Quotes from Morris Berman

All-out nuclear war, of course, is just a literary device here; it is not a prerequisite for contemporary cultural disintegration, and indeed, one could argue that corporate consumer culture is tantamount to a kind of nuclear attack on the mind.

Department stores, hotels, and amusement parks began to dot the landscape, and by World War I, buying was seen as the road to happiness. Money became the measure of everything, friendship and religion included.

For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, "democracy" will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy's and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. Corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.