Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Jonah sounds off:

" This illustrates why, for example, the talk we hear from the paleo-Right and the anti-American Left and most places in-between about the American "empire" is so disingenuous. In fact, if you look really, really closely, you'll discover that when American lefty intellectuals prattle about American imperialism it is mostly a metaphorical argument. They confuse our cultural dominance with the Roman Empire's dominance, skipping right over the fact that the Roman Empire installed Roman governors, collected imperial taxes, imposed Roman law, conscripted colonial subjects into the Roman army (eventually), and generally considered Rome the supreme and final authority on a important question.

Sure, the U.S. has military bases all over the world — which are often compared to Roman garrisons — but unlike Roman garrisons their host countries can get rid of them by asking them to leave. The same holds true for our overly hyped "imperial" holdings, like Puerto Rico. They are one referendum away from independence.

Anyway, my point is simply this: Saying we rule the world doesn't make it so. We don't rule the world. We lead the world-this is a huge distinction to people who live outside the intellectual menagerie of an Ivy League English department. If the coolest guy in school wears a leather jacket and all the other kids follow suit, that's hardly the same thing as the coolest guy forcing them at gunpoint to buy a leather jacket from him.

Now, the fact that we are not an empire, but could be one if we wanted to, confuses the dickens of all sorts of people. Indeed, some people find the idea so confusing they willfully refuse to believe it and just go on insisting we are an empire the way the guy in the Monty Python skit just kept insisting the parrot wasn't dead. Other folks don't use the word "empire" but they are just as confused about America's behavior. Marxists, for example, have a hard time fathoming that America doesn't behave according to their straight-line predictions about how a capitalism "hegemon" should behave. So they mine the data. They ignore the inconvenient and misinterpret the unignorable."