Reply #35: I like your 'crime racket' analogy. // I also read "Sorrows of Empire"

[RichM]

recently & saw Johnson speaking last month. I was very aware, both in the book & at his lecture, that he was someone who had signed on to the basic assumptions of the Cold War. He seemed a somewhat Kevin-Phillips-like figure to me -- no leftist, but someone with great integrity - easily enough, for example, to start questioning old and once-dearly-held assumptions in the light of new information.

I agree with this (your sentence) entirely: "The debate among elites vis a vis US Foreign Policy has never been about neoimperialism vs. global cooperation, but rather has been limited to varying shades of neoimperialism." That is exactly the point I hoped to reach, by posting the DLC excerpt. The problem is, global cooperation is completely off the table for discussion, because it's outside the range of elite opinion. We can either have more thuggish neoimperialism (R), or more refined neoimperialism (D) - but neoimperialism, one way or another, we must have.

This leads directly to the "no real difference between the 2 parties" debate, because the range between Democrats and Republicans does exist; there are some points of difference. Yet, the range is a very narrow one, where solutions that could represent real progress for most of the world's people are simply eliminated.