Here’s a meaty article by the conservative professor James Kurth, discussing the foreign policy implications of our plutocratic governing order. Excerpts:

It is obvious that the 1990s was a decisive decade in shaping the future course of the United States in world affairs. It was then that the U.S. elite embarked upon a particular path, one that by now has brought it to its current condition of increasing economic crisis, increasing political paralysis, increasing relative military weakness, and declining power and leadership in the world. The choice of that path was not inevitable, although the spokesmen for the grand alliance of finance and industry often said so at the time. However, once chosen, the consequences of that path do seem to have been inevitable.

Several developments came together in that decade to set the United States on this path. First and most obviously, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as “the sole superpower”, even, as some called it, “the American empire” or the “hyperpower.” In this exuberant time, it seemed that the United States could do whatever it wished in the world. Second, the consensus ideology of liberal internationalism, now ripened into liberal globalization, was an ideology that perfectly suited America’s supreme global power. Third, the American financial sector greatly expanded in wealth and power, both in absolute terms and in relation to America’s industrial sectors. Finance became the dominant sector in the economy and also in politics.⁷This is clearly evidenced by the success of America’s finance plutocrats in obtaining congressional legislation and executive decisions that almost completely deregulated the financial sector, destroying the regime established by the New Deal in response to the Great Depression. Finally, the great increase in wealth and income inequality in the United States at last culminated in the creation of a new plutocracy. Having been created by public policies with respect to deregulation and taxation, this plutocracy then set its sights as an even more cohesive and powerful force on locking in even more favorable versions of these policies. These in turn rendered the financial sector and the plutocrats running it even richer and more powerful. From the perspective of the American plutocracy, it was the beneficiary of a virtuous cycle; from the perspective of the American democracy, it was the victim of a vicious cycle.

When the crash came in 2008, the government might have broken up the big banks and reduced the power of the financial sector over our affairs, as it once did. But that did not happen. Kurth:

Unlike the earlier eras of financial reform and reconstruction, the financial sector has retained its status as the largest sector in the American economy. Of even weightier consequence, it is now organized into a cohesive political force by the plutocracy at its top. So instead of the financial crisis reducing the power of these institutions and this plutocracy, it ended up increasing it.

Now what? Kurth compares our current and developing situation to Britain’s between the wars. That worked out well, didn’t it?