By Invitation

America the immoderation machine

To understand its present political struggles, both domestic and foreign, it pays to look at the underlying forces shaping American society

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Occasionally, someone expresses a thought whose general utility far outdistances the purposes of its invention. So with the famous remark of an Italian communist nearly a century ago: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born." In this interregnum, Antonio Gramsci added, "a great variety of morbid symptoms appears".

Gramsci likely would not approve of my appropriating his remark about Europe's civilisational order to describe the plight of US grand strategy, but it fits the case too well to ignore. How so?

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on September 05, 2020, with the headline America the immoderation machine. Subscribe