Episode 210 – American Exception with Aaron Good

If Macro N Cheese wasn’t committed to spreading MMT to the activist community, we might have been a history podcast. Nothing excites Steve Grumbine as much as listening to 50 hours of lectures on the French Revolution or the Black Plague. This week’s guest, Aaron Good, checks a lot of our boxes. What he brings to the table is history with a solid class analysis.  

Aaron is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. American exception should not be confused with American exceptionalism; think instead of the concept of laws applying to everyone EXCEPT one nation or one elite group.   

During World War II, the US oligarchy saw the opportunity to replace the western European colonial powers with a new empire. They planned and created institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the CIA — all designed to launch and support this new era of US domination of global capitalism. Imperialism required its own strategy: 

“To do all of this, they need to have the capitalist world all marching to America’s beat. And so the Cold War is more or less ginned up and anti-communism becomes the principle around which the US empire is organized. So it’s an empire, but it’s not an empire that says ‘we are an empire and we’re going out to rule the world.’ 

Instead, it is packaged as a defensive response to a terrible threat. And so communism is the perfect foil because you can basically castigate any left-wing idea that you don’t like as being part of this global communist plot, whether domestically or around the world. And they use this to legitimate, really, an attack on the whole world and also on the US population.” 

Aaron and Steve go on to discuss more of the history of US hegemony, elite criminality, and anti-democratic forces. They look at ruling class manipulation of institutions like academia, politics, and media. They critique Scandinavia as an example of democratic socialism (or social democracy?) with capitalist rule and explore the complicated legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  

Aaron Good holds a doctorate in political science from Temple University. He is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, and host of the American Exception podcast. Support him on patreon.com/americanexception 

@Aaron_Good_ on Twitter

Macro N Cheese – Episode 210
American Exception with Aaron Good
February 4, 2023

[00:00:00] Aaron Good [intro/music]: We should have been developing our societies quite differently over recent decades to try to solve material problems with technological advancements that might allow us to make better use of resources. But a lot of these things, if you game them out and think of the best way to do them, you’re just not going to come up with systems that are acceptable to the people that own everything.

You can’t organize a civilization based on bewildering the population forever so that you can exploit and dominate them forever. The US is gonna lose out to countries that actually try to build functional societies as we’re seeing now.

[00:01:34] Geoff Ginter [intro/music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I’ve got Aaron Good, who is a political scientist. He got his PhD from Temple University. His dissertation, American Exception, Hegemony and the Tripartite State, examined the state elite criminality and US hegemony. It was an expansion of a previously published article, American Exception: Hegemony and Dissimulation of the State.

Prior to completing his doctorate, he worked on the 2008 Obama campaign in Missouri. Born and raised in Indiana, he has since lived and worked in Taiwan and Shanghai. He currently resides with his wife and son in the greater Philadelphia area where he has been a history and social science instructor.

He’s also got the great podcast, American Exception, and does some great, great work in the alt media space and waking folks up. It’s my pleasure to bring on Aaron Good today. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:46] Aaron Good: Hey, thanks. It’s great to be here.

[00:02:48] Grumbine: Your book, American Exception, is absolutely must read for anybody who has not read this. It is a history book and it presents history in a way that I think will be shocking for a lot of people, especially in this post Bernie era that had hopes of changing the world through the ballot box. People’s minds got totally wrapped up into this idea that we could change, and then when the establishment cracked down and flexed on Bernie and he stepped aside, however that might have transpired, I think a lot of people completely checked out of this political space and began to see the world through dark eyes and stopped having hope. And a lot of them started turning to nihilism.

I think this is part and parcel with some of the MAGA movement, also with what we’re seeing as a burgeoning left wing growing in the United States, but we have no power. And so I guess the history of how these things come to be, Bernie Sanders was the awakening for a lot of people. But this has been going on for a lot longer than that, and many of the guests we’ve had on here have laid out the history and different aspects of it.

Going back to the Bolshevik Revolution even earlier. And so your book, it’s a great starting point for the conversation. Why don’t you tell us about American Exception and the concept behind it.

[00:04:17] Good: Well, I had, as you mentioned in the bio, I worked for Obama. I grew up in a democratic household. My mom worked for a congressional staffer. She was basically a social worker in his office doing constituent work. And my dad worked for a coal company, so I was a middle class kid in Indiana who was a Democrat in a town that was really Republican and my mom had protested the Vietnam War and such and was basically a left liberal democrat.

And I majored in political science and was more to the left, but kind of disengaged in a way. Instead of doing any political work or anything after graduating from IU, I went to Taiwan for a year, came back and did political work for campaigns and did other jobs. But after working for Obama on his campaign and expecting that he would confront the criminality of the Bush administration and really reverse some of these policies, when he ended up being a continuation of that, it made me realize that the corruption in the US and the lawlessness of the US Empire was much greater than anything that could be fixed by an election.

If they could pull off a con, really like Obama, then we’re talking about a very, very cynical project because his whole thing was, change, change you can believe in and hope and all this. And then what does he do? There’s this economic collapse and he kicks all these people out of their homes, but then he turns on the magic printing press to bail out the banks.

I mean, I know it’s all keyboards, but they basically create a bunch of credit out of nothing. But not to give people their home ownership, which they could have done. They could have basically paid off everybody’s mortgage for a lot less than they spent on that whole thing, but they didn’t. They actually left people homeless, but with the banks receiving endless amounts of money to hold them up.

