My thoughts upon reading Francis Fukuyama’s NYT Mag essay on the end of neoconservatism: ‘Bout time, I say. Alas, the damage done by this unrepentant gang of imperialist plotters will take decades to heal, and some of the soldiers and overseas civilians injured and maimed and PTSD-damaged by this stupid, stupid war won’t ever be the same.

And sure enough, Fukuyama doesn’t have any specific answers for what should replace neocon ideology, besides something more realist, more multilateral, and less hubris-tainted.

Here’s my highly vague, formless attempt at an answer:

American industrial capital, the real source of power and money propping up our imperially-minded national political machine, is in its endgame, knows it, and is running scared, in aggressive-defense mode.

It wasn’t sex and hedonism that killed ancient Rome. It was the fact that the empire had finally reached further than its infrastructure could hold; while the pagan natives began to successfully fight back, the Roman establishment, which had been built upon the notion of eternal expansion, turned upon itself in corruption and intercene squabbles until the whole thing became progressively less manageable.

I’ve long held that politics is part of culture, not the other way around. Your typical Capitol Hill (Seattle, that is) leftist would interpret all of human affairs as the manipulating machinations of the owner class vs., not the valiant struggle of the workers (Seattle leftists are terrible square-bashers), but the cogent protests of We Who Know Better.

I see a more nonlinear (or at least more multilinear) world. A MISC world.

Our governmental situation is the result of multiple sources and influences. In the case of our current national governmental situation, our supposed “leaders,” for all their swagger and pomposity, are the sniveling whores to their backers.

Who are these backers? Follow the money and you’ll find a few old men with wealth from highly consolidated and/or “dinosaur” industries—oil, mining, drugs, entertainment/media, banking, discount retail, armaments, etc.

These guys don’t like the instability of competitive markets. They also don’t particularly like organized labor, environmentalism, consumer action, or any other impediment to their continued hold on the sources of their affluence.

Add some cold-war nostalgists, some grafters, and some religious authoritarians, and you have not a slick neo-Nazi spectacle but a gaggle of Bull Connors out to hold onto obsolete power through any means necessary.

As Wired magazine once said, power corrupts, obsolete poewr corrupts obsoletely.

Replacing a couple of this machine’s political stooges won’t change things enough.

More importantly, the very sociocultural presumptions of the Seattle left won’t change things; but then again they’re not meant to.

So what will?

A new way of thinking, or at least a different way of thinking.

For one thing, we don’t have to bash Christians anymore. Progressivism is more Christlike than the fear and bigotry propagated by the sleaze machine.

And we don’t even have to bash capitalism, either; at least we don’t have to confuse the current U.S. economic system with capitalism.

As some of my Libertarian friends (with whom I have other arguments that are outside the scope of this discussion) point out, the influence-peddling and palm-greasing that characterize today’s federal system aren’t the purist rule of business values but the mercantilist collusion of corporate and governmental power.

Real prosperity, for workers, managers, investors, and the rest of us, will return as our current economic and industrial infrastructure is replaced, piece by piece, with something saner.

This is big-big-big picture talk, at which I’m less comfortable than I am with very specific topics.

So bear with me.

But for now let me posit one thing: Politics, particularly oppositional politics, isn’t the answer. It isn’t even the problem. It’s a symptom.