Episode 276 – What Democracy? with Aaron Good

Macro N Cheese – Episode 276
What Democracy? with Aaron Good
May 11, 2024

[00:00:00] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:00:45] Steven Grumbine: All right everybody, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than political scientist, historian, podcaster extraordinaire, Aaron Good. Who’s going to talk with me about a subject that has been eating my soul away.

We’re watching the world implode around us. And the death that we have seen, we have a up close video documentary of what’s going on in Gaza right now. And the student encampments around the country pop up everywhere in direct opposition to this genocidal policy in support of Zionism and Netanyahu. One of the most brutal regimes in modern history, this is our Holocaust. And there doesn’t seem to be any way of impacting policy in this nation.

And as we watch the Biden administration support the genocide that is occurring, I ask myself, do we even have a democracy? Is there any way of people demonstrating their agency within this government, other than outside the electoral process, through organizing and strategizing like the Black Panthers? And like other movements in the past, that once understood without having dual power, without having some form of non electoral strength, that doesn’t break down and fall apart between elections, without having a credible anti war movement, without having a credible resistance to tyranny, tyranny will continue to reign supreme. And it will laugh at us, because power concedes nothing without a demand and a credible threat.

So, I asked my friend Aaron to come join me today. Maybe there’s some history here that we can talk about, that will bring what I’m saying into clarity. Let me bring on my guest Aaron Good, of the American Exception Podcast. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:56] Aaron Good: Hey, thank you. It’s great to be here.

[00:02:58] Grumbine: I’m sorry for that long winded intro, but I feel so passionately about this and I feel so absolutely powerless to make an impact. Just on the surface, looking at what’s happening today, what would you say is a standard typical voters ability to impact public policy of the Biden administration, and other administrations for that matter. But it seems like everything that we do, everything we say, is met with ridicule, and basically just ignoring us and doing it anyway.

[00:03:34] Good: Yes, this is a very low point in the history of democracy. Perhaps the lowest point ever, if you put it in a historical context. And the United States was never really a democracy. Democracy isn’t so much an either/or proposition, I would say it’s a continuum. There’s a lot of political science literature on democracy, and most of it is pretty useless because it’s American, and so it’s going to conform to American ideas of what democracy are. Which basically boils down to a checklist of procedures and so on, and supposed political rights.

Even in the generic sense of political rights and universal suffrage and basic ‘one person, one vote’ rules, the US comes up short. The electoral college is a ridiculous system. There are barriers to getting on the ballot. There are barriers to appearing in presidential debates. There’s, of course, the absurd campaign finance system, which essentially makes it a contest of who can curry the most favor with the oligarchy.

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of democracy. So there are different voting systems in different localities. There are even places where there’s really no way to recount a ballot or know that a ballot will be counted accurately. We’ve had electronic voting, where there’s no paper and the vote tabulating software is a proprietary trade secret of a corporation that we are not a part of are able to exercise the authority over. And of course they suppress free speech, the right to assemble, and they infiltrate political groups and so on. There’s all sorts of ways that the US doesn’t even conform to the generic political science ‘good liberal American’ version of democracy, which is still something that has no problem accommodating enormous economic inequality. And I think that without some measure of economic equality, you can’t really have political equality. That’s pretty clear.

If it wasn’t clear, the US has shown that by the way its democracy has deteriorated, as the wealth has been concentrated in smaller and smaller hands. Part of the things that you’re saying are things that occurred to me after I worked on the Obama campaign, and I moved out to Missouri for four or five months and worked ridiculous hours.

Basically, you just work and sleep. And I went to the inauguration and went to the inaugural ball. And then Obama proceeded to essentially be George Bush’s third and fourth term, just with kind of different woke liberal branding. Now it’s become more of a thing for the Democrats to really lean more on their cultural superiority as part of their branding message.

And that’s what we have, are two crazy corporate brands going against each other now. And the theory that I came up to try to explain the American state- in a paper that I wrote in 2015- was that it’s really a tripartite state structure that we have. So we have some democracy, with people voting on things and doing some sort of electing of legislators and the executive, and politicians making campaign statements and issuing platforms and doing those democracy things.

But we also have this national security state that was created, in the wake of World War II, when the US decided to go for global empire, and it has been given the authority- or usurped the authority- to act in violation of the law. And the more that we look at it, we see that even this doesn’t capture the despotism of the state. That there’s really a tripartite state structure, and something that we have to think of as oligarchy, the power of oligarchy. And the reason I say that this is not just the same as what you would think of as a national security state, is the national security state- in theory- could act as a guardian of democracy. You could have a group that operates with some overriding authority and some level of secrecy, if it was in service to ultimately protecting the democratic regime, and democracy, and the Constitution and so on, because these people do take oaths to uphold the Constitution. Which is funny to think of, the FBI people and CIA people, when they violate it so much. But really this power of oligarchy and the way that it gets boosted with the power of the national security state and the US global empire after World War II, has given us an oligarchy that is extremely powerful, and a regime that is essentially top down, where the most important decisions are made by unknown people at the top in secrecy, because they’re private actors some of the times, and then secrecy because they’re in the national security bureaucracies the other time. So we’re very divorced from judging decision makers. We don’t even know what some decisions are that have been made, because those are kept secret. For example, we don’t even know what emergency measures are in place since 9/11. For all we know, the state has the authority to act, to deal with anything deemed a national security threat in any way it sees fit. If they want to argue that it’s somehow related to international terrorism or damaging US interests, we don’t even know what the state is doing these days. And so, we are just left to watch what happens.

