I'm struck by this passage from Against Empire by Michael Parenti, published 30 years ago:

Mainstream pundits and propagandists label our desire to move away from corporate militarism and imperial domination as weakness, folly, isolationism, or self-defeating pacifism. But there is another name for the course of action that aims to wrest the wealth and power out of the hands of the military-industrial complex and the multinational investor class and give it back to the people so that they can become agents of their own lives and social conditions: it is called democracy, the victory of the republic over empire.