Clever Hopes. Expiring.

If you begin with the premise that nothing about American society or government is especially admirable, that the Constitutional Republic was a dead-letter by the time it was ratified, that our history is a history of slavery, genocide, aggressive expansion, imperialism, and war, and that our great wealth and global predominance were more an accident of available resources and favorable historical circumstances than any particular national genius, then all this caviling about our dying principles and betrayed values seems a little silly. And that is not to say wrong. As a diagnostician of our constitutional malaise, Gleen Greenwald is very good, and yet these sorts of analyses seem myopically focused on the present moment and the current generations. Maybe the harsher reality is that we are and have always been basically a venal, craven, and cowardly society whose committment to equal rights and democracy has never been more than superficial, a fearful and xenophobic people who long ago beat our ploughshares into swords and are now not reaping what we did not sow.