And many people feel like you, they recognize that we have very little power here to influence things at all, and that’s a problem. Because even the generic liberal philosopher par excellence, John Locke said ‘if you ever find yourself in a position where the executive is acting as though he has to use emergency powers to break the law, but he’s essentially oppressing the people using that excuse, then the only recourse is an appeal to heaven.’ Which is to say a revolution. But as you and I both know- or I assume you would share this assessment- the US is nowhere near a revolutionary state. And if the regime broke down now, probably the force and violence outside of the regime, is of a right wing, overtly fascistic bent. And so, we’re left utterly powerless. And there is not a good literature, or body of philosophy really, that can give you perfectly satisfactory answers about what you can do… when there’s nothing you can do.

[00:10:02] Grumbine: You clearly recognize what I’m talking about and gave it words that I lack, so I appreciate that. There’s a feeling that you know you’re being lied to. It’s like an itch you can’t quite scratch and it’s causing you to lose sleep at night. And they label anyone that is not within the establishment norms as a terrorist. These are new things that stem, I would presume largely, as a fascist knee jerk to the January 6th quote unquote “insurrection.”

It’s taken good protest, staples that America was supposed to stand on, and has basically trashed them. The concept of free speech, I understand that there are certain levels of responsibility that come with the rights beget responsibilities. And when we do things that are irresponsible that put other people at harm, that there should be some sort of justice that would take place in that fashion to maintain safety for all, not just one or two, but all.

And yet the chilling effect of free speech being eradicated from the public space, of the conflation between social media and the state. And watching the- now militarized- police in these cities and universities, we’re watching these thugs violently oppressing children at campuses, attacking anyone and everyone.

I think of Kent State and the Vietnam marches. And what we’re seeing is quite chilling. We don’t even need Donald Trump in office to see fascism, as we watch the Biden administration co-sign these behaviors, your thoughts.

[00:11:58] Good: This issue of fascism is a key to what we’re dealing with. My dissertation, and then the book version of it, and even the original article, I call them American Exception in the podcast. And that’s about the exception to the rule of law. When the state could say, this is an emergency. So, as you’re saying, they’re reduced to calling people terrorists, because if you do that, then this is a dangerous person that you must respond to.

That’s the reason that they do it, it’s a Pavlovian thing. Now, this exception idea comes from a Nazi, Carl Schmitt, who said, “if there’s ever a crisis, the executive or the sovereign authority is really the person who gets to decide that there’s an emergency and that the state can respond however it must to protect itself.”

And that became the core of the Nazi philosophy, and so it’s obviously a fascistic thing. It’s a core of fascism. Just say it’s absolutism on the state, to protect the state from an emergency, but in a modern industrial advanced civilization, that’s basically fascism. It’s capitalism, advanced industrial capitalism, with a top down regime, to guarantee that the regime and the state survives, and does what it wants to do.

Now, I don’t end up talking a ton about fascism specifically, in the book, just because it wasn’t a big part of the theory I really wanted to get into. I wanted to try to explain what had happened to the American regime and how it had changed, but it’s really there repeatedly. And I believe I do say at some point in the book, the other choice that we have is some kind of more over fascism.

But the reality of it is, that since the end of World War II, when the US creates the CIA, and the US defines its reality as being existentially threatened in an emergency, because of the Soviet Union. And there are these policy papers where they say ‘whatever we do to fight this is justified, we don’t have to worry about compromising our values, because this fight is so righteous.’ So they’re basically laying out an argument, a Nazi-ish argument, but it’s going to be a secret thing. Because of course, even as they’re laying out these arguments that the state must be empowered to do whatever we want and we don’t have to worry about making sure our deeds match our values, yada, yada… at the same time that they’re doing that, the face to the world is, ‘Hey, we’re democracy and freedom and all the good things, we’re going to bring progress and liberty and free speech, and our liberal values will improve your societies, and you can be rich like us.’

This is what they tried to trick the Third World into believing. But it really was, underneath it, a regime that would kill you just like it kills its enemies, just the fascists, that we supposedly defeated in World War II. In reality, we defeated their governments in war, but a lot of the regime was folded into our own anti-communist international. Because that’s what the Axis powers, Germany and Italy and Japan, called their alliance, was the anti-comintern, anti-communist international.

We created our own anti-communist international, but it was all done through covert networks connected to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and NATO and so on. And it would murder people that needed to be murdered in the third world, or even in Europe with these Gladio networks that we set behind.

Europe’s history also has pretty much, been secretly subordinated to US sovereignty. I’m told that there are treaties among the militaries in NATO countries- from a professor in Europe that I know who’s spoken to high officials- there are treaties that are spoken sometimes, not even really written down, that it’s understood that the security officials and the highest military officials, will do whatever the US says in Europe. And so, the West has been living with this duality of a fake liberalism and democracy, with really an exceptionalist regime that will make sure politics at home are under control. And then around the world, they’re even more vicious. The things that we did in Southeast Asia and Africa and Latin America.

We’ve just killed millions of people during this time period to keep Western imperialism going. And the fascism part of it is important, because the US always had these elements of fascism. You could say that the regimes of dealing with the native Americans and with the African slaves were proto-fascistic, because they weren’t an industrial Nazi society churning out tanks and missiles and such, but they had a very hard reactionary mentality in a capitalist system, and a othering of people and a suspension of laws to deal with groups that are deemed not part of the nation. And so that’s like a proto-fascism, but really we don’t go the Nazi route of saying we’re fascists, or the Italian, especially the fascisti. But there’s a fascist mentality that gets adopted, to where we go from a element of proto-fascism or a deep political system, that we had in the US before World War II, to a deep state, where these top down elements of oligarchic power are installed in the government, given state secrecy to operate under, enormous budgets, plus whatever they can get from the drug traffic apparently, and the ability to act without any legal restraint from Congress or the judicial system.