And so all of these things made me go in a more radical direction. I heard Oliver Stone on Bill Maher talking about this book, JF and The Unspeakable. I read that book because of his recommendation, and I looked at the Kennedy assassination and saw it as a really illuminating episode in US History. The thing that was shocking about it was it wasn’t like what they tried to tell you in media when they speak about the assassination, that it’s this unsolvable mystery and that there’s all these mini theories that people believe, but whatever. It’s probably just one guy that did this. It was actually pretty obvious what had happened, that it was the national security state with apparently the thumbs up from wealthy oligarchs and so on.

Removing a president and then using their total control of the media and the political system to cover it up for decades. And the goal was to keep the Cold War going and to keep all these arrangements in place that were beneficial for the richest people in the world. And so they get rid of Kennedy, who was the most popular president in US history, or at least since they started keeping polling data on approval ratings.

He actually had the highest average approval rating for his presidency, and they eliminated him. And that’s not a coincidence, , because there’s a anti-democratic force. That presides over the system in this country, and they got rid of him. And then when his brother was set to investigate his crime, they got rid of him.

And these are interesting things to look at in terms of the personalities and the forensics and the bullet angles and this and that, and you can go down those rabbit holes, but the bigger issues are the historical and political economic aspects to it all. These are the really important things to look at that we have this lawless force that maintains this system and overrides democracy again and again.

And that’s a big part of why we have all these problems that we can’t solve or even hope to improve in this country despite, even when majorities of people are for things like medicare for all. We don’t get that because we have top-down rule, and I wanted to explain that as best I could. And so that’s what I set out to do with my dissertation.

[00:08:25] Grumbine: So this dissertation basically becomes the book.

[00:08:30] Good: Yeah, there’s material that’s added from the dissertation and it was rewritten so it wasn’t using the academic diction and so on. That’s difficult for people to understand if they’re not immersed in it. It’s weird because you read and write in this vein and it actually kind of becomes natural to write and think that way.

But then you take a little bit of time off and you go back and look at it and I’m like, oh my gosh. So I did a rewrite and then I added a bunch of material that made it work better as a book and as a result, there’s a lot of stuff in it and some of it is laid out in the first half, especially social science material that it basically is a critique.

It’s two books really. It’s a critique of social science, so political science, sociology, international relations, which is a subfield of political science and foreign policy studies. All these kinds of things that I look at one by one. And the second half of the book is really history and the explanation of the actual workings of the deep state system that I try to lay out.

So it’s a history book? Yes. That starts in about, I think chapter six. And then the first five chapters are mostly social science, but with some historical examples thrown in. So it really is two books in one. It’s a social science book that explains why social science can’t deal with elite criminality and these sort of heavy issues, the history discipline, and the political science, sociology and these other social sciences.

And then the other half as actually a counter history, a counter narrative to the prevailing one that builds upon the work of a lot of other great scholars to lay out this history, especially this pivotal time period from the end of World War II to the eighties with Reagan, because Reagan really marks the establishment of what I would call the deep state system.

It really marks the end of post-war liberalism and the beginning of this neoliberal right wing system that we’ve had for decades now that we can’t seem to get past.

[00:10:25] Grumbine: Let’s take a look at part one of your book then. Why in the world can’t social science work with us? Why can’t we attack this through our normal systems?

[00:10:36] Good: Well, a big part of it is that during World War II, you have the decision that the US is gonna go for global empire, and this is arrived at the Council on Foreign Relations and they decide that they’re going to create all these institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the CIA, they’re gonna set up the dollar in a certain way, and the US is gonna be the hegemon of this global system of capitalism.

But to do all of this, they need to have the capitalist world all marching to America’s beat. And so the Cold War is more or less gin up and anti-communism becomes the principle around which the US empire is organized. So it’s an empire, but it’s not an empire that says we are an empire and we’re going out to rule the world.

Instead, it is packaged as a defensive response to a terrible threat. And so communism is the perfect foil because you can basically castigate any left wing idea that you don’t like as being part of this global communist plot, whether domestically or around the world. And they use this to legitimate, really an attack on the whole world and also on the US population.

It’s really a way to suppress the domestic population as well if they get outta line. And so because the US is a democracy and its myths are that it’s an anti-imperialist enterprise going back to our rebellion against the British. The US cannot operate like the Nazis did or like the Mongols. We are here to take all your stuff and you better accept it.

We are the master race. They don’t say that it’s freedom and democracy. And so to get around that and the public opinion and so on around the world, the US has to rely on covert operations. Which means that you carry out your imperialism and the imperialist violence under the veneer of cover stories and different clandestine arts to obscure what the US is really doing when it needs to.

And these end up being very impactful in many countries around the world. They help to disguise this transition to a neo-colonial system, and it’s always backed up by cover stories. So the government will say, this is what happened in Iran today in 1953, and this is what happened in Guatemala in 1954, and this happened in Vietnam.

This is what happened in Indonesia and so on. And you have a fake history. And the journalists are not in the frame of mind of just calling out politicians for lying. And the cover stories are hard to discern sometimes anyway, because it makes events look like something that they are not. We’ve seen this with Maidan in Ukraine that seems to be very obviously in the template of CIA overthrows, and yet it’s passed off in the media as a popular uprising. But organizing those things is the bread and butter of the CIA and later the National Endowment for Democracy. The academia and journalism are out to lunch because they don’t contradict these stories. They basically accept official narratives and they get rewarded in the institutions they work for by not questioning power, by and large.

