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Fortress America?

This article has much food for thought:

After September 11, America basically wrote off the rest of the world as a reliable partner. The ultimate goal was no longer the Fukuyama utopia of expanding universal liberal democracy, but the transformation of the United States into "Fortress America," a lone superpower isolated from the rest of the world, protecting its vital economic interests and securing its safety through its new military power. This new military not only includes forces for rapid deployment anywhere on the globe, but also the development of space weapons that enable the Pentagon to control the global surface from above. This strategy throws a new light on the recent conflicts between the United States and Europe: It is not Europe that is "betraying" the United States. The United States no longer needs to rely on its exclusive partnership with Europe. In short, Bush's America pretends to be a new global empire but it is not. Rather, it remains a nation-state ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if U.S. politics is now being guided by a weird reversal of the ecologists' well-known motto: Act globally, think locally.

Within these coordinates, every progressive who thinks should be glad for Bush's victory. It is good for the entire world because the contours of the confrontations to come will now be drawn in a much starker way. A Kerry victory would have been a kind of historical anomaly, blurring the true lines of division. After all, Kerry did not have a global vision that would present a feasible alternative to Bush's politics.

I'm beginning to see that the Democratic party is doomed. If a Kerry victory would have been a historical anomaly, then one must conclude that the Clinton years, and the Carter years, were also anomalies, mere distractions from the aggressive forward advancing of the neoliberal agenda in place since the mid-70s. If you examine the past 30 years, each Republican regime pushed the line, and each Democrat regime held the line where it had been drawn. Almost a collective good cop, bad cop act.

It seems to me that until the Democrats rebel against the neoliberal status quo, and embrace real, progressive, even radical agendas, they will be nothing more than the whipping boy of the neocons. The "election results" from Tuesday only reinforce this notion.

posted by JWL at 4:44 PM |