Read The Classics

First published in the fateful year 1980--the year of Ronald Reagan's election, the Year of No Return--and re-issued in 2007 with an Introduction by Andrew Bacevich, William Appleman Williams's now classic Empire As A Way Of Life chronicles the dark heart of the American Dream: the imperial ideology that sustains and rationalizes the lethal cocktail of predatory capitalism and apocalyptic Messianism (of the Christian and Nationalistic varieties) that now strut brazenly upon the stage of American politics and are preached as gospel from American pulpits. Anyone who is still mystified how someone like Donald Trump came to occupy the Oval Office should read this book.