Ep 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