It’s fascism without fascism. And the result is that the oligarchy wins all these political battles, especially domestically. And that is the essence of why we feel there’s no democracy in the US, because essentially, the oligarchy rigged the game of the economy and the political system as much as it can.

But also, if that fails, they have the clandestine state. And when democracy was getting stronger in the US in the 1960s, especially 1968, they dealt with that problem by killing Martin Luther King and by killing Robert F. Kennedy. And the result was, that essentially killed within the US political class, any kind of progressive, lawful internationalism.

And as a result, we’ve had what we have now, which is a procession of people dedicated to America as the dominator of the world and the world political economy.

[00:18:07] Grumbine: There’s a book and it was recommended to me by Esha Krishnaswamy, who’s been on with us several times and runs Historicly podcast. She recommended a book called Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law  by James Q. Whitman. And I’ve listened to this book several times.

It’s relatively short, it’s about five hours of listening time. Saying that Nazis as they were preparing for Hitler, before they had gotten to the quote unquote final solution, had looked to the United States as a beacon of white nationalism. And that the United States led extremely well run, race-based law that prevented race mixing and any kind of undesirables.

And Nazis found tremendous amounts of inspiration in our covert dealings during Reconstruction, they were able to make laws in such a way, that those laws created the same conditions that were there before, whether it be vagrancy laws, etc. And these laws carried through the Jim Crow era, up until the times of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated, as well as Martin Luther King Jr. We have been far worse than we give ourselves credit for.

We have been so pumped full of this American exceptionalism, apple pie, that the idea that we’re really the bad guys is hard for people to grasp. And so they have almost a childlike belief system, that allows them to find faith in institutions, that are there in name only, led by those deep state characters that you spoke of.

And one need only look at the work of Pete Buttigieg and the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Where we’ve seen the destruction of an entire community, all in the name of capitalism. And the administration stayed quiet and we’ve got no real meaningful peace for those people, the coverups, the misdirection, the lies.

And we see this with Flint water problems there. We have seen nothing that actually benefits the people. It is always at the expense of the people. Your thoughts.

[00:20:39] Good: This is something that arose in the ’70s and ’80s, and I would say it was a response- in part- to 1968. Because one thing that is really staggering to contemplate, is that the time period in which cities and state governments are increasingly impoverished, and forced to conform to the logic of bond markets and such, that begins in the ’70s as a conscious set of policies that become known as neoliberalism.

And what I think happened was in 1968, as people were rising up and you saw all this democratic pressure for democracy and reform, that was confronting our corrupt and oligarchic institutions that are very warlike, and it’s benefit from racism and exploit the masses to make themselves even richer. They felt that they were under attack- because they were- from educated people, anti-war people, the new left, and so on.

And they dealt with this in a number of ways. I think some of them are obscure and we still don’t know the truth about. Psychological warfare. If you’ve read the book Chaos, about Charles Manson, I think some of those episodes of the ’60s seem to be psychological operations. What Manson did was exactly in line with the COINTELPRO FBI plans to foment conflicts and violence between the counterculture, and Black Panther type groups and so on.

And we have Patty Hearst also. There’s a lot of weird things, that if you look at them, have connections to intelligence. So, that era is interesting for that aspect of it. And I think that the Chaos book is going to be turned into a Netflix documentary, directed by Earl Morris as I understand it.

So, maybe more people will start to wake up to these things, which to me, is very encouraging. I almost find stories like this, if it does indeed happen, I find that- in a way- more encouraging, because to me, when a corporate entity like Netflix puts something like this out, or when you hear people like Tucker Carlson talk about the JFK assassination… the hopeful interpretation of that, is that perhaps the elites are realizing that they have painted themselves in a corner, and they’re going to need to have some kind of shocking revelations, as a way to ring in some real structural changes.

But in 1968, they were politically hurting, domestically. But internationally, they had maneuvered and schemed to put themselves in a strong position, because even though the Vietnam War was ultimately a defeat for the US, the fact that they controlled the dollar system and were basically able to stiff the rest of the world on redeeming all of those dollars,- that the US pumped into the global economy during the Vietnam War- they were able to avoid having to redeem those for gold, by simply saying, ‘we’re going to give up on the old Bretton-Woods agreement and you’re just going to accept and buy treasury bills, but we’re not going to give you the gold that we’d promised.’

“It’s our currency. It’s your problem”, said the Treasury Secretary, John Connolly. So, getting back to what I was saying earlier about the decline that we have in our industry, and these railroads breaking down and so on. A tragedy of all this, is that as this happened, it was happening at the same time that the US- essentially- got the ability to run deficits as big as it wanted to, but the powers that be decided that those deficits could only be for military spending, essentially. That they could not be used to build infrastructure, or social infrastructure, medical infrastructure, to have a national healthcare plan. We could have had a national healthcare plan, and really, just run it on credit that we created. If you wanted to.

If you run huge deficits, regardless, that would be something you could do. And then it would cut down on everyone’s health expenses, and so on.

[00:24:37] Grumbine: Can I please jump in there? Because this is what we focus on, what you just said. I’m really glad that you brought it up. I’m a modern monetary theory evangelist. I talk about this stuff wherever I can, because it’s not really that it’s good or bad, it’s just the way the system works. And we get it so wrong.