The institutions serve power, and the power in the US is most held by an oligarchy of the corporate rich. And so those interests in the class interests of these oligarchs who really dominate the US empire, that use their power and wealth to dominate our institutions like academia and the political system and the media.

And so they’re able to anathematize or to render beyond the pale critics of the system. So people who are saying, hey, this is a crime, this is criminal, they’re considered kooks and so on. With the Kennedy assassination, this clandestine way of manipulating politics comes home in a big way. And the sixties are a time period where the democratic impulses of the American people, and it’s happening around the world also, but it really increases while the US has other plans like launching the Vietnam War, which just exacerbate things.

And so there’s a whole lot of assassinations in the 1960s, and they’re suspicious, all of them, extremely suspicious when you look at them, the Kennedy Brothers, Robert Kennedy. A week after his brother died, he and Jackie sent an emissary to Moscow to tell the Russians that they knew that they weren’t behind the assassination, that it was a domestic right wing coup, and that the quest for peace would have to wait until RFK was back in the White House because LBJ was too closely tied to big business. So the Kennedys understood that the war machine and big business were intertwined. I think Robert Kennedy was naive and he should have said he was coming after his brother’s killers. That seems pretty obvious in hindsight.

But then he gets killed in very suspicious circumstances, and the effect is to bring in more right wing leadership, whether it’s Lyndon Johnson first, and then RFK is assassinated, and that leads to Richard Nixon taking office. And then Richard Nixon is removed by these same forces. And Nixon himself came to believe that if you got him drunk, he would admit that he thought the people behind Watergate were the same people behind the Kennedy assassination.

And he tried to get information on the Kennedy assassination, but the CIA stonewalled him. And the burglars were CIA connected at Watergate. And this is a whole fiasco, but the result is that he gets eliminated. And that’s really the last liberal president. Since then, it’s been all Reagan, but this kind of power is so illegitimate and so anti-democratic that it doesn’t find expression in the academy.

The academy can’t really deal with this. There are leftists in the academy, some of them, although a lot of them are kind of anarchists and such, or they’re into post-modern theory. They’re really into identity politics and so on, and can just go on endlessly about that, right? But they don’t really look at the imperialism, and I think that that’s by design.

It’s a way to make these things not even discussed so that it’s a fringe thing to actually talk about the criminality that we see. And we know of things that are crimes, besides the issues like the Kennedy assassination, or more controversial things like the Anthrax attacks or 9/11. Those things aside, the Iraq war is unambiguously illegal.

All of those government overthrows are illegal that we do. All the governments we overthrow with using the CIA and covert operations. That’s a violation of the UN Charter. The UN charter is ratified by the Senate according to the Constitution, the supremacy clause. It makes it the highest law in the land, and the US violates that all the time.

The US tortures people. That’s also totally illegal. So there’s no accountability for the national security state, for US imperialism. And this is something that flies in the face of all of the tenets of liberal democracy and so on that prevail in the academy and that journalism kind of takes for granted in the United States.

We don’t live in that kind of a system. We live a lawless imperialist system, and that’s obvious. Whatever you think about something like the Kennedy assassination, it’s very easy to just prove that we do live under a lawless government. And so this is important and people should be aware of it.

[00:18:00] Grumbine: Listeners of the program know that I was a former Republican Reaganite, interestingly enough. My father had a bust of Kennedy on one side and a big picture with a flag of Ronald Reagan over on the other side, and I grew up in that household of worshiping Ronald Reagan. And so coming to where I am today is a bit of a long journey that most have heard at some level.

But one of the passerbys was the Alex Jones and Ron Paul era. It’s weird because you go through that phase and everything’s a conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy before you even know the facts. You’ve already jumped into this. And I know that the concept of conspiracy theory was a CIA planted idea that ensure that we are not questioning, they’ve institutionalized kookery to make sure that people, if they question it, are labeled as kooks.

But Alex Jones really messed with the minds of a lot of people, and he took a little bit of truth, just enough truth to make people hold onto it and then filled it with a bunch of right wing insanity. So hearing the things that you’re talking about as a leftist and putting that in perspective with a proper understanding of history, I can understand why it’s challenging for people to break free of the Goldilocks narrative that we’re told through the media, and through our politicians and through every election cycle as they sell that Obama hope and change only to be completely let down. And I think it’s because the very nature of the things you said are no longer questioned. This is kind of what we call institutionalized knowledge. What’s no longer something you can debate because they’ve already got you prepped that if you talk about this, you’re a kook.

How do you deal with that as a person seeking truth that you know, there are cranks that are advancing things that are just absolutely salacious, not really grounded in reality and not allowing yourself to get lumped in with that, but at the same time struggling to push forward with truth to bring awareness.

[00:20:15] Good: Well, you have to be someone who doesn’t seek, first and foremost, the adulation of the mainstream or advancement in the mainstream. I think that if you are really dedicated to trying to tell the truth, it becomes kind of a calling if you’re fascinated to learn about it, because a lot of it was, I just wanted to understand this stuff myself.

So I would listen to podcasts dealing with this material because I just found it really fascinating and I wanted to figure it out. So part of it is that I just wanted to understand all of this myself. And then another part is that the more that you get a sense of the scope of the thing, you are able to become a bit detached from your own present circumstances and look at it in the bigger scope of history and try to look at the human civilization and see this where our experience stands in the context of human civilization.

And it just becomes something that some people are compelled to do. Peter Dale Scott is a hero of mine, and he was a professor at Berkeley and he got very involved in anti-war political activities at the University of California at Berkeley, right at the time, at the sixties, the Vietnam War protests were breaking out. So he had a front row seat to a lot of this and was a participant, and he’s still writing books into his nineties because he’s just compelled to do it.

