The Liberal Extreme: The Friendly Face of Empire (2024)

Let’s get one thing straight: the so-called “liberal extreme” has never been about peace, justice, or equality. It’s about running the empire with better PR. When Noam Chomsky wrote What Uncle Sam Really Wants in 1992, he pulled back the curtain on figures like George Kennan, who perfected the art of sounding reasonable while planning the next atrocity. Kennan’s advice to ditch the “sentimentality” of human rights while protecting America’s obscene wealth disparity wasn’t some dark corner of U.S. policy—it was the blueprint. Thirty years later, the liberals have learned how to sprinkle their imperial ambitions with diversity, climate promises, and the occasional Pride flag. But the core remains the same: they’re just better at lying about it.

Enter Kamala Harris, the latest mascot of the liberal extreme. Her failed 2024 presidential bid against Donald Trump—leading to his grotesque second term—offers a perfect case study in how neoliberalism paved the way for this disaster. While Trump screamed about walls and witch hunts, Harris politely promised a more "inclusive" version of business as usual. And that’s the problem: liberal extremism isn’t the antidote to Trumpism—it’s its enabler.

Kennan’s Ghost Lives On

George Kennan’s Policy Planning Study 23 set the tone for U.S. foreign policy long before Trump’s boorish nationalism took the stage. In 1948, Kennan candidly admitted that America’s global agenda was about hoarding wealth, not spreading democracy. He dismissed ideals like human rights as “daydreaming,” warning that they’d get in the way of the real goal: making sure the rest of the world stayed poor and obedient.

Sound familiar? Kennan’s strategy has been rebranded by the likes of Harris and her ilk, but the playbook hasn’t changed. Today’s liberal planners still believe in crushing economic independence wherever it threatens U.S. corporate profits. They just do it with press releases about "shared values" and “strengthening alliances.”

Kamala Harris: The Empire’s New Mask

Harris was the perfect liberal candidate: a former prosecutor who could talk tough while flashing a warm smile. But scratch the surface, and it was all the same. On the campaign trail, Harris promised to "restore American leadership" (read: bully the world back into line), “stand up to China” (read: provoke a Cold War), and champion “democracy” (read: overthrow governments that won’t play ball). This is neoliberalism in its purest form: selling imperialism as a kindness.

While vice president, Harris mastered the art of saying one thing and doing another. She claimed to care about the “root causes” of migration from Central America but spent her time pressuring countries like Guatemala to crush grassroots movements for land reform and justice. She lamented climate change in speeches while quietly greenlighting fossil fuel projects. And while she criticized Trump’s blatant racism, she oversaw policies that deported record numbers of migrants back to the violence her administration helped sustain.

Harris’s foreign policy boiled down to one principle: U.S. dominance at all costs. If Trump’s “America First” was imperialism with a sneer, Harris offered imperialism with a hug.

How the Liberals Lost to Trump (Again)

And yet, somehow, Harris lost to Donald Trump. How? Because liberal extremism offers nothing to ordinary people. Harris ran a campaign based on identity politics and empty promises, all while clinging to the neoliberal consensus that created Trump in the first place. She talked about diversity in corporate boardrooms but had nothing to say to working-class Americans drowning in debt and facing eviction. She attacked Trump’s cruelty but upheld the policies that devastated communities at home and abroad.

Trump, for all his grotesque bluster, knows how to exploit the failures of liberalism. While Harris spoke in polished soundbites, Trump screamed about forgotten workers and corrupt elites—never mind that he is one of those elites. His pitch resonated because, unlike Harris, he at least pretends to care about people who’ve been left behind by decades of bipartisan neglect.

Liberalism Abroad: The Polite Brutality

On the international stage, the liberal extreme is no less vicious than Trump’s chest-thumping nationalism. Take Harris’s approach to Venezuela. She framed U.S. sanctions as a noble effort to “restore democracy,” but the real goal was to strangle the economy and force regime change. The result? Mass starvation and poverty for ordinary Venezuelans—a small price to pay for keeping U.S. corporations happy.

Or consider Haiti, where Harris’s "humanitarian" rhetoric masked the same old policy of propping up corrupt elites while crushing grassroots movements. U.S.-backed coups, rigged elections, and paramilitary death squads are fine, as long as they’re done with a liberal smile.