The lies that we’ve been told are all part of the misdirection, that we end up hearing from the mainstream. And all these lies… ‘There is no money.’ ‘We’re out of money.’ Alan Greenspan, as he’s getting grilled by Paul Ryan over Social Security; “there’s nothing that prevents us from creating as much money as we need to, the issue is, can we create an economy where the real goods and services are available?”

And so, these issues that you’re bringing up, the end of the Bretton Woods accord, the beginning of a free floating, fiat currency, was in the hands of the oligarchy, and to your point, the class interests of the people were not represented.

This was all in the name of the wealthy winning. And if you spend money on the military, everybody thinks you’re saving the country, you’re protecting them, so they don’t complain. They don’t whine about it. They just say ‘yes’, and everything’s good. But the minute that you say, ‘why don’t we create a national health service where you never have to pay a cent for your care?’

“That will be inflationary!” No, actually, it would be deflationary. Because it would be efficient and it would trim a trillion dollars worth of economic activity out of the GDP, because it gets rid of all the middlemen. The point is, there’s a reason why they’re not giving it to us. And that is because labor has always been under the realm of the oligarchy. To have the boot on their neck. To give them only little bits at a time. To be able to maintain the control that it has over the people.

The great academic Clara Matei wrote a book called The Capital Order- which is worth everyone’s time if you haven’t read it- where she describes how economists created austerity to save capitalism during the Bolshevik Revolution, as they realized that people were seeing it doesn’t have to be the way that these industrial capitalists are making it out to be, and the fear of losing control of the international economy was too much for them, so they created this austerity condition.

I just wanted to throw that in, because within MMT, we understand that the state is the creator of its own currency. Yet the purveyors of the state, the frauds that we call politicians, will tell us that’s taxpayer dollars. Wrong! Taxpayer dollars are deleted. They don’t need them. The United States government spends money into the economy, and redeems them by you doing something for them, that they want done. Whether it be create bombs and missiles, or whether it be go to war. Your thoughts.

[00:27:39] Good: Yes, and it is about class power. And in the ’70s and the post Bretton Woods era, it’s not just the end of Bretton Woods, it’s also the fact that coincided with a real shock for the establishment. And Louis Latham, who came from a family that was connected to oil- I think his brother was in the CIA- and he said that he was at the Bohemian Grove…

[00:28:02] Grumbine: Oh yeah.

[00:28:02] Good: which is this California gathering of rich people. They just stand out in the Redwoods and chant, and do whatever stuff. But he said that the atmosphere there in 1968, was sheer terror. That they just felt that there was a revolutionary feeling in the US, and that it was like nothing they’d ever seen.

And of course, that gets resolved by assassinating these leaders, who were more to the left than anything since then. And that’s no coincidence, that they were assassinated, and then not just that perspective was removed. MLK had stopped talking about ‘let’s just have civil rights and the Voting Rights Act’, and saying “We shall overcome”, he was saying, “We’ve got to look at who owns the oil in the ground”, and “Why do we have all of these disparities in the North and the cities?”

‘I don’t want to integrate into a burning house’, essentially. And he was standing up against three evil triplets of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation. And then RFK, Robert Kennedy was running a campaign on the same three themes, peace, economic justice, and racial reconciliation, ending the Vietnam war, and so on.

And he told MLK, through an intermediary, he said, ‘why don’t you take all these people, create a poor people’s march and demand an end to the Vietnam war, and that money be spent on social programs’… and MLK took up that cause. And he was set to launch the Poor People’s Campaign and march on Washington, like the Bonus Army during the Depression, and camp out until government policy changed.

Now, the establishment was so scared of that, so they murdered MLK. And then a couple of months later, they murder RFK, problem solved. You get Richard Nixon in the White House and he manages the chaotic years of the late ’60s, early ’70s, including the end of the Bretton Woods system. Now, you have, in 1970 or 71, a guy writing a memo to the [US] Chamber of Commerce which is, at the time, the top corporate business lobby in the country, and it’s Lewis Powell.

And it’s called the Powell Memo. And it’s basically, a deep state or neoliberal manifesto. He says the free enterprise system is under attack from the whole of society, the universities, and the students, and the labor unions. And nobody respects free enterprise, but they should, because if it weren’t for us, how would they even get enough money to eat? So they should stop biting the hands that feed them. And we need to have a concerted effort of long, prolonged, organized effort to make sure that free enterprise prevails over American institutions.

And, more or less, this is what happens. You get all these right wing think tanks, and corporate money dedicated to furthering corporate dominance over society.

And the result is, really, a victory for corporate forces in the US. The takeover of both political parties. They’re both purged of anything that’s populist or democratic, in an economic sense, and they become two culturally different parties with some differences over tangible things. But mostly, especially on culture issues, they could fight about those all day and the Wall Street financers would prefer that, because then they can go on making money.

Whatever people’s positions are on DEI issues, or abortion or trans issues, it doesn’t matter either way for BlackRock and State Street and Boeing and Exxon. So they’ve warped politics on purpose, to make their hegemony over society complete. Even when things like healthcare, you could point out how much it would help businesses not to have to pay for their workers health insurance. Or if the workers didn’t have to get fleeced by bankers and real estate interests to buy a home, and end up paying so much more for a home than they should have to in this country. Same for education, this debt. I think the logic for the oligarchy is, that the more that people have no choice but to work at wherever they can find work, and the more difficult it is for them to leave their employment because their health insurance is tied to it, then the less political wherewithal non-oligarchic forces, i.e. 99.9% of the population, has. We have very little political wherewithal, because we don’t have a lot of time or resources to devote to advancing our interests. But they have billions of dollars and money to hire people, so that they have infinite time to devote to all of these things, when you think of all the people that they can hire to work for them.

