According to one strand of leftist thinking, progressives should embrace U.S. global dominance as a vehicle for global emancipation. If that sounds crazy, it’s because it is. And while only a very few, relatively marginal figures today openly profess it—Christopher Hitchens was probably the last famous and unabashed proponent—the theory is, in fact, all too alive and operative on the mainstream left, albeit in unacknowledged fashion.
The imperialism-as-emancipation theory explains, I increasingly believe, the otherwise inexplicable absence of any measurable progressive dissent from relentless U.S. escalation in Ukraine, and from the way Washington has used the conflict to reassert total hegemony over Europe. It also accounts for the refusal of most on the left to acknowledge an inconvenient reality: that Donald J. Trump was the most antiwar, anti-imperial U.S. president in two generations.
Here is the hard-Marxist version of the theory (which, again, remains marginal on the Marxist left): Too much of the world is still dominated by feudal, patriarchal, and otherwise backwards social systems. These are places where, for one reason or another, capitalist development hasn’t made much headway or failed to follow its ordinary course. As a result, local bourgeoisies are weak, and the bourgeois political form—liberal democracy—has failed to emerge. That’s a problem, because societies must go through the bourgeois, liberal-democratic stage before they can achieve more radical egalitarian models.
