From the article:

It is sobering, to put the point mildly, to sit in America in 2021 and read the reflections of a writer sitting in Paris 102 years ago. The world America made in the post–1945 years has ended just as the Great War ended the world Valéry, born in 1871, knew as his own.

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[America] has by a long tradition mistaken material progress for authentic human progress.

As to the latter, America has made little as measured by the lives Americans now live—their deprivations, their Gilded Age inequalities, their mental and emotional distresses and the addictions that compensate for them. And now, as the world it sought to make in its image goes its own way, America finds itself a desperate empire with no moral qualities to speak of as measured by its conduct.

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Three cases, of the countless number available to us, merit our consideration for their proximity. In each, we must note not merely what America did or did not do; taking a page from Valéry, we must also think about the deeper consequences for all Americans of their nation’s doing or not doing.

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Assange

Assange’s treatment in Belmarsh prison for the past two and a half years has been properly termed torture. I would also call it a human-rights atrocity.

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And what are most Americans thinking and saying about Julian Assange’s fate? What is the press, whose principles and professional practice are at stake, saying and doing? Most Americans know little to nothing of the Assange case. Apart from independent publications, the press cannot write of it due to its diseased relationship to power.

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Colin Powell

Of Powell’s famous lie at the U.N. as to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—the most consequential lie so far told in this century—the corporate press said as little as it could get away with, and what it said was whitewash.

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Do Americans think there is no price to pay for this kind of self-deception? The price exacted is evident out our windows: It is our continued pursuit of empire and the consequences at home as measured by our increasing deprivations, our political collapse, and our social decay.

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Antony Blinken

His function is purely to portray, to put across, carefully, a nonexistent America. He is a custodian of images, nothing more.

No one in corporate media calls Blinken on all his silliness: They pretend the world according to Blinken is just as he says it is. There are consequences there, too. The unlawful, often atrocious conduct abroad continues in the name of people who do not even know it is occurring.

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I see a nation that is detached from reality (which is a basic definition of psychosis) such that its people are confined to a series of simulations: This is what it would be like to live in a country that respects others; this is what it would be like if our government abided by the rule of law; this is what it would be like to have a free, unfettered press; this is what it would be like if America upheld either rules or order—to say nothing of both. We are merely pretending in all such cases.