So I think that that’s been the case with me as well. It’s just something that you feel you have to do. And mentioning people like Alex Jones and so on, and the conspiracy theory operation, or what Lance Dehaven-Smith called the conspiracy theory conspiracy. Meaning that they’ve really weaponized that term and they go beyond just the term.

I think, and a lot of people believe that people like Alex Jones and LaRouche and some of these other more kooky conspiracist types, that they are somehow backed by clandestine elements of the state or something, and boosted in the ways that we can only speculate about, in order to discredit these suspicions, to create a perpetual poisoning of the well on purpose by themselves, so that for people to talk about these issues, they seem like cranks, and I tend to think that that is true.

I think QAnon on fits that mold, Alex Jones. Some people have speculated that maybe Tucker Carlson is doing something like that, but more focused on liberals. I can’t really figure out why he’s reported on some of the things he’s done. I mostly approve of any sort of discussion of these issues on mainstream media since I see the whole spectrum as being pretty bad, but it is weird. And Alex Jones and QAnon and so on, it’s similar to the Nazis. I’m not calling them Nazis. I’m not saying they wanna run concentration camps.

[00:23:05] Grumbine: No Godwin’s law here. Huh?

[00:23:08] Good: I’m not saying that they wanna run concentration camps, but what I’m saying is people need to understand why the Nazis did what they did. They were backed by the establishment because they would put forward a narrative that was against the socialist narrative. They were the Anti-Comintern Pact. That was the name of the Axis Alliance really was the anti-Communist International Pact.

They scapegoated Jews for the Nazis rather than the capitalist class. That’s the key to remember about them. And so when Alex Jones and other people say globalists, globalists, some people say that’s a dog whistle and that they’re really trying to talk about Jews. I don’t necessarily think that that’s true in all these cases but where it is similar is that it’s a scapegoat.

[00:23:53] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:23:53] Good: To avoid really looking at the richest, most powerful capitalists and the centers of corporate wealth that dominate US society. So instead, it’s not capitalism, it’s just some globalists. It really is like the conspiracy theory of history. And it’s cartoonish and it’s a misdirection and it sort of has a whiff of antisemitism for a number of reasons. But it’s really just a way of deflecting and misdirecting people. And so if you grasp these things, then it compels you to wanna talk about them because you really realize that we’re in a bad way if the system does not change and that people need to understand how thoroughly rotten it is before it can be fixed.

And so you basically almost have to do it once you recognize it.

[00:24:39] Grumbine: It feels like a moral calling to bust hopium and accept that breaking a few eggs is necessary in the wake up call that is required to bring about change because again, I see a lot of hope in go to the ballot box and everything will be okay. Just get a few more progressives in there. All we need is a few more votes and we can have Medicare for all and I just don’t see any evidence of that. You and I both hail from the great state of Pennsylvania. I come from the Washington DC metro area, and I used to commute every single day on the Dulles Toll Road, and I never really had an understanding of Dulles. Growing up in Washington DC you’re near the hallowed halls of Congress. But Dulles, you wrote extensively about him.

He appears to be somebody who’s a key cog in history that I think people probably need to hear about as we move through some of the various agencies and groups that were set up post-War War II, and even going back to World War I. What can you tell me about some of these key figures in particular Dulles?

[00:25:48] Good: The airport in DC is named after John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State for Eisenhower. But under Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Director was Allen Dulles, and he is a very important figure to understand the US empire. It wasn’t that he was the richest person or really the most powerful, but he exercised a lot of power on behalf of the corporate rich.

He was a lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell before World War II, and while he was doing this, he also worked for the State Department because this was a common practice back then to have these standard oil people and corporate people in State Department positions. He did work in the South Pacific for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Corporation, which was a Standard Oil and Dutch initiative.

And they discovered during the thirties, the world’s biggest gold deposit in West Papua, which is now part of Indonesia, but it was part of the Netherlands, but not really colonized back in part of their colonial empire before World War II, before the Japanese took it over. And so I’ll come back to this aspect of it, but Dulles was this corporate lawyer who later went on to work for the Council on Foreign Relations.

He was their vice president and the aftermath of World War II and during World War II, also before he was with the OSS, he was with the Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations. He’s one of the main people writing the War and Peace Studies project, which plans the whole US empire. And he also authors a whole section of it, which is still classified to this day.

It’s the report on security and sovereignty, I believe. And Peter Dale Scott speculates that this may have contained a call for the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency, what becomes a Central Intelligence Agency, because after the war, he and other people connected to Wall Street, especially the investment bankers, Dillon Reed, they lobby Truman to create this National Security Act, which allows for the creation of the CIA.

And Allen Dulles wrote most of the National Security Act as I understand it, and they put in a clause that says the CIA will, from time to time carry out operations in the interest of national security as assigned to it by the National Security Council. That’s not an exact quote, but that’s basically it.

And that is used to justify all of these covert operations, like mind control experiments, assassination programs, alliances with mafia organizations and so on. Basically, every crime you can think of is justified on the basis of this one little clause said: the CIA will from time to time do things that the National Security Council assigns.

Basically, that’s it. And this is Allen Dulles’s masterpiece, I guess. And he runs the CIA really in accordance with the interests of corporate America, especially big oil, the seven sisters. They were instrumental in bringing Eisenhower to power, and this is a foreign policy based on moving away from colonialism.

