Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s line lands like an academic aside that’s also a dare: if American government reaches far enough to shape other people’s lives, then democratic legitimacy can’t stay quarantined inside U.S. borders. The provocation isn’t “America matters” (too easy); it’s that U.S. power has become so infrastructural to global life - through finance, sanctions, military basing, climate policy, internet governance, even the dollar - that the usual moral alibi of sovereignty starts to look like a parochial technicality.

The intent is strategic. By framing his book around “the power of the American state,” Gitlin is pushing back on a familiar American self-myth: that “the market” or “culture” runs the show while the state is secondary. He’s reminding readers that state capacity - the ability to tax, police, regulate, wage war, set terms - is the engine room of hegemony. That focus also signals a sociologist’s move: treat power as a system with institutions, not a series of bad choices by bad leaders.

The subtext is moral discomfort wrapped in dry understatement. “The case could be made” is a polite phrasing that masks a radical implication: the demos affected by U.S. decisions is larger than the electorate that authorizes them. He’s gesturing toward a democratic deficit built into empire, even when it wears liberal rhetoric.

Context matters: Gitlin came out of the New Left, critical of Vietnam-era state power and later attentive to media and political spectacle. This reads like a mature version of that critique - less protest slogan, more institutional diagnosis, with the same uneasy question underneath: if American policy is global, why isn’t accountability?