The Decline of the American Empire

Kirkpatrick Sale, the director of the Middlebury Institute, reviews Morris Berman's Why America Failed. Berman's book, argues Sale, is essential to understanding how the DC Empire achieved its present status. It did so by relentlessly pursuing its notion of "progress," an impossible goal perfectly suitable for "a nation of hustlers," a people "relentlessly on the make."

And what does a nation of hustlers do to those who get in their way? The South is a perfect example - as well as a model for future conquests:

In fact that civilization will always take steps to marginalize it, even destroy it if necessary, a fact that Berman illustrates in a chapter on the antebellum South. He shows how the South was "the one example we have of an opponent of [the dominant] ideology that had real political teeth," and blatantly opted for a life premodern (indeed "neofeudal"), agrarian, slow, conservative, and honoring tradition, honor, chivalry, and hospitality more than making a buck or inventing a gadget. This ultimately the increasingly industrial and expansive North could not stand and so began a war to destroy it. "The treatment of the South by the North," Berman says, "was the template for the way the United States would come to treat any nation it regarded as an enemy: not merely a scorched earth policy, but also a ‘scorched soul’ policy’" that it would use in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else it could achieve it.

This is why the Civil War remains a hot issue today - the triumphalist mythology that grew out of the Northern victory is the foundation for today's militarism, which is prettied up with talk of "liberation" and "equality."

Thanks to Robert for the heads up!