Faced with the collapse of the American dream at home and the decline of their global empire abroad, American liberals have dumped the 1960s-era radicalism of their youth and become complicit in a complex game of bait-and-switch, selling the world a vision of liberal democracy that is, in reality, a failed system on the verge of social and economic collapse.
In the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen Marshall, a Sundance Award-winning director and co-founder of Guerrilla News Network, hits the road and travels from the front lines of the Iraq war, through the wasteland of the former Communist Eastern bloc, into a coke-dusted sex party of Britain's intellectual elite, and into the minds of America's most influential liberal figures.
Marshall finds America's most powerful liberals, all part of the same baby boomer generation that has dominated US political life since their voices broke in the 1960s, pushing a new form of "liberal interventionism" that threatens to use force to bring political freedom to oppressed people. But is the democracy they are exporting to the world really what they say it is? Or have liberals buckled under the pressure of America's declining fortunes and taken on the role of good cop to the conservatives' bad?
Featuring interviews with Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, David Horowitz, Lewis Lapham, John Avlon, The Economist's John Micklethwait, Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger, and best-selling authors Thomas Friedman, Paul Berman, and John Perkins.