So it’s a system that’s guaranteed to keep working in this way, as long as it doesn’t change. Now, the interesting thing is that with the empire collapsing, it’s changing the logic of all of these actors. And this is where we’re in a moment of flux and uncertainty as to how things are going to develop, and possibilities are opening up, but we don’t quite know how to take advantage of them because we are so disempowered. And it’s a very fascinating, exciting, and scary time to be alive.

[00:32:58] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

[00:33:20] Grumbine: I think we ride a Metro that goes 20 stops, but we always get off 5 stops before the end. We never quite ask ‘what’s next, what’s really happening?’ So you acknowledge you can’t really vote your way out of this. You acknowledge that the people that are in power aren’t answering to you. You acknowledge that it goes beyond just political contributions, because this is a deep state element.

This is part of a system that is funded by the government, these pseudo dark agencies that control the institutions that manage our nation as well. And so, you have this sober moment of ‘What do I do with this knowledge now?’ What I’m hearing is, I can’t entertain what I just realized in my head. I can’t open my mind to that. If I start thinking this way, I’m going to be on my own. I’m going to be out of the herd, and that’s a scary place to be awakened by reality and without any kind of pathway forward. That’s a terrifying feeling. It’s like falling off of a mountain, and you’re just free falling and going to hit the ground at some point.

Oh, my God, what do I do? Help me explain that in better terms, because to me, that’s what I see.

[00:34:39] Good: Subconsciously, people that would be experiencing these kind of many crises, political, existential crises, or psychic crises. However we want to say it, it’s a realization that you are not living in the world that you thought you lived in. It’s the stuff of science fiction movies. It’s like The Matrix metaphor.

And in The Matrix, there’s even one character that says,’ please just put me back to sleep, I just want to go back to the dream, because it’s better than this reality.’ And you can understand that. And we have all of these distractions that way, but history is unfolding whatever we do. And, in a way, I can’t think that it’s the most urgent thing to try to rouse any individual, because I think that there’s a realization that we don’t have political power, because of the regime that we live under. But then you do want to understand that regime, to arrive at a understanding of why we don’t have the power and what this regime really is.

I think that the empire part of it, the importance of it, cannot be overstated. Because the US ceased to become a society that was going to be organized along the lines of other civilizations, wherein you try to have some kind of logical division of labor, and a set of laws to make everything run smoothly and handle transitions of power, and manage public policy to deal with public problems.

It became instead, a political spectacle that was the front for a project of global dominance, of global empire. They wanted to rule the world. And at first, it was only the capitalist world. But around the time of the ’80s, around the time that they got this dollar system really sorted out and organized the way they wanted it, the people who decided that they should use this power- to go for unipolarity, for global dominance, and wipe out the Soviet Union, and just be the sole hegemon of the global capitalist system, and that there should be only the global capitalist system, no longer a competing system of any kind- those people won out. And they warped society, and American society even more, to suit their needs.

Now the problem is, that we are losing that ability around the world. Even the magic Rumpelstiltskin dollar that we produced, which other countries have to treat as good as gold and they have to keep our treasury bills instead of gold, often if we’re able to… although China is reversing that, and other countries are too. We created that system and we abused it to the hilt.

And by abusing it, we united countries against us, powerful countries. And if you look at US foreign policy as I have, and I feel like this is very understudied in a sense, in part, because it does get into Zionism, in a sense, because Zionism has been such a big driver of neoconservatism that it’s difficult to say exactly how much. But we can say that Zionism is either folded into, or the driving force behind, this insane unipolar drive that the neoconservatives have launched since Reagan. Really, the Reagan revolution, I think, could be the time that they really came to power.

And this has generated, as people warned, people like H. W. Bush actually warned about some of these things, if you can believe it. Not because he was any kind of humanitarian, but because, I think, he was a WASP of the old eastern establishment, and he had some skepticism for Zionist maximalism, and the neocons as a whole. And that might be why he lost in 1992.

And these other people on the non-neocon side, the realists- are people like the Rockefellers and Brzezinski and H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and even Kissinger- they would have warned against some of these things, as being dangerous to the US.

What Brzezinski wrote in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, he says that ‘the nightmare scenario would be the US uniting Russia, China, and Iran, not by any cultural similarity that they have- because they’re obviously very different countries- but by a shared sense of grievance against the US and the West. And this is exactly what the neocons have done. And everything that they do to try to deal with this now- damaging Russia by expanding NATO, trying to sanction all these countries, seizing Russian assets, sanctioning Russia- these have all backfired and they’ve just generated more opposition. And I think, in part, the declining position of the US, has frightened the neocon, the Zionists, and the neoconservatively oriented Zionists in Israel. And I think it’s part of why they’ve tried to deal with this Gaza situation brutally, because they realize they have a certain window of time where the US is still the biggest bully in the world, and they can act with impunity, they believe. But the US is in a huge problem, because it’s losing legitimacy. The status of the dollar is waning. And China is becoming a more powerful economic country. And they’re a country that can actually deal with production problems in the 21st century, and other issues, of managing the population and providing for the needs of a population, so you have a good, strong industrial base and an educated population.

They are dealing with these things sensibly. Rather than trying to put the screws to their population as much as possible, to make life hard, so that their population is more easy to control. The Chinese are trying to build a functional society, and that’s what they say to the rest of the world, ‘do business with us and we can both prosper.’

