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obviously alot depends on your understanding of what the american empire was and what it still in alot of ways is.
we're talking about a gradual process that was put into motion in a significant way via the bretton woods arrangement and which took a more definitive shape as the implications of the end of colonialism and rise of neo-colonialism happened.
it's characteristic form of domination is neo-colonial. control of economies and ideological frames as over against direct occupation.
the ideology of empire was neo-liberalism.
among the effects of neo-liberalism is a pervasive rhetoric of cycles that are modeled on a crude understanding of markets, the kind of nonsense that was already subject to mockery in the middle 19th century but which somehow was repackaged largely by people who were also able to confuse ayn rand with a philosopher (nietzsche for stupid people---i still really like that. anyway) into an internally coherent (if nothing else) ideology which was deployed through the various mechanism of mass opinion co-ordination and became for a while hegemonic.
the language of cycles is the inverse of the language of politics. zackaria from this viewpoint is symptomatic of the crisis of neo-liberalism as an ideology.
which is, i think, one of the main features of the problem of empire.
across all different types of empire (and it seems there are as many types as there are examples, which makes you kinda wonder about the type of name empire is) which collapse or implode a constant feature of the collapse or implosion is a refusal to see collapse or implosion.
there's alot of possibilities here.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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