The tragedy is that the average American does not know how bad it is or that he/she is an expendable subject within the empire. Certainly the middle-class is starting to see the effects of this empire when jobs are "outsourced" to cheap Third World labor markets and are not replaced, when the tax structure favors the richest two percent while gaps in national inequality continue to grow, when the education system continues to collapse, when political action becomes irrelevant within a two-party system that is owned and paid for by the same corporate elite.
The question becomes: "What do we lose by becoming an empire?" The short answer is that we lose our democracy. That is because empire and democracy are mutually exclusive. A choice has to be made between the two – either consciously or by default. I wrote Exodus from Empire in the hope that enough Americans would read it in order to prevent the choice being made by default.
For example, in Chapter 5 (pp. 200-201) I address the Congressional surrender of the war power – under the U.S. Constitution – to Bush on the eve of the Iraq War. From that surrender of its war power, the congress allowed Bush to revitalize the "imperial presidency" – a reality we see in Bush's claim that he can function as a "Unitary Executive" without guidance by either the courts or the Congress. As a result of this situation, the vast majority of the American people are left un-represented. Even when Bush's poll numbers fall it no longer matters – because he does not care and there are no effective checks-and-balances in place to stop him. Hence, illegal spying and wiretapping by the NSA is sanctioned by Bush in the name of "fighting the war on terror." As a result, the FISA courts become meaningless appendages of "an earlier era" – just as the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture are, according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "quaint" artifacts of the past.
Americans are directly harmed by the fact that their civil liberties under the Bill of Rights have been shredded. Further, America's place in the world is diminished by the fact that as U.S. Corporations – operating under the protection of the American Empire – repress wages and workers throughout the Global South – so too, wages are depressed in the United States itself. Higher levels of inequality throughout the entire period of the Bush years are a testament to that reality – as is the absence of affordable health care for most Americans. As a result, Medicare is going bankrupt because the insurance companies and AMA lobby and the pharmaceutical industry-lobby remain protected enclaves of capitalist profit and exploitation. Congress is either powerless to rectify the situation or simply too corrupted by pay-offs to correct the situation.
In Exodus from Empire, I make three central points on this matter: (1) First, the fate of the Global North is linked to the fate of the Global South; (2) Second, trade and investment policies must benefit the citizenry of both the Global North and the Global South and, (3) Third, Neo-liberal globalization increases global inequality (pp. 230-233). Therefore, I argue that we must build what I call a "Post-Imperial America" (pp. 228-230, Exodus from Empire). In short, we need to realize that empire is antithetical to democracy and to our national and global civil society. The good news is that we are starting to witness the rise and newly emerging power of global civil society---as well as social movements across the Global South---which represent a direct challenge to the U.S. Global Empire (SEE: pp. 344-345, Exodus from Empire).
KZ: And, from the perspective of the world, isn't the American empire a good thing? Don't we bring stability and democracy to the world? Wouldn't the world be a more violent place without us? Wouldn't there be more poverty, disease and income disparity?
TP: From the perspective of the rest of the world, the American Empire is not a good thing – it is a curse. It deserves resistance, opposition, and overthrow. Why? Because it is a thing – a creation divorced from law and the moral codes of the teachings of all of the world's great religious traditions.
In Chapter 4 of Exodus from Empire, I address this directly by critiquing Professor Samuel Huntington's thesis that there is a "Clash of Civilizations" going on and that clash and conflict are inevitable. The problems with his position are many – and I address them all in this chapter. But what I want to emphasize is that at the heart of his thesis resides a strong "American Empire First" concern. He wants to see the protection of the current global power arrangements no matter who gets hurt and regardless of the fact that over 2-billion people on this planet attempt to live on less than a dollar a day and espite the fact that his clash-thesis serves to justify a “war without end” in the name of fighting “terrorism.” For Huntington, like the military planners in the Pentagon and the economic elite on Wall Street, in the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and the U.S. Treasury Department – these 2-billion people are nothing more than "collateral damage." Yet, what is at stake is a moral issue – a human rights issue – an issue of democracy rising in the world or fading into the sunset under the auspices of a Neo-liberal economic model combined with a fascist polity of control called the American Empire.
In contrast, I argue that there is an emerging unity of religions and civilizations. I call it a “convergence.” Further, from an international law perspective, I maintain that the evolution of customary international law reveals a normative standard that is shared globally – between and among nations – that is capable of moving humanity toward a "convergence" and "healing" of peoples and of nations and of civilizations. Hence, my counter-thesis to Huntington’s “clash thesis” is that war is not inevitable and that peace and harmony can be our collective destination if we re-order our mental-maps, our conceptual categories, and learn to recognize the propaganda of the American Empire for what it is---propaganda.
In short, the "clash thesis" is nothing more than an ideological construction for proceeding with business as usual. The clash-thesis is a cruel hoax that is employed to justify huge expenditures on a so-called "war on terror" while continuing to wage war on the weak and vulnerable. What I am calling "the rise of Global Community" means that we are actually witnessing global integration, nonviolent resistance, and the rise of global civil society in an era where terror and terrorism (as a strategy of resistance) is really representative of less than one-percent of the world's population. The real sources of terror are found in the projects of the American Empire along with its tragic consequences. The consequences of empire include higher levels of poverty, disease, inequality, and war itself. Hence, the pursuit of empire and "Empire's Law" (p. 111) produces a situation where the potential for "clash" and violence and terror is really the product and result of imperial rule---the actions of empire.
In opposition to the practices of the American Empire and the "clash thesis," I argue that: (1) Despite attempts to claim the opposite, there exists no inherent right, on the part of the powerful,. to govern, rule or order the weak; (2) Regardless of the ideological claims being advanced, there exists no unified or unifying civilizational consensus on the naturalness of a corporate-dominated, militaristic imperialism as comprising the common values, truth’s, visions of human futures that prescribe a universal course for humanity's social evolution; (3) Notwithstanding attempts to convince otherwise, there exists no preordained rationale for eternal truth of inevitability regarding forms of socially constructed orders that form the institutions of governance, including the form of "law."
In fact, the very existence of nuclear weapons is a violation of the moral code of all of the major world religions and a violation of international law since the findings and final judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 1990s (See: p. 111, Exodus from Empire). In short, in a world without the American Empire, the world would be less violent, less prone to suffer poverty, disease or income disparity. Chapters 1 through 3 make this point quite clear. The American Empire is dangerous not only for the world, but dangerous for American democracy itself. If we wish to see DEMOCRACY RISING, we must see the setting sun on the American Empire and its projects.
KZ: What kind of country would the U.S. be if it were not an empire? What would take the place of the U.S. empire in the world?
TP: If the U.S. were not an empire what kind of country would it be? I have suggested in Chapter 5 that a "post-Imperial America" would reject the policies, practices, and rationales that have characterized the hidden politics of empire.
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