-- DRR



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