The US is ‘Our way or the highway… we’ll sanction you, or murder you, or overthrow you with a coup, and even if we get caught- like in the case of Pakistan- we’ll just say that it didn’t happen. Like when they got rid of Imran Khan. And even the supposed left wing media outlets, like Democracy Now!, will just get on the air and lie, brazenly, about Pakistan, for example, and the US role there. The US is really in a perfect disaster of its own making, because of its own hubris and the fact that a very vicious group won out in US foreign policy over another vicious group, but a less insane one, the Old Eastern Establishment. The neocons emerged over them, and established an orthodoxy of unipolarity, of the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine.

You’re going to do everything to keep another power from rising, to even be possibly able to challenge the United States. That’s the path that we’ve been on, and it just accelerated the end of the US empire. Which was always inevitable, because all empires end. And now we’re at this strange point where our institutions don’t work, our society doesn’t work, and the empire is crumbling as well, and people are trying to make sense of it. And our dominant mainstream institutions are doing very little to enlighten them at all, they’re really basically there to mislead them about their situation.

[00:41:46] Grumbine: Absolutely. I’ve stated this on the show many times, the very first State of the Union under Joe Biden, the things he talked about, he was already beginning the process of putting China back into Cold War territory. They were already identifying China as the biggest risk that the United States faced. All the other red baiting that went on with Russia, as well.

Russia is not a communist country, at all anymore, and it’s just humorous how we still hold on to so much of that… but it plays, and it’s repeated. But ultimately, we have been priming the pump to get people ready to re-hate Russia, China, and Iran. And US sanctions on Russia backfired, and the proxy war with Ukraine and Russia [backfired].

To me it’s amazing, if you take a global map and you take the plots where US military bases are, it’s staggering. The fact is that all nations have currency, not all nations control their currency. The United States, through its use of debt peonage and through its use of extra governmental agencies- such as the IMF, World Trade Organization and World Bank- they have been able to manage to leverage that dollar hegemony, by getting these different countries into IMF structural adjustments.

And this is a long arm of empire. And what is interesting, is to see China reaching out to these countries and saying, ‘we have another cooperative way, we have a way of not having you be under the thumb of this rogue empire.’ And the empire may be getting wounded, but it’s military is still all over the world. We are using our sabers mightily, to try to retain whatever we have. We’ve turned Europe into a complete vassal, as they try to scramble about with the failure that happened in Ukraine. Beyond the dollar portion of this, what do you see as the rationale, for the entire European Union becoming like a child of the United States?

[00:44:10] Good: This is the position that they were in, as a result of World War II.

[00:44:15] Grumbine: Mm hmm.

[00:44:16] Good: The US came in with the Marshall Plan, which served to tie the economies together. But there was a real problem in Europe, in that they weren’t going to be able to participate in this new dollar system that the US had planned, because of the differing strengths of the two economies. The European versus the American one.

There was really nothing that Europe could produce, that Americans would buy in high enough volume, for the Europeans to earn dollars to really be able to participate. And so, as the years wore on in the ’40s, this was causing panic because they knew Marshall funding was going to run out. And the way that they dealt with it, NSC 68 is the document- and it’s written in 1950 by the subordinate of [US Secretary of State] Dean Acheson- Paul Nitze is the guy’s name, who wrote it according to Acheson’s specifications [he’s this arch establishment, deep state character]. And the NSC 68 was calling for ramping up the cold war, and describe the Soviets in apocalyptic terms. But the interesting thing about it- it wasn’t for public consumption, it was for policymakers- the interesting thing about it, is that if you read it carefully and you look at other statements by people around that time, that were involved in the drafting and were in those circles, the concern is not that the Soviets would invade, because the nuclear deterrent. And the desire to avoid war with the US, was enough to deter the Soviets. And they just lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis, they were not eager for more war or more land. They have this enormous Soviet Union and then Eastern Europe, which they really used as a buffer, because of previous Western European incursions into Russia. The Germans invaded twice, over the preceding decades, and killed millions and millions of Russians and Soviets. So that was why they occupied the East of Europe. And the US basically enters World War II at the perfect time, to be able to control Western Europe without really incurring many casualties.

They lost like 200,000 people in Europe, compared to the Soviets losing 27 million people fighting the Nazis, which is staggering to think of. The US was a huge industrial power, the biggest in the world, and they were totally undamaged by World War II, minus a little bit at Pearl Harbor. So, the issue was how you’re going to deal with integrating Europe into this economy, into this scheme that they planned.

And what they decide to go for is, essentially, the military industrial complex and the permanent war economy. War spending, and dictating to Europe that they will not trade with the Soviets at all. That they will really strengthen this Iron Curtain, make it an economic curtain, and then the US would spend more on military.

This would result in a gold deficit, year after year, for the US. But it would put dollars out there, and would require the Europeans to boost their spending. But then Congress could give some aid for that as well. The military industrial complex was devised as a way, and the permanent war economy, privately incorporated so it still made money for oligarchs. This was the model of the US domestic economy. It was how they would be able to have the benefits of a socially managed economy, without actually having it. Because it’s weapons making that becomes the national project, and the national way to intervene in the economy, and the way to balance trade.

And so, between these policies and the breakout of the Korean War- very fortuitously for these people- this is what created the military industrial complex, and led to the rearming of America after World War II. And the result is that NATO gets established at the same time, and Europe basically becomes a set of vassal states to the United States.