And let’s not forget China. Harris, like Biden before her, talked endlessly about defending “freedom in the Indo-Pacific.” Translation: preventing China from becoming economically independent while surrounding it with military bases. Liberals like Harris love to cloak their aggression in terms of “human rights,” but the policies are indistinguishable from Trump’s tariffs and trade wars.

At Home: Liberalism’s Soft Despotism

The liberal extreme isn’t just failing abroad—it’s collapsing at home. Kennan’s advice to suppress “daydreams” about raising living standards is alive and well in the Democratic Party. Harris talked about fairness while defending a system where billionaires grow richer and ordinary Americans sink deeper into despair.

During her vice presidency, homelessness hit record highs, healthcare remained unaffordable, and student debt continued to crush entire generations. But Harris and her team were too busy handing out subsidies to Silicon Valley and defense contractors to notice. This isn’t just incompetence—it’s the inevitable result of a system designed to serve the wealthy while keeping everyone else in line.

The Real Legacy of Liberal Extremism

Here’s the truth: the liberal extreme isn’t an alternative to Trumpism—it’s its breeding ground. By refusing to address systemic inequality, liberals create the very conditions that allow demagogues like Trump to rise. Their obsession with maintaining the empire—wrapped in the language of inclusion and progress—only fuels resentment and ensures more cycles of reactionary backlash.

Kennan’s playbook lives on, not just in the hard-right hawks but in the liberal doves who claim to stand for something better. And as long as the liberal extreme clings to its polished version of imperialism, the cycle will continue: Trumpism, followed by more liberal betrayal, followed by an even uglier Trumpism. Two wings of the same bird.

Conclusion: Liberalism’s Polished Poison

The liberals love to position themselves as the saviors of democracy, the protectors of human rights, the champions of progress. But in reality, they’re just better-dressed imperialists. Harris’s failed campaign against Trump wasn’t a defeat for progress—it was a triumph of cynicism over substance, a reminder that the liberal extreme is incapable of offering anything but more of the same.

If we want to escape this nightmare, we have to stop pretending that neoliberalism is the solution to Trumpism. It’s part of the problem—a softer, slicker, more insidious version of the same rotten system. As Kennan would surely recognise, the liberal extreme is doing its job perfectly: keeping the empire intact while pretending to care about the people it crushes.

Protecting Our Turf: The Empire Strikes Again (2024)

The United States has long maintained that its global actions are guided by lofty ideals—democracy, freedom, and human rights. Of course, the historical record reveals something altogether different: a dogged commitment to one overriding principle—domination. Since World War II, U.S. foreign policy has been less about safeguarding democracy and more about ensuring that no other power, ideology, or independent movement dares challenge American hegemony. In 2024, that doctrine remains firmly intact, albeit more hypocritical, destructive, and self-defeating than ever.

The Unipolar Delusion: America’s Post-Cold War Hangover

By the early 1990s, the United States had achieved what policymakers had only fantasised about: a unipolar world where no competitor could credibly challenge its dominance. NATO’s eastward creep into the wreckage of the Soviet Union wasn’t about protecting anyone’s freedom; it was a naked land grab designed to encircle a weakened Russia. That encirclement worked—until it didn’t. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it wasn’t the result of some unprovoked imperialist whim but a predictable reaction to decades of NATO encroachment.

This should have been an opportunity for self-reflection. Instead, the U.S. doubled down, pumping tens of billions of dollars into weapons for Ukraine, ensuring a prolonged war with no clear exit. The policy’s real purpose? Weakening Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives. Washington’s planners are happy to fight Moscow “to the last Ukrainian,” proving once again that smaller nations exist only as pawns on the U.S. chessboard.

China: The New “Threat” to Civilisation

With the Soviet Union out of the way, Washington turned its attention to China, now painted as the ultimate villain in a new Cold War narrative. Never mind that China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—a feat the United States wouldn’t dream of emulating at home. For U.S. elites, China’s real crime isn’t “authoritarianism” or “human rights abuses” (words they conveniently forget when discussing allies like Saudi Arabia or Israel); it’s the threat of economic independence. China dares to develop cutting-edge technologies, expand global influence, and challenge the U.S. monopoly on global economic power. Such audacity cannot go unpunished.

