Just briefly, let’s talk about the dialectical relation between the international and the domestic dimensions of what is going on, and what has gone on over several decades. Let’s look at some key conjunctures and nodal points. Where did all this stuff that the ’60s was part of come from, what was the underlying basis of that? It was the resolution of World War 2, and what arose out of that on an international scale, and what became the principal contradiction in the world—between the oppressed nations of the Third World and imperialism—and other things we’ve analyzed in connection with that. The transformations in the southern U.S. were related to that—the changes in southern agriculture and related political, social, and cultural changes—and this, in turn, was related to what was going on in the world as a whole, both economically but also superstructurally (in terms of politics, ideology, and culture). There was the civil rights movement that arose in that context, and the Vietnam war also arose in that context. In other words, without being mechanical, there’s plenty of international dimension that has played and ultimately is playing a determining role in all this.

And then go to the situation today. What sets the context for all this is the resolution of the contradiction with the Soviet Union—"the end of the Cold War," as it is put—by highly unexpected means: the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then there is superstructural stuff going on in relation to and in the context of that, in all different kinds of ways, including different sections of the ruling class in the U.S. trying to forge new strategies and new consensus. And it’s true that, as a comrade pointed out, Clinton did try to bring forward a new consensus; but it was within the same fundamental framework as has historically existed within the U.S. What Clinton was doing was objectively bringing greater hardship for masses of people, but frankly it was not bringing a "clash of civilizations" right within this civilization, if you want to put it that way. It was not bringing two different "irreconcilable"—or, to put it in different and perhaps better terms, philosophically, two antagonistically op- posed worlds and worldviews directly up against each other. And that is what’s being posed now.

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Now, the fact is, if there is another event like September 11, the configuration and the dynamics are going to change dramatically again. Some people, including some generally progressive people, left to their own devices, are perhaps going to join the Christopher Hitchens’ in deciding to cast their lot with the Christian theocratic fascists of U.S. imperialism rather than the Islamic theocratic fascists. Now, that is a metaphor for saying that a lot of the forces who right now don’t think they can live in the same world with these Christian Fascists will, in those circumstances (of further attacks on U.S. soil) be inclined to go under the umbrella of whatever the government in the U.S. is, even if it’

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