As much as I love the comedy of Eddie Izzard, who once looked slyly at his American audience and said, "You are the Roman Empire, you know," I've never subscribed to the facile "America is the modern Roman Empire" nonsense. However imperial America might have been in its past when acquiring territories, it hasn't been an empire of any sort in a long, long time, if it ever even was a true empire. We don't have outposts in conquered lands were the citizens are forced to pay regular tribute to our leaders (our military bases exist thanks to the consent of the local governments), who are treated as the heads of a cult (Canada, despite being ostensibly independent from Great Britain, still celebrates Queen Elizabeth's birthday and puts her face on Canadian money). Expansionism hasn't been a thing for us since the somewhat-fulfilment of Manifest Destiny. We don't have a constant flow of gifts and tributes flowing into DC (or do we?). America is decidedly not an empire.
In a recent post, Dr. John Pepple contends that there're the folks who call America an empire and the folks who refer to a stable world with America at the top as a Pax Americana. And as Dr. Pepple sees it, that Pax Americana is now fading away, and yet the leftists who have craved this very eschaton are not happy (since when is a leftist ever happy, though, right?).
For fifty-plus years, leftists have whined about American imperialism and what they call America’s Empire. (See here, for example.) The rest of us, if we think about it at all, call it Pax Americana. But now that it’s pretty clear that it’s the beginning of the end for this empire, one would think they would be dancing in the streets, but no, they are complaining bitterly and blaming Trump and his supporters. See here. Actually, not just Trump and his supporters, but also white supremacists, toxic masculinity, and anything similar they can think of. Maybe that racist subject, math, is to blame, too.
Of course, this isn’t what they were expecting. They thought the end of America’s empire meant peace for a thousand years. Most non-leftists thought they were crazy, but it was impossible to talk them out of their nonsense. But even worse than war is that it is being waged by a guy who is not woke [i.e., Vladimir Putin]. How terrible. He doesn’t think that masculinity is toxic, he doesn’t like gays, and so on. Yes, wokesters, learn to deal with it. The world isn’t interested in your wokeness, which they think leads to weakness (as some wit suggested recently; I wish I could claim to have been that wit, but I can’t). They think it makes us sitting ducks. And if they were in control, you wouldn’t have the freedom to be woke.
I've never understood how leftists so easily ally themselves with those who would destroy them. They'll defend Islam despite Islam's mistreatment of female, trans, and gay folks; if the leftists are Jewish, they'll vote suicidally for pro-Palestine Democrats. It's like a death cult. Not to say that everything makes logical sense on the right (e.g., wanting to minimize government intrusion in one's personal life while also desiring an amendment defining "marriage" as exclusively between one man and one woman), but leftists really do seem to suffer from some bizarre form of self-hatred. And here, too, in desiring the defeat of the American "empire," leftists fail to see how—or are unwilling to acknowledge that—such a thing will result in their destruction, too. Meanwhile, the Pax Americana fades.
The left made this bed, but we all have to sleep in it.
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