And the EU is created, pretty much to just make this more easily manageable. The CIA and other corporate internationalist forces were behind the creation of the EU and promoted it.

[00:48:22] Grumbine: The worst neoliberal project of them all.

[00:48:24] Good: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And now in Europe just essentially has no sovereignty. So, if the US blows up the pipeline that Germany needs for its whole economy, there’s nothing they can do about it. There’s nothing they can do about it except for crack down harder on anti-Zionist protesters, people who are opposing genocide in Germany, they’ll crack down on them.

And who knows what kind of censorship they have. I think they didn’t allow Yanis Varoufakis to come there recently. Germany is just following the orders of the United States. And we do wonder if they’re going to eventually do something different. But in the late ’80s or the early ’90s, I believe, there was a Deutsche Bank executive, the guy that was the head of Deutsche Bank I think, Alfred Herrhausen, and he was saying that with the end of the Cold War, we shouldn’t just loot these countries in Eastern Europe, we should help them to build railroads and connect them, in a more socially democratic way, to the rest of Europe, and let them develop in a democratic socialist direction. And we’ll have more trade with Eastern Europe and Russia, and we can all be integrated.

He gets killed driving his armored car, in a caravan of people, and it had this huge armor plate on it, and somehow this bomb was perfectly placed and timed, to blow up underneath him. And then the US just blamed it on some Red Guards, some communists. Which is ridiculous. It was some sort of Gladio thing. But the Germans, they have to accept that.

If Americans have to accept the regime can kill the Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, the Europeans have had to accept that, if they get out of line- look at the example of Alfred Herrhausen or Olaf Palme or Aldo Moro- ultimately, if the other normal economic means and threats aren’t enough, they’ll kill people over there too.

So Europe is not sovereign, and until they realize it, or until things get bad enough, they are likely to stay in the Western camp, and this is going to be disastrous for them. I don’t know where it will end. I don’t think that they’re going to enter into Ukraine, because I want to believe that they’re not that stupid.

I also don’t think that these countries have an appetite for this kind of thing. A war. This sort of old school, step onto the battlefield and get incinerated at any moment because of Russian artillery. I think that somehow, the fact that there are no good options for the US, suggests that there’s a good chance for reform. Hopefully rather that, instead of a nuclear world war.

[00:50:53] Grumbine: I’d like to finish this podcast off with one final question, concerning the American political system. We have two major parties and by law, we have a first past the post government. I previously had been a third party supporter. I moved on from third parties and believe that the only way forward is to tear this thing down, because we have two corporations, the Republican corporation and the Democratic Party corporation. And they have no requirement to honor primaries, or any kind of impacts within their parties.

And since codifying Citizens United into law, that corporations are people, and the highest form of being in this country. How do you help people understand it’s not a matter that the rhetoric of the Republicans or Democrats is the same, so much as it is, that they are answering to capital. They’re not answering to we, the people. Help me understand how the American public should see its political system.

[00:52:05] Good: I think that it is likely going to take some real serious shocks and revelations, to wake up enough of the public, to have a critical mass to move for reform. It seems that our leadership is trying to bring about that kind of cataclysm, with their hubristic and short sighted actions, which are done in the pursuit of empire, and ironically are bringing the end to the empire.

I think that something is going to have to happen to wake people up, because Americans do not have a common sense, or a national mythology or creed, that is suitable for this moment. If there is an American creed, this is what C. Wright Mills said, or an American mythology. The closest thing we have to it is Horatio Alger, which is, you were alluding to is ‘the person that pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps, the rugged individualist.’ But it’s a really ridiculous mythology because what really is the kind of power structure that we have, it’s the opposite of the individual, it’s corporate.

It’s so corporate all the way down or all the way up, however you wanna say it. It’s the most anti-individualist kind of a system. And I’m not wanting to fetishize individualism, because I do think that liberalism’s fetishization of the individual and individualism has been a problem, and has been very useful for right-wing forces in society.

But we’re now in a position where I think that some of these myths are going to be examined and interrogated, and we might start to look at some deeper historical issues, I would hope. To my mind, when I taught US history, I tried to emphasize this aspect of it, in a way that was not just beating somebody over the head with it [although it may have felt that way to some of the kids], but to say, this is really how America began. You could trace back the conception of the US to the Enclosure Movement in Britain, and a bunch of greedy people just asserted property rights over land, that used to be held in the commons… and they use it to raise sheep so that they could have the first capitalist industry in Britain, which was the textile industry. And this created such dislocations of people, who are now desperate and didn’t have any way to eke out a living on the land, that the British dealt with this through colonialism. They went to Ireland, and brutalized Ireland, and set up big plantations and big farms over there for export. So they’re exporting cattle and grain, while the Irish are eating potatoes, until there’s a potato blight. And then they’re all starving, and Britain’s basically saying, ‘Oh, it’s a pity while they’re exporting food off the island.’

And then they go further west to America. And there’s policy papers written about this, saying we can unburden the realm at home, deal with our excess population created by capitalism and the Enclosure Movement and the evolution of that. We can send them to America. And that’s why the pilgrims, they’d left to go to Holland because England, the land had been taken. And they even wrote at the time, ‘they care more about sheep than they do about humans.’ And so, they go to the US. The American colonies are businesses, they are the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company, and they have this Protestant idea that if you’re successful, that’s a sign that you’re chosen by God. If you’re a successful capitalist.

And so, they practice good capitalist habits, some of them. And because they had all of this land to use, and they had better technology, they could kill the Indians when they wanted to, and take whatever land they wanted, although that was expensive. It was expensive, and if they got into Indian wars, that would be a problem, and it could be expensive for the crown. So they use African slaves instead of indentured servants, because the indentured servants eventually wanted more land to the west, where they would fight Indians.

