Special - Empire Burlesque w/ Danny Bessner
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Jul 1, 2022 • 31M
Special - Empire Burlesque w/ Danny Bessner
Appears in this episode
American Prestige
A podcast from Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison that provides listeners with everything they need to know about what’s going on in the world.
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*Derek is on vacation, so no news recap this week!*
With Derek out of town, Producer Jake takes the opportunity to chat with Danny a bit about his new article in Harper’s, “Empire Burlesque”. They discuss some of the concepts presented in the piece, including the American century, liberal internationalists and restrainers, the latter two ideologies’ approaches towards US-China relations, where the American public stands on US armed primacy, and more.
Special - Empire Burlesque w/ Danny Bessner
A huge issue with the Left as well, and this could be due to decades of efforts, is a lot of the US Left (at least online and enough thought leaders) seems very interested in purity tests and self purging, and rather resistant to dealing people who aren't 100% ideologically pure.
As much as the Left needs institutions, structures and the ability to pull levers, it also needs to avoid absolute ideological purity which seems to plague leftist spaces, and not fracture at any given moment, factionally.
Now, we might be seeing this with the resurgence of unions in the US to some small degree that they can't purity test every potential ally, but there is a definite issue with factionalism and 'circle firing squad' problems with the US left, especially with the Professional-Managerial Class left, and if you can't address that issue it's hard to see any long term hope to organize to build institutions and control levers, if energy is being wasted on 'Thou Art Not Pure Enough'.
But maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
I agree in total with your analysis.
One argument I often see in response to sentiments like yours (disarmament, winding down American hegemony, letting other countries build resilience and alliances without intervention etc. ) that I have a difficult time thinking about is 'but what about when X country (or organization) starts building up power and starts a process of expansion' where X is Russia, China or whatever bogeyman of choice.
So, for instance, if a few months ago, the US started to decrease intervention, one decision might have been to not send arms to Ukraine (setting aside the fact that an expansionary NATO policy was a major contributor to the whole mess), which would make the outcome worse for the Ukrainian people (ie more citizens would've died). It's sort of a 'we have all of this power to do good (help the people of Ukraine) so we should help out' or even a 'it's better us be the global hegemony than them' style argument. The same could be said for when the US might not intercede when China re-possess Taiwan.
Is the argument against this from your perspective that these casualties/bad things are transient and over time as the US rolls back it's empire more drastically, these regions will be better off with out intervention, despite periods of instability in these regions?