Imperialist realism is a function of several structuring conditions. The most basic of these is the fact that, since the early 1940s, US elites have sought global military and economic primacy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of primacy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for imperialist realism’s emergence. Imperialist realism became the common sense of an era as the result of two other factors: first, the end of mass politics, and second, the failure of the global war on terror.

Genuinely mass politics is a relatively recent phenomenon. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, intertwined processes of urbanization, industrialization, and technological development reshaped politics across the North Atlantic world, giving ordinary people more power than they ever had before. In effect, as people moved from rural areas to cities, became industrial wage workers, and organized in unions, and as new technologies such as the telegraph and radio enabled leaders to communicate directly with large groups of citizens, a novel type of political formation — the “mass public,” which was considered to have an “opinion” — arose.

For the first time in history, government officials started to conclude that their policies needed to have some relationship to what the mass public desired. Predictably, the emergence of the mass public as a political force engendered significant discussion among intellectuals about the proper role “public opinion” should play in policymaking. In the 1920s United States, two prominent thinkers, the journalist Walter Lippmann and the philosopher John Dewey, engaged in a debate that continues to define how American elites understand the public’s political function.

On one side, Lippmann argued that ordinary people were simply too ignorant and too easily manipulated to be given the reins of public policy. In place of the public, Lippmann affirmed that social scientists needed to attach themselves to institutions that directly provided the government with advice. Lippmann thus presented technical expertise as the solution to the problem of mass politics. On the other side, Dewey averred that, though Lippmann was correct to doubt the public’s wisdom, elites should not ignore the masses but must instead educate them. Through education, Dewey claimed, ordinary people could eventually gain the knowledge necessary to make astute political choices.

Initially, most American intellectuals embraced Dewey’s position over Lippmann’s: democracy, they maintained, relied on an educated mass public. Nevertheless, by the late 1930s, historical events in the United States and abroad led many thinkers to change their minds and endorse Lippmann over Dewey. First, the Great Depression, which witnessed bank runs, labor militancy, and other “irrational” mass behaviors, suggested to many intellectuals that the public was innately unreasonable. Second, and more important, the ascendance in Germany of the Nazi Party — whose power, Americans believed, rested on the masses — demonstrated to many observers that ordinary people could easily be duped to support destructive dictators such as Adolf Hitler.

Together, the domestic responses to the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism persuaded an emergent majority of American elites that the masses could not be trusted. Mass politics and public opinion became things to be tamed and manipulated rather than improved. The stakes of the debate over public opinion became especially high during and after World War II. Following the fall of France in the summer of 1940, American elites concluded that the future of their nation, “Western civilization,” and humanity as a whole depended on the United States’ triumphing over Nazi Germany, a country whose fascist politics represented an illiberal attempt to address the problems of mass industrial society.

In essence, US elites began viewing international relations as a sphere of life defined by a zero-sum struggle between Manichaean enemies, the winner of which would determine the fate of the world. Luckily for those who endorsed this position, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other US-controlled territories in December 1941 made it easy for the United States to go to war; in the days after the attack, 97 percent of Americans approved Congress’s declaring war against Japan, and 91 percent said that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should have also asked Congress to declare war on Germany. For the remainder of World War II, most Americans accepted that their country needed to defeat the Axis.

The situation, however, was not so simple in the early Cold War. While, after World War II, manifold American elites rapidly transferred their anxieties about Hitler and Nazism onto Joseph Stalin, Bolshevism, and “international communism” writ large, they didn’t trust that the public — which, they worried, had proven itself ignorant and capricious in the past — would necessarily do the same. Indeed, as late as May 1947, 35 percent of Americans said they had “friendly” “feelings” toward Russia (i.e., the Soviet Union).

