America Empire

One of the West's leading intellectuals offers a provocative look at America's withdrawal from world leadership and the rising powers who seek to fill the vacuum left behind

Just as the lives of slaves and Indigenous peoples paid for the early growth of the new American nation, so too were lives sacrificed to advance the expansion of empire in the 20th century. Book Two in this epic three-part series is a damning account of war—and the selling of war in America—revealing how riches, imperial expansion, and the consolidation of power have been the true aim of American wars and covert actions, both at home and abroad. The seeds of exceptionalism and divine entitlement, whose planting is detailed in Book One: Dreaming of Empire, yield Book Two: America's Favorite Pastime and the nightmarish side of the American Century.

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today…