[WS:] I do not think it is true, if by Empire you mean foreign relations and policy. As I see it, what a typical American thinks on those issue does not go beyond ordinary ethnocentrism/nationalism commonly found in virtually every country. It is annoying, but nothing to write home about.
I think that the US public discourse, and consequently "collective consciousness" or "stock knowledge" as sociologists would call it, is poisoned by a different kind of toxin - the cocktail of virulent ant-institutionalism, localism and coziness (gemuetlichkeit) There is a widely spread gut hatred of everything that smacks of an institution - the bigger and the more global, the worse. Thus, big corporation is bad but small business is good, the Wall Street is bad, but a local community bank is good, federal government is bad but the local government, sheriff or politician are good, big city is bad but small town or suburb is good, transnational organizations are evil incarnate but local charities are good, and so on.
This poisonous toxin effectively kills critical thinking on contact and makes people extremely vulnerable to manipulation. All that it takes to win their support for something or someone is to portray it as folksy and gemuetlich. All that it takes to stir intense fear and hatred of something or someone is to portray it as institutional and alien. What is suicidal about this is that once these two opposing ways of framing things are evoked (something that business and political propaganda mastered to perfection) most people stop thinking critically and start reacting with either gullible acceptance or irrational hatred.
This toxic mixture of anti-institutionalism, localism and coziness is not limited to the US, of course, you can find it in virtually every country (Switzerland and Ireland would be good European examples.) But it seems to be more widely spread in the US than in many other industrialized countries.
I think what you call "the problem of the US left" is that it does not get it - it thinks it can persuade people with rational arguments, graphs, charts, figures, and appeals to economic self-interests. But as it has been painfully obvious that it cannot - the only time it can succeed is when it adapts this toxic cocktail of anti-institutionalism, localism, and coziness, but by so doing, it pays a high price - it crosses over to the dark side.
Wojtek
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 7:25 PM, Dennis Redmond <metalslorg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Angelus Novus
> <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Better, I think, to stick to the "tons of other reasons" you name, rather > than engage in this kind of guilt-ridden,
>
> I am not some Cold War liberal and have zero guilt about the collapse
> of the Empire. But the culture all around here is deeply suicidal.
> It's reflected in social policy, in Hollywood, in a thousand other
> ways.
>
> One of the problems of the US Left is that even the most ordinary
> people can't imagine living without the Empire. That's a genuine
> political barrier to change.
>
> -- DRR
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