Washington’s strategy has been to weaponise global supply chains. Take the semiconductor industry. The CHIPS Act of 2022 wasn’t about innovation or creating jobs—it was about choking off China’s access to critical technology. U.S. leaders trumpet “free trade” when it suits their interests, but when they fall behind, they throw up barriers faster than you can say “intellectual property.”

The tech war is only the tip of the iceberg. U.S. sanctions against Chinese firms like Huawei and TikTok have nothing to do with security risks and everything to do with suppressing a rising competitor. Ironically, this campaign has forced Beijing to double down on self-reliance, accelerating its economic independence—a result Washington’s planners will surely chalk up as another “unforeseen” consequence.

Military Power: The Stick That Never Gets Old

Despite the failure of military adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam (a recurring theme U.S. elites somehow never learn from), the Pentagon continues to guzzle nearly a trillion dollars a year while ramping up its global presence. The results are predictably catastrophic. In Yemen, where the U.S. backs Saudi-led atrocities, famine and disease have become weapons of war. In Syria, U.S. troops still squat on oil fields, ensuring that the country remains in ruins. And in Africa, U.S. military “advisors” prowl the Sahel, sowing chaos in a region already battered by centuries of colonial exploitation.

Even the much-lauded war in Ukraine isn’t the noble defense of sovereignty it’s portrayed to be. For Washington, it’s another excuse to dump weapons into the global market, enrich defense contractors, and tighten its grip on European policy—all while escalating the risk of nuclear conflict. But hey, what’s a little Armageddon compared to protecting Lockheed Martin’s bottom line?

The Climate Hypocrisy

Here’s a 21st-century twist on “protecting our turf”: the U.S. now wraps its imperial ambitions in greenwashed rhetoric. While climate change devastates vulnerable nations (many of which had their resources plundered by U.S.-backed dictatorships), Washington positions itself as the steward of global environmental responsibility. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 could have marked a genuine shift toward sustainability, but its primary goal was ensuring that American corporations—not China—dominate the burgeoning renewable energy market.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military, the single largest institutional polluter on the planet, continues its global rampage. If Washington cared about the climate crisis, it might start by scaling back its military-industrial complex, whose emissions dwarf those of entire countries. Instead, the U.S. plans to “secure” critical minerals like lithium and cobalt, ensuring they remain under Western control while the Global South bears the environmental cost. It’s imperialism in a shiny new package.

Controlling the Narrative: Orwell Would Be Proud

As Chomsky pointed out decades ago, managing public perception is as crucial as wielding power. Today, this involves manipulating not only traditional media but also social media, where Silicon Valley firms align their moderation policies with U.S. geopolitical goals. Posts critical of American foreign policy are algorithmically buried or labeled as “disinformation,” while platforms amplify narratives that toe the State Department line.

Domestically, the surveillance state soldiers on. The Patriot Act may be old news, but its legacy persists in the NSA’s dragnet spying programs and the increasing criminalization of dissent. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are vilified or exiled, while corporate media dutifully parrots the government’s talking points.

The Empire’s Diminishing Returns

Here’s the real kicker: this strategy isn’t even working. The U.S. may dominate militarily, but its credibility is in tatters. Allies like Saudi Arabia openly defy Washington, while the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) gain ground as an alternative global bloc. Even the European Union, ostensibly America’s closest partner, increasingly charts its own course in response to U.S. economic bullying.

At home, inequality deepens, infrastructure crumbles, and real wages stagnate. While Washington spends trillions maintaining its empire, its own citizens are drowning in medical debt and eviction notices. It’s the clearest possible indictment of an empire built on exploitation: it eats its own.

Conclusion: Time to Abandon the Illusion

The U.S. doctrine of “protecting our turf” has left a trail of destruction—at home and abroad. What Chomsky identified in 1992 as a policy of naked self-interest masquerading as benevolence has only become more brazen in its cruelty. The question isn’t whether this empire will crumble—it’s when, and how much suffering it will inflict before it does. For those of us living in its shadow, the task remains the same: resist, expose, and demand something better than this broken, blood-stained system.