United States

The United States is portrayed as both a model of democratic plurality and a political order that turns majority rule into an image of an undivided people. Its flexible social identities coexist with the symbolic pull of the nation, while its democratic language of freedom and dignity sits beside practices that expose people to state power without the protection of ordinary legal status. The book’s account moves among elections, capitalism, foreign policy, and public scandal to show these tensions as structural features rather than unrelated exceptions.

Majority, People, and Exception

In discussing democracy, the United States serves as an example of the gap between a majority and the imagined whole it claims to represent. The 2000 election dispute in Florida makes the arithmetic stark: a narrow majority can acquire the authority to govern as though it speaks for everyone. The political minority does not simply disappear, but the democratic short circuit makes it count as nothing in the decision that follows. The problem is not treated as a defect peculiar to an authoritarian regime; it is described as a constitutive ambiguity of democracy itself.

That ambiguity concerns what the people are taken to mean. The demos can be imagined as an unlimited, inconsistent multitude without exceptions, or as one bounded People whose unity depends on distinguishing it from those outside. The United States is associated more strongly with the first tendency than Europe: fixed traditional bonds are loosened, while the majority may remain politically present without speaking as a single, settled voice. The contrast is not a simple opposition between an inclusive America and an exclusionary Europe. It identifies two competing ways of organizing political belonging, each vulnerable to turning plurality into a claim about who truly represents the whole.

Plural Identity and the National Frame

The United States is also set beside Israel as a revealing pair of political principles. Israel, described as an ethnic state, stands for tradition and inherited continuity; the United States stands for a social non-All in which fixed traditional ties are dissolved. Yet the contrast is not a clean separation. Israel functions in the analysis as the intimate point of reference around which the American field of plural identities can organize itself. The relation makes national difference more than a matter of foreign policy: each side helps give shape to the principle that appears to oppose it.

This account challenges the assumption that global capitalism simply melts particular identities into a uniform society. The argument is instead that ethnic, religious, sexual, and lifestyle identities can persist as the structural counterpart to a unified field of capital. The United States is therefore presented as both a setting for social fluidity and a nation whose unity depends on a powerful symbolic frame. That tension also informs the discussion of competing public readings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One treats European solidarity with Palestinians as a continuation of antisemitism; another treats the occupation of the West Bank as colonial expansion and the invocation of the Holocaust as its political justification. The analysis rejects the idea that truth lies in a moderate position between these claims. It argues that both dangers require scrutiny: antisemitism can appear within parts of the contemporary Left, while criticism of Israeli policy cannot simply be dismissed as antisemitic.

Capital, Biopolitics, and the Social Order

The United States appears within a broader account of modernity in which capitalist change and administrative control are distinct but connected forces. Biopolitical governance promises happiness and protection from shocks that might obstruct self-realization. At the same time, individuals are encouraged to monitor themselves through practices such as exercise, attention to safe sex, and healthy eating. In this arrangement, people become both subjects of personal fulfillment and objects of regulation. The book links this promise of happiness to a consumer ideal that it describes as having arrived from America in the 1950s.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is defined by the production and appropriation of excess. Money generates more money, and the system continues by repeatedly changing its own conditions rather than preserving a stable normal order. The book resists reducing this economic dynamic to a mere appearance of technological domination: capitalist reproduction and political administration are two incompatible aspects of the same modern social formation, with no neutral language that can translate one fully into the other. The United States figures in this account as a central example of the social field in which individualized striving, self-regulation, and continuous economic change coexist.

The country’s political alignments also unsettle familiar ideological labels. The Republican Party and Democratic Party are described as having partially reversed their conventional roles. Under George W. Bush, Republicans spent heavily, expanded the federal state, and pursued global interventionism; under Bill Clinton, Democrats pursued fiscal restraint and policies associated with reducing the welfare state and privatization. The account also notes Bush’s proposal to regularize the status of millions of undocumented Mexican workers and to widen healthcare access for retirees. These contrasts make the parties’ names insufficient guides to the political content of their actions. A related discussion of investment privatization describes a theory whose success depends on widespread belief in a proposition that would fail if everyone accepted it, showing how economic confidence can rely on beliefs that remain socially unstable.

Power, Iraq, and Human Rights

The United States’ intervention in Iraq is examined through the difference between humanitarian justification and political transformation. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was publicly legitimized as a way to end Iraqi suffering, but the proposed future also involved Western liberal democracy, private property, and integration into the global market. On this reading, humanitarian action is not politically neutral: a policy framed as the prevention of suffering can implicitly foreclose the possibility of a different collective project. The book further observes that Saddam’s pragmatic authoritarian rule had cooperated with the United States during the 1980s, while the intervention produced a more uncompromising fundamentalist opposition that obstructed pragmatic compromise.

A similar tension appears in the account of the Abu Ghraib scandal. When photographs of Iraqi prisoners’ mistreatment became public in 2004, George W. Bush described the conduct as isolated and contrary to American values. The scandal’s emergence in public could indicate that criticism remained possible, but the International Red Cross had repeatedly sent reports of abuses to United States Army authorities, and those reports had been ignored. Measures restricting guards’ access to digital cameras and video-capable phones sought to prevent the circulation of evidence, not simply the abuse itself. The explanation that soldiers had not been properly taught the Geneva Conventions also shifted attention from the setting in which the acts occurred to individual failures of instruction.

The photographs are analyzed as evidence of a wider contradiction between the public language of dignity and the unofficial practices that sustain power. The account distinguishes the direct infliction of pain associated with Saddam’s prisons from the emphasis on psychological humiliation in the American military abuse described here, where recording and circulating the humiliation formed part of the practice. It rejects both the idea that the acts were merely individual crimes and the claim that no direct written orders means no institutional responsibility. Informal pressure and private directives can authorize conduct without appearing as official policy. Donald Rumsfeld’s May 6, 2004, acknowledgment that the photographs represented only the tip of the iceberg reinforced the concern that the scandal was not an isolated episode.

Legal Limbo and the Meaning of Protection

The discussion of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay extends the argument from abuse to legal status. One defense of their treatment held that they had survived bombing intended for military targets and were therefore better off alive than dead. The book reads this reasoning as placing prisoners in a condition between biological life and legal death: their lives continue, but their standing under law is suspended. The authorities who treat them occupy a related contradiction, exercising legal power in a space presented as still within the law yet no longer constrained by its ordinary protections.

The contrast between these prisoners and the 2005 Terri Schiavo dispute sharpens the argument. Schiavo had suffered brain damage after her heart briefly stopped in 1990; court-appointed doctors judged her to be in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. Her husband sought the withdrawal of life support, while her parents opposed it, and the dispute drew in the Supreme Court, the President, and Congress. The book contrasts this intensive national attention to a single person’s continued vegetative life with the large-scale deaths caused by AIDS and hunger elsewhere. Together, the cases expose opposing limits of rights: people who remain fully human but are deprived of legal protection, and a person reduced to bare vegetative life whose continued existence is defended by the state.

Across these examples, the United States is not presented as simply fulfilling or betraying its declared ideals. Its public commitments and its exclusions are bound together: democratic inclusion depends on decisions about who counts as the people; universal rights depend on political forms that may also withdraw recognition; and the rule of law relies on powers that reserve the ability to suspend ordinary protections. The country’s significance in the book lies in making these contradictions visible across domestic politics, economic life, and foreign policy.