David C. Unger

The author shows the United States to be a captive of its Golden Age, and what an age it was. 1950's America was the world's military and industrial leader, the dollar was the de facto world currency, Detroit was generating a new middle class and America's European and Asian competitors were recovering from wartime destruction with no immediate possibility of challenging American supremacy.

Unger considers that this overwhelmingly powerful narrative has governed American policy ever since with only a few moments of self doubt (e.g. the Oil Price Shock of the 1970's and the Vietnam War), and he suggests that it accounts for the increasing separation from reality of the American government and the public from the 1970's onwards.

The unwelcome reality is that free trade benefits the lowest cost and highest quality industrial manufacturers and the US loses out on both counts to China and Japan/Germany respectively, plus combine this with an extreme free market ideology that unequivocally puts outsourcing corporate profits ahead of any national interest and you have a magical increase in unemployment and budget/trade deficits.

Add in extreme Congressional special interest pork barreling and the US simply looks wasteful, inefficient and broke.

The author's emphasis is on the military-industrial complex that has done so much wasteful spending and which is so central to the "America First" narrative. The book documents the marginal threats faced by the U.S. following the fall of Soviet Communism and the way that these have been ridiculously inflated into a permanent "War on Terror" that somehow needs more nuclear aircraft carriers or stealth bombers at the unbelievable price of $ 3.2 billion each.

The author considers that the United States had a chance to change direction under the Carter administration, with Carter speaking frankly about the challenges facing the U.S. and the need for a forward looking policy and national sacrifice. However, this was predictably seen as weak and wimpy and buried by the Reagan's "Bring back the 1950's" Stand Tall rhetoric with the party moving on to giant deficit financing with minimal government oversight.

It's a very good book but in my opinion it has some major faults.

One is that a government can't engage in large scale deficit financing if no one will lend it the money, Unger says that, "..... thanks to the dollar's special reserve role as an international reserve currency and America's sterling reputation for political and financial stability, foreign savings and surpluses kept flowing inwards to pay the bills for America's government and private consumption." when the real reason is probably that Americas's asian creditors recycled their dollars into American assets (bonds) to keep their currencies at an artificially low rate against the dollar in support of their export industries (i.e. they were cheating) and had no particular respect for the US financial system.

A second is the single favourable paragraph he gives to U.S. multiculturalism despite the obvious harm to society of identity politics and "Culture Wars" . He doesn't seem to see any problem in the every man/ company/ethnic group for itself idea and the destruction of the "General Interest" concept. He could for example have asked whether Rubin, Summers and Greenspan (while simultaneously Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Clinton) had a greater loyalty on ethnic, financial and social grounds to Wall St. investment bankers than the American public that they were hired to represent (and so obviously failed to protect).

Equally, the book would have been improved if he had clearly said that Jewish activists in and around the government provided critical support for the WMD, and Al Qaeda bases in Iraq stories and made a major efforts to enable the invasion and sideline Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. This was pure ethnic special interest action designed to benefit the Israeli right wing and had nothing to do with any "Building Democracy" argument or the interests of the United States ( see Sniegoski's, "The Transparent Cabal" for a detailed account.)… (mais)