So you wind down the European colonial empires, but you have the US managing this so that it’s a transition to neocolonialism. And so that Europe invested capital is now under the protection of the United States, and that’s why Europe always stays loyal to the United States up to this present day, is that the US is the muscle protecting all of the investments of the capitalists of Germany, France, England, Scandinavia, Italy.

They enjoy this first world living standard, but they are satellites of the United States. And now we’re seeing this sort of unraveled because of Ukraine. But Allen Dulles was the architect of a world order that was designed by Wall Street and when people needed to be assassinated or overthrown or whatever, these are the kind of people you would call on. When he dies, he didn’t have people to really take care of him. He was supposedly upstairs in urine soaked sheets and really suffering at the very end of his life because I think he’d alienated everyone around him because he was kind of a bastard. So he wasn’t the richest man or the most powerful man in that way, but he was this instrument of power and of the empire.

And in that way, studying his life can really illuminate a lot about the US system. I really recommend people read David Talbot’s book, The Devil’s Chessboard. It’s really, I think, a masterpiece of the real history of the United States. If people wanna understand how we got to where we are.

[00:30:45] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:31:36] Grumbine: You said something I think that bears critiquing and that is Scandinavia. Everybody points to Scandinavia as proof positive that you can have democratic socialism, capitalist rule and this robust welfare state. Bernie Sanders points to it frequently. A lot of the progressives point to this, but yet when I talk to black and brown people that look back at FDR, they say, hey, we were left out of that.

That was a terrible time for us. Japanese Americans say that was not a great time for us and other aspects of it, especially digging into some leftist theory, I understand that FDR saved the capitalist order by what we would call the great compromise. And what you’ve just said is the US government has by default become the world police for all these corporations and the business interests of these countries.

So without the US being their police dog, they would have to have an army to defend their business interests around the world, this neo-colonial society. And I’m wondering, at what point do we take a hard look at the WTO and the IMF and the role it served to take that mindset around the world to create markets and create business opportunities for Europe and others, and the effect that that has on the way we view history.

I don’t think that most people think of the reason Scandinavia is doing so well is because they’ve got the US backed army helping clear markets and do things for them. I’m not sure that most people think of it that way, but it does seem like a contradiction to beg for that style of government while knowing that it stands because the US military protects their interests.

[00:33:25] Good: Well the US case is different in that they had elements of Scandinavian social democracy as part of the new deal and that continued in the United States up through Nixon. You had this idea of new deal liberalism in which the political system did promise and attempt to solve the economic problems that socialists and marxists identified, poverty and the lack of access to education and healthcare and so on.

The US made efforts in the American liberalism era to work in those areas and to improve things. And the US could do this because they had so much economic power and wealth that this was something that it could pursue. I think that in the sixties they get frightened by all of this political turmoil, and they’re shocked by the fact that a lot of it comes from middle class Americans, that they had given these people enough economic stability that they became politically activated.

They felt that they could be politically active. They felt that they could make demands of the system and try to change it, and this was alarming to them. I think that that’s what happens in the seventies. With the money that we waste on the military and we run these budget deficits year after year. We basically apply Modern Monetary Theory to our own system, the dollar system.

It’s just that we refuse to allow the deficits to be run for socially useful things like healthcare and such. So the US is in a different position than Europe. I think Europe because it is dependent upon the US to a large degree because of A, the dollar system, and B, the US protection of investments overseas.

This has made Europe basically totally slavishly devoted to the United States up to this point. So what kind of system you could have is a real question in the United States. We should have been developing our societies quite differently over recent decades to try to solve material problems with technological advancements that might allow us to make better use of resources.

But a lot of these things, if you game them out and think of the best way to do them, you’re just not going to come up with a system and with systems that are acceptable to the people that own everything. It makes the most sense to have nationalized and/ or municipally owned or publicly run health systems.

A big part of housing should be managed for the public benefit to try to find ways to take out rent seeking opportunities from real estate and so on. All these things should be run in terms of being efficient. They shouldn’t have massive rent seeking and people becoming billionaires off of them, but we don’t even think about that.

So it’s hard to even know what our institutions could look like if they were guided by a democratic logic rather than essentially capitalists deciding every area of policy and exercising a veto over anything anybody wants to do to actually improve people’s lives.

[00:36:23] Grumbine: With Davos happen right now, it’s kind of hilarious to think about, but there was a cartoon where there was this woman with a fur on and she’s stepping basically over a homeless person that’s laying there with the can out. And she’s looking at the schedule of events at Davos saying, oh, there’s so many sessions to attend.

Oh, here’s one on poverty. And it’s just such a detached reality, such a balkanized world that’s split from the haves and the have-nots. Class consciousness is at, in my opinion, an all time low. I don’t think that people realize, even with all the tragedy around us, how much of an oligarchy the US really is.

And I guess my question to you is looking at FDR, which is often harkened to as the model by which we’d wanna look at. I’m getting ready to talk to historian Harvey Kaye, who wrote the Four Freedoms, and I saw an anecdote you had put up from your book. About the fifth freedom being free enterprise.

[00:37:24] Good: Yes.

[00:37:25] Grumbine: I’m trying to mentally marry this because there are people that are slavishly devoted to FDR’S history as well, and I know that from a socialist perspective, FDR is not seen in a favorable light.

And so I’m trying to make heads or tails of it because the material conditions of today and the place where regular people are today in terms of both their understanding and how aware they are of the society and the historical factors is relatively low. MMT should be the most basic concept.

