The Nation blog: Obama's Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich

And Democrats agree with Republicans on the "concrete interests" of Americans: preserving what Bacevich calls our "empire of consumption." (He borrowed the term from Harvard historian Charles Maier.) After WWII, the US was an "empire of production" – "we made the stuff that everybody else wanted." So the country did not go into debt. "But we have increasingly become a culture that emphasizes consumption – limitless consumption – regardless of whether we have the money to pay the bills, while others, notably China and Japan, have become the source of the goods we consume. There's something fundamentally out of whack here. This disparity between what we produce and what we consume is simply not sustainable."

Neither Obama nor McCain, he says, realizes the seriousness of this problem of "limitless consumption."

via @TAC