Who Will Rule in the Age to Come?

Who Will Rule in the Age to Come? 

Captain America: Brave New World; Caliphate Redefined; One Battle After Another; Eddington

I am apparently the last person in America who does not think that America is coming to an end.

In my last mega-essay on this blog, I posited that what has defined America and Americans most for the past hundred or two years has been a shared concept of heroism, which among other things has meant a shared devotion to death. Still, as I acknowledged at length in that essay, this heroic, mythological sense of America has been in actual history not the name of a nation or a nature or a people or institution or government or Empire, but merely the defining ideal of a particular Imperial elite, a homo imperialis. This nomadic elite has within the United States itself monopolized nearly all the positions of power in government, business, culture, and even religion once held by local and regional elites: and in the last century it has expanded its invisible networks of commerce and governance to encompass the entire world. For all that, as I suggested, its imprint on the ancient settled peoples of the world remains, like many Imperial predecessors, surprisingly light nonetheless. 

In the last few years, though, increasing drastically since January 2025, I have encountered people who seem to think, or who in fact tell me, that America itself is on the verge of ending: by which they do not