Everybody knew Nixon took us off the Bretton Woods Accord, meaning the end of the gold standard. So why will we talk like we have commodity money? Everything changed. You can see it in the bar graph of the hockey stick as the wealth inequality blew up, and most people just don’t understand that. And yet there’s so many ways that you see that the system has done the same thing only differently forever and people just can’t wrap their head around it.

And so I don’t believe people have a real understanding of the world they’re in. I feel like they are so propagandized. I think that they genuinely don’t have any concept that A, it could be different, B, that we deserve better or C, that’s even possible.

And with that in mind, FDR is the closest thing the US has to look back on for somebody that was pushing for what looks to be social democracy in terms of people thriving in a capitalist environment. What are your thoughts on the legacy of FDR and his application to today?

[00:39:02] Good: Well, FDR is a fascinating figure. There are many contradictions to his administration. He ultimately did save capitalism rather than fundamentally altering its foundations, but I think he had different plans. If you look at the last couple of terms, he had Henry Wallace as his vice president, and even as Roosevelt was the person who his administration authorized the war and peace studies project, which was carried out by Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations in financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

It planned US entry into World War II and basically the post-war peace. So even as he’s doing that and who knows how much he was really involved with that, or how closely he was monitoring all of that, but he at the same time had Henry Wallace as his vice president, who was the most leftist and anti-fascist person in high office in the United States that the US has ever had.

The party bosses and political economic elites did not want him to be the vice presidential nominee in 1940. And Roosevelt had to threaten not to run. Basically, he had to threaten to drop himself from the ticket if they didn’t put Wallace as his vice president, in order to make that happen. In 1944, they launched a coup against Wallace and this one works and they remove him from the ticket.

But Wallace wanted something different than what the US went for. The US went for the American century or US Empire, and it was pitched by CFR member Henry Luce in Life Magazine. He wrote the Century of the Common man and the vice president contradicted him or argued with him and gave this speech called the Century of the Common Man, saying that the US should help to destroy fascism and this fascist menace, but then usher in a century of the common man where the benefits of technology would be available for all, where we would undo the damage of colonialism and end colonialism and accept that no one race has the right to rule over other races.

So it was a very progressive vision, and I believe this is what FDR was more sympathetic to himself. But he underestimated, I think, how rotten the whole of the establishment was. And by putting Harry Truman in there, they were really able to undo most of the progressive things that FDR wanted to do.

I do realize that there are big problems with the New Deal that domestic and agricultural workers were left out of the Social Security system and other protections. And so for black people, they were not really the beneficiaries of the New Deal directly, although there was some progress made in race relations under FDR and even under Harry Truman. It really was pretty slow in large part because the more progressive of the two parties was the Democratic party with Republicans, pretty much the Eastern establishment, big business party.

But the Democrats had not just your more progressive people from the Northeast, but they also had the southern segregationist. So it was a crazy political situation that really every Democrat had to deal with up through Kennedy. And Johnson resolves that only in 1964. He signs the Civil Rights Act and he says, I’ve just handed the Republican Party the South for the next 50 years.

That ends up being more than 50 years, even . So it’s hard to weigh FDR as thumbs up, thumbs down. I think as American presidents go, he was among the very best. However, he also was there at a moment when you could have perhaps changed the system more and he did not do so. And he really did maneuver the US into the war by putting that oil embargo on Japan because up to that point, the US and Standard Oil had been fueling the Japanese war machine. They were selling them 80% of their oil as they were mercilessly attacking the Chinese especially. But fighting all these wars over in East Asia, it’s not until the Japanese attack Indochina that the US slaps this embargo on them.

And this is what leads to Pearl Harbor. They thought they would knock the US out and then secure these resources. But the Japanese weren’t attacking free countries. They were attacking colonies. And even Hawaii, the US claims on Hawaii and Pearl Harbor is very illegitimate anyway. They overthrew the government. Sugar planters and US Marines basically overthrew this government and then annex Hawaii.

It was just gangsterism. And the Japanese essentially decided they wanted to be the imperial gangster of the Pacific, and the US didn’t accept that. And so the war in the Pacific is really much more morally problematic than people realize. So that’s just a longer way of saying that FDR is quite complicated.

And I think that he did want to do good things and he was actually against continuing colonialism. He spoke about how the Japanese benefited from how terrible the western colonialists were leading up to World War II, and then he said, you kind of understand why Japan’s able to step into this vacuum, but the business interests in the US were just too powerful for any one person to be able to manage or control.

Kennedy, I think, is undone by similar forces, even Nixon, really. The democratic impulses and the better impulses of the leaders that emerged from our political system get overridden time and again by the interests of the richest people in this country who control foreign policy and who wanted to go for global empire.

And that’s what the US did that were the most powerful empire probably in world history and the richest. And that’s what they went for because they could. It turns out that’s what happens throughout history is countries that can go for empire and dominance, they do until they can’t anymore. And that’s just a cycle that repeats itself.

And I think that we are seeing that unwind as we speak.

[00:45:04] Grumbine: That’s a good way of bringing me to my next question. If I was to build Maslow’s hierarchy of power instead of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and look at our system today. Clearly the oligarchs are at the top of that pyramid. Based on your work, how would you lay that hierarchy out? How do you think it flows until it gets to us at the very bottom catching whatever falls from the top.

[00:45:33] Good: Well, C. Wright Mills was writing in the fifties about the power structure of the United States, and he said that power was concentrated at the very top of the big three institutions, which are big business, the political system, and the military. And that increasingly, the people at the top positions of the most powerful organizations are interchangeable and that they’re very much in agreement on most of the fundamental issues.

