Disagreement is part of discourse, and pursuing differing views of the best way forward is the heart of democracy. Disagreement is abundant, democracy is scarce, despite claims to the contrary.
If you think you can surgically extract Empire from the American System, force the State to serve the working/middle classes, end the stripmining of financialization, limit crony capitalism/regulatory capture and get Big Money out of politics–go ahead and do so. I'm not standing in your way–go for it.
But while you pursue your good governance, populist, Left/ Right /Socialist/ Libertarian, etc. reforms, please understand the system is indivisible: the Deep State, the Imperial Project (hegemony and power projection), the State, finance in all its tenacled control mechanisms (greetings, debt-serfs and student-loan-serfs), crony capitalism /regulatory capture, money buying political influence, media propaganda passing as “news”, and the evisceration of democracy (something untoward could happen if the serfs could overthrow the Power Elite at the ballot box–can't let that happen)–it's all one system.
Should any one organ be ripped from the body, the entire body dies. The entire system defends each subsystem as integral as a matter of survival. As a result, the naive notion that big money can be excised with only positive consequences is false: restoring democracy places the entire system at risk of implosion.
No more bread and circuses, no more Social security checks, no more state employee pensions–it all melts into air if any subsystem stops doing its job.
The system is interdependent. Each subsystem needs the others to function. I drew up a chart of the major components (but by no means all) of the system:
The system is a machine in which each gear serves the whole. So go ahead and try to “reform” the system by extracting whatever gear you don't approve of: the Deep State components, the Security State organs, the Federal Reserve, cartels/monopolies enforced by the State, the suppression of democracy, crony capitalism, whatever.
