Guida: By “everybody,” you include the world?
Schwartz: Yes, everybody means in the rest of the world as well, which is the one point where the transnational billionaire class has some degree of overlapping interests.
Guida: In an empire like this, what are the benefits and costs to an average American?
Schwartz: There is no average American! But if you want to posit an average American, then the benefits and costs look something like this. Empire allowed the United States to avoid a trade-off between guns and butter — between military and social program spending. From 1992 to 2024 the U.S. ran more or less continuous current account deficits. We imported more than we exported and gave the rest of the world pieces of paper (U.S. Treasury and agency bonds, equities, corporate bonds) that promised them something real in the future, while we got TVs, cars, oil, tropical fruits, etc.
In other words, the empire’s peripheries in some sense funded our military footprint in exchange for promises to pay something, someday. So the U.S. avoided having to raise taxes or cut consumption to fund the military.
In the U.S., this was great for folks who wanted BMWs, avocado toast and vacations in Italy without having to pay higher taxes to sustain U.S. military power, and for corporations that wanted access to cheap offshore labor and, again, lower taxes. And in some ways it was good for the working-class people who bore the costs of those imports in the form of lost jobs or lower income, because for them U.S. military dominance also largely meant stability or even falling prices for things like clothing, and no call on their bodies for any mass war. But those imports and offshoring did cause mass deindustrialization and the loss of the notionally good jobs associated with manufacturing and support for manufacturing.
And successive administrations did very little to help those communities. To the extent that we had industrial policy it aimed at the high-tech industries, which did not re-employ laid-off manufacturing workers, were largely concentrated on the coasts, and of course were highly diverse in all sorts of ways that conflicted with white and rural working-class norms. Finally, at the national level, the hollowing of manufacturing meant a loss of production power in favor of China.