And that as such, America isn’t really a democracy. So he was pointing to how America had essentially become an oligarchy centered around what he called the privately incorporated permanent war economy. I believe that after Reagan takes over after the end of Bretton Woods, this becomes an even more financialized entity. And the military industrial complex, it’s not done away with exactly, but it’s supplemented by so much financial and monetary alchemy that it takes on a different character.

But the point is that it’s run by and for the benefit of people at the very top. So the Federal Reserve becomes an even more powerful and unswayable institution in the US exercising all this power over people’s economic fates. And these people that run the big capital firms like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, if you look at them on the whole, they essentially have a majority interest of most of our major industries managed by these big firms. So of course there are individual investors who own all of this money, but the people that manage it become themselves very important political actors. So that’s where the political power is really located to the extent that we can point to it.

What we do see, based on the work of political scientists like Gilens and Page, who are at, I believe Northwestern and Princeton, this is maybe eight years old now. They did this study that showed that essentially the public, the majority of the US population has no political power to speak of. There’s no correlation between public policy and the preferences of the bottom, say 70% of the population. That really it’s the wealthy people whose interests are reflected in policies and they use a whole lot of regression models to point this out.

But it’s funny because it’s about 60 years after C. Wright Mills. You have political science kind of catching up to him and saying, oh, well, turns out he was right. So political power is in the hands of a very small number of people. The squad is supposedly this progressive element in the US system, but they haven’t really accomplished anything other than tweets and some photo ops and such.

[00:48:13] Grumbine: If that.

[00:48:13] Good: There’s not even anybody like Dennis Kucinich in Congress anymore. The closest you have is Bernie, who is okay on some domestic issues. He’s helped by the fact that the other members of Congress are so terrible, but on foreign policy, he’s become increasingly worse. I think that’s something important to understand.

It’s that the US is not a nation state where we make policies to help the American people and so on. The US is an empire, and the empire is really the regime that dominates our life and it dominates the lives of people in other countries as well, because that’s kind of the definition of an empire. And this is, I think what we really need to focus on.

We need to understand that capitalist imperialism propels the US and animates it and has empowered and enriched this class of people who dominate us politically, and that we need to end the American empire. I’m not saying in the American nation state or anything like that. I’m saying this idea that the US has to run the world as a global dictator and then call that the rules-based international order, that this needs to be unwound, and I think it’s happening as we speak.

I feel that we are largely powerless in this because that’s the system they’ve created. The public really is largely neutralized, but that internationally, the US Empire, like every Empire dialectically generates the forces of its own demise. It generates its own nemesis, and that’s what we’re seeing now, I believe.

I can’t make accurate predictions about how this is going to unfold, but I do think that we are seeing a real unwinding of US hegemony, and I hope that this happens without causing nuclear doomsday or without any terrible economic calamities, and that we’re somehow able to adjust and course correct in ways we haven’t been able to for so long because the Empire artificially empowers these terrible political arrangements.

It just gives them too much wealth and power to really be overcome. But if the empire starts to decline, then maybe we can actually take an honest look at where we are and how we got here.

[00:50:25] Grumbine: That’s a great point. I want to finish off this with a final what’s next. I saw in your bio you’ve been to Shanghai and China and Japan and other places. I went to Beijing and Shanghai, and I have been overwhelmed when I saw the port cities in China and saw the massive machinery that takes all the raw materials in to China and then all the export out of China, and just thinking about how huge that is.

And this is controlling the distribution around the world in large part and the United States as the dying empire, making enemies of China, creating a new Cold War, creating a problem with Russia through Ukraine. And you actually said it. We don’t have any real power here, and yet we have this almost childlike hope that we can, like I said, vote for random people.

Do you think it is possible to change society to avoid a revolution or more importantly, do you think a revolution’s even possible? There’s so much talk about revolution. Given all that you’ve said in this podcast and all your work, how do you see us making a dent or is it just survive?

[00:51:49] Good: Well, I think these are questions that are very hard to answer definitively, and yet these are questions that are not unique to our time. The modal form of regime throughout human civilization is despotism of some kind or another. And even this thing that we call democracy, we look back at it and you look at Jim Crow and the Alien and Sedition Acts and the espionage acts, COINTELPRO, political assassinations. The Despotism is with us as well.

So this is fundamental to human civilization. I like human civilization. I like that we have all of this technology and all of this intimate knowledge at our disposal, and it allows us to have leisure time and other pursuits that we couldn’t if it weren’t for civilization. And yet civilization is based on exploitation of people.

If it wasn’t for the exploitation of people, we couldn’t have a division of labor and other pursuits that allow us to advance different areas of human society that we can because of civilization and agriculture and other things. And so it’s a double edged thing. There are all the great things of civilization, but it’s always based on hierarchy and exploitation.

And we have not grappled with that and discussed this honestly as a civilization. We instead have our own various myths that sort of distract us from these fundamental facts of human existence that we tried to address. Enlightened thinkers spoke to these issues, and we have kind of abandoned that.

We’ve gone for a sort of counter enlightenment in order to come up with mythologies that justify the prevailing order. And as a result, we have regressed as a civilization. So we find ourselves, like most people in human history as being unable to confront the centers of power. But I believe that they are going to have to change.

And it seems that at some point, people who actually do hold power are going to realize that the system is untenable. And that one option would be for the US to start to act a bit more like its ideals that it always talks about. That’s the ironic thing and the frightening thing is that the US is always democracy, democracy, democracy.