This presented elites with a problem: How could they ensure that the irrational mass public would allow its leaders to prosecute a potentially decades-long “cold war” against the Soviet Union, a nation that had only recently been an ally? American elites developed a clever solution to their conundrum: to guarantee that ordinary people didn’t stand in the way of the Cold War, they constructed a governance apparatus designed to limit the public’s impact on foreign policy. The creation of executive branch groups such as the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense, as well as parastatal organizations such as the RAND Corporation and other national security–focused think tanks and academic centers, institutionalized a system in which elites, not the masses, made the important foreign policy decisions.

Put another way, in the late 1940s the United States embraced two distinct “containment” policies. Internationally, US elites sought to contain the Soviet Union by preventing it from improving its global power position; domestically, they sought to contain the American public by preventing it from shaping US foreign policy. From its inception, the US pursuit of global primacy was accompanied by a domestic democratic deficit.

Since World War II, the public has had at best a minor influence on the conception and execution of US foreign policy. All the major strategic decisions made by US elites after 1945 — to spend an enormous amount on the military; to build a global empire of bases; to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops abroad; to intervene repeatedly in the politics and economies of other countries — have been made with only passing reference to public opinion.

This is not to say that American politicians and officials have always ignored the public; they’ve often paid attention to and tried to manipulate it. Still, the public was rarely, if ever, the driver of US foreign policy. Even Congress, the institutional representative of the people’s will, has been a secondary player in US foreign policy and war-making. Indeed, the last time Congress declared war was on June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania despite the fact that, as the political scientists Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi have discovered, between 1946 and 2019 the United States intervened abroad with “the threat, display, or direct usage of force” 216 times. Though the language of mass politics continues to permeate US discourse and influence how Americans conceive of their political role, when it comes to foreign policy, we do not live in a mass democracy and haven’t for almost a century.

The powerlessness of the masses in the realm of foreign affairs is one of the two key structuring conditions that make imperialist realism possible. While the organizations and practices of the age of mass politics remain extant — Americans still vote for mass political parties; we still engage with politics through mass media; we still participate in mass protests — these are not effective vehicles for the will of the demos. Ours is an individualistic, atomized, and alienated era overlaid with atavistic institutions unable to influence the power elite. Indeed, research suggests that wealthy capitalists are the only people capable of shaping policy. According to the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Is it any surprise that Americans have become cynical about politics? In fact, a recent report by NORC at the University of Chicago revealed that, when polled, “barely one in ten Americans thought the government represents them well”; 70 percent “thought politicians were only out for themselves”; and just 19 percent “said people in government could be trusted to do what’s right.”

The other necessary condition for imperialist realism’s emergence is more proximate: the failure of the global war on terror. For those who don’t remember the early 2000s, it’s difficult to overstate how patriotic, jingoistic, and — importantly — hopeful Americans became once the George W. Bush Administration committed the United States to fighting a war on “terror.” In January 2002, for example, 93 percent of Americans believed that the United States made the correct decision to send military forces to Afghanistan and 66 percent said the United States was “winning the war against terrorism.”

To many Americans, the GWOT was a world-historical project that united the country in a moment when the United States lacked an existential enemy and thus lacked an organizing principle for both domestic life and US foreign policy. This conviction was perhaps best reflected in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, in which the president declared that the 2000s “will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty” because Americans have “been called to a unique role in human events” — to eliminate “terrorists” and all those who supported them.

But the GWOT did not proceed as planned. Instead of marching to triumph, the United States lurched from disaster to disaster. Above all, Americans fought, and lost, a twenty-year war in Afghanistan and an eight-year war in Iraq. The GWOT, which expanded beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan, Syria, and other countries, cost around $8 trillion, engendered the displacement of thirty-eight million people, resulted in at least 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths, witnessed the deaths of over seven thousand US troops, and helped impel police militarization, political polarization, and the erosion of civil liberties at home.

Without putting too fine a point on it, the GWOT was one of the most significant failures in the history of US foreign relations: the disconnect between the hopes placed in the GWOT and its vicious, violent, and counterproductive reality undermined Americans’ belief in themselves and their country. Because of it, the United States is a more cynical place.