So, we end up exploiting African slave labor as well, to keep this system going. But at the heart of it, is always making a buck. And we go all the way from sea to shining sea. And as brutal as capitalism is, as it evolves into industrial capitalism, there’s always the frontier. You can always keep going West.

And that’s really the case until the end of the 1800s. And at that point, they were at a crossroads. Do we start to build up our country and improve working conditions and living standards, and have the economy work that way? Or do we go abroad, looking for markets and resources? They opted for international empire.

They went sea to shining sea, all the way to the West coast. And then they kept going West, first to Japan, they sailed into Tokyo Bay, and then later, they fight the Spanish American war, which begins in the Philippines, even though it’s supposedly fought over Cuba, and they take what’s left of the Spanish empire.

And they enter in World War I in an imperialist fashion, and they wait around in World War II until an opportune moment, and they had planned during World War II to become the global empire and the manager of global capitalism. And that’s exactly what they do in World War II, and they’re so powerful that they’re able to take down the Soviet Union, eventually. And for a moment in the ’90s, they were so drunk on imperial hubris, really, that they believe they could have a new American century, that they could have this empire last forever.

And they could just manage capitalism in such a way as to make it work perfectly, and just keep the money flowing where they want it. But that has not worked, and we don’t know what to do about it. We have two parties that refer to some sort of fantasy world that they have made up, between the two parties and the national media.

And so, we’re not having serious discussions in mainstream forums, about the problems that we’re actually facing. But those problems are not going anywhere. And I believe that the oligarchy that runs things, is eventually going to have to look at reforming this. And to my mind, as the empire becomes more and more untenable, I think that they will have to look at what they have around them.

And what does the US have? Its economic power, which now is very financialized and very dependent on imperialism, which is evaporating, so they’re losing that. And that was the whole reason for the oppressive system, and all of the manipulation of politics and political life and culture, it was all in service to this empire.

So what they need now, what they should do, what I hope they do, what they will do if they are sensible, is to realize that without the empire, they really are going to need to draw upon- for the stability of the regime, that’s going to have to be created and reformed- they’re going to have to rely on things like democracy, things that they have used in a misleading way before.

They’re going to have to somehow convince more people, that this is actually a democratic society, with a democratic government, that can solve easily solvable problems. Because we’ve intentionally not solved problems like homelessness, and underemployment, and economic deprivation, and access to healthcare and so on.

We have intentionally not solved them, for purposes of social engineering and class dominance, but that project has really failed. And now we have a dysfunctional society. Even the oligarchy must recognize this. And so, I think that the hope is more with some sensible people, but I will say also, these protests recently, are good, in that they can terrify the establishment.

And maybe make some of them look soberly at what their options are. It’s the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in a while, that you have these students taking over parts of the university. And they’re not even doing it for, like in Vietnam when they had a draft that they could worry about, they’re doing it because they see children, and women, and men, and old people being slaughtered in- not even a war, really- in an extended pogrom by this Zionist entity that claims legitimacy, in part, whether it’s stated explicitly or not, as a function of the Holocaust, and genocide, and never again.

And yet, here they are with a very analogous blood and soil ideology, that they opposed so famously. It’s remarkable to see these students rising up, and Israel has been a part of this turn to unipolarity. The exact nature of it is difficult to say for sure, but neoconservatism is certainly intertwined with Zionism, and that has led us to this path.

And the younger people are inspiring. That they are able to stand up and say that this is terrible, because they’ve lived through some other horrible experiences, like the lockdown years. Where they had to sit in front of computer screens instead of going to school, because of a disease that really was no threat to them, statistically speaking, at all. Best I can tell, for the younger people anyway. They’ve been through a lot of shit, living in this society, and their formative years have been difficult.

And they’ve had their brains addled by social media, too much exposure to this stuff at an early age, because we are totally irresponsible about those things. And yet, they are still saying that this is a moral monstrosity that they cannot accept anymore. That is the kind of courage that we need a lot more of.

[01:01:40] Grumbine: Aaron, that was very inspiring. Thank you so much for this interview, this conversation. I’m walking away feeling like I’ve not been gas lit. So thank you. I appreciate it immensely. Please tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

[01:01:55] Good: The best place is the American Exception podcast on Patreon. We’re getting up to almost 200 episodes, maybe a couple dozen away from that. And also the Devil’s Chess Club is on YouTube. We put about one episode out a week. That’s me and Bryce Green and David Talbott. And we talk a bit about the assassinations of the sixties, but we look at the US empire in general, and all of the moves that these people are making on the devil’s chess board, which is an allusion to David Talbott’s book on Alan Dulles.

And there’s the book, American Exception Empire and the Deep State, which is my political science dissertation, rewritten to make it a little more accessible. Which tells, basically, the story that I’ve been talking about here, the rise of the US deep state and this global dominance project that began in the wake of World War II, and how it’s brought us to this sad state.

Check out the book and the podcast if you want to get more of my work.

[01:02:52] Grumbine: Please do me a favor, tell Bryce I said, hello. I just saw he was recently arrested and it’s good to see him back out and still fighting. So it’s good to know I can find him over there with you. And thank you so much for your time. And this is the Macro N Cheese podcast. I’m the host, Steve Grumbine.

My guest Aaron Good, we are out of here.

[01:03:23] End Credits: Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by the fantastic team of volunteers at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To support our work, please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com or realprogressives.org.