The Monday morning quarterbacks are in full flow, and the post-mortem is already on. The alternatives are being immediately staked, and the relevant policy changes demanded. Depending on whom you read, the Democrats lost so many seats in the mid-term election because Obama wasn’t centrist enough or because he was too centrist.

            What a difference two years make in times as serious as these. Two Novembers ago, all was hope and glory on the center-left in American politics, all was despair and despondency on the center-right. But that is not how things stand now. The political momentum has shifted back, and shifted back very quickly, into the hands of the very conservative forces whose future looked so bleak when Obama first entered the White House.

…Our imperial endeavors alone, if Chalmers Johnson is right, “will, sooner or later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency.”[1] And even if that fear is overblown – and it probably is not – there is certainly trouble looming at home, trouble for which we all need to be prepared, and trouble that we would do well to avert by systematic and extensive social reform before it occurs.[2] For if the challenges abroad are linked to empire, at home they are linked to poverty.