But we get this from institutions that are really representing top-down power. So our media and our politicians talk about democracy. The rule of the demos, the rule of the people, but they know, and we know . I mean, most of us do know the rich people are in charge. Even more right wingers kind of get that.

It’s just they think that the rich people are some liberal pedophiles who wanna make their kids be trans and stuff. They don’t get it, but they do understand that the people at Davos are rich and that there’s not much democracy. Most people get that. That’s part of why they like Trump is that he’s so anti-establishment that he appeals to them because a lot of people are anti-establishment, so we know this, but we just don’t know what to do about it.

All the billionaires that we have, not one of them actually supports institutions like a think tank that’s seriously anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, for example. There’s not one think tank or media outlet that functions like Brookings does, or like The Intercept does, all these different entities.

There aren’t endowments at universities that hire people who are like anti-imperialist and so on. I think that one opportunity is gonna be if some segment of the establishment decides that the system really needs to be reformed and that a way to do that would be to look honestly at us imperialism and support people who actually tell the truth about it.

The people understand that it’s not beneficial to have a society where nobody who actually talks honestly about society is given any sort of platform. When your entire understanding of your own civilization comes from people and institutions who are structurally compelled to say false things and believe myths about our civilization, that’s not good for human progress.

This is why we’re sort of stuck in this rut and we can’t solve any problems. It’s because our institutions are so corrupt that you can’t solve a problem that you’re not even allowed to talk about honestly. And that’s where we are with all of these problems and crises that we’re facing that stem from the arc of our imperial project and of capitalism more broadly.

So this is a major issue. And the elites, I think at some point, some segment of them must wake up and realize that you can’t organize a civilization based on bewildering the population forever so that you can exploit and dominate them forever. The US is going to lose out to countries that actually try to build functional societies as we’re seeing now.

[00:56:48] Grumbine: I am friends with a guy, great scholar and legal mind, William K. Black. He’s the guy that took down the Keating Five and a great whistleblower, shined a light heavily on the Countrywide scandal and the rotating door from Wall Street into the government and back again. And that comfy relationship that allows for elite control fraud, the entire nation is run on control fraud, basically. And American Exception, if I’m understanding it correctly, is directly noting that we have all these rules and laws, but the United States is above and beyond them. And I think that that awakening is something for me to chew on for a while. And I’ve been thinking it. And your work really lends a cohesive, coherent means of putting those thoughts together.

And with that, Aaron, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with me today. Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

[00:57:48] Good: Most of my output is at the American Exception Podcast on Patreon. We have a lot of great material there. We just did our hundredth episode actually, and we’re putting together something very exciting for my friend and mentor, Peter Dale Scott, coming up soon that I think people will hear. I’m really happy about the people we’ve gotten on board for that.

The book is American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, and you can get it online wherever books are sold or from your local book seller. And they just did a second printing of it. It was sold out for a while and I may have more exciting news on that in the future on the book, but nothing I can say right now.

So I recommended people like this sort of discussion that they go to Patreon and subscribe to the American Exception Podcast.

[00:58:36] Grumbine: Fantastic. I hope I can have you back on because I’ve got so much more I’d like to talk to you about. You were fantastic.

[00:58:41] Good: Yeah, I’d be happy to come back on. I appreciate what you’re doing here. I believe, and I say this to people all the time, but it’s worth repeating that the situation that we’re in, the ability to try to discern and to speak the truth, that’s the only real democracy that we have left. And so we have to take advantage of it until we can’t.

And so I’m happy to know that there’s all these people like yourself doing all this work.

[00:59:06] Grumbine: Thank you so much. That means the world to me. This is Steve Grumbine, your host of Macro N Cheese, and my guest, Aaron Good from Macro N Cheese. We are outta here.

[00:59:22] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Aaron Good holds a doctorate in political science from Temple University. He is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, and host of the American Exception podcast. Support him on patreon.com/americanexception 

@Aaron_Good_ on Twitter

Article: American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State

Book: American Exception

American Exception Podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/americanexception 

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2834255

Council on Foreign Relations: https://www.cfr.org/

World Bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/home

IMF: International Monetary Fund  https://www.imf.org/en/Home

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency  https://www.cia.gov/

Maidan in Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan

National Endowment for Democracy: https://www.ned.org/

UN Charter: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter

Peter Dale Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dale_Scott

Lance Dehaven-Smith: https://coss.fsu.edu/askew/emeritus/ldhavensmith/

Lyndon LaRouche Jr.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

Godwin’s law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Anti-Comintern Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact

John Foster Dulles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles

Allen Dulles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles

Sullivan and Cromwell: https://www.sullcrom.com/

Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG184746

OSS: Office of Strategic Services  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services

War and Peace Studies project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_Studies

Dillon Reed: Warburg Dillon Reed  https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/warburg-dillon-reed

National Security Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947

The Seven Sisters:  https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Oil-The-seven-sisters.html

The Devil’s Chess Board by David Talbot https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-devils-chessboard-david-talbot/1121272921

The Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey J. Kaye https://bookshop.org/a/82803/9781451691443

Bretton Woods Accord: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Henry Wallace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace

Henry Luce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Luce

American Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Century

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs 

C. Wright Mills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Wright_Mills

BlackRock: https://www.blackrock.com/

State Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Corporation

Vanguard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group

Gilens and Page study: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/

Dennis Kucinich:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich

Alien and Sedition Acts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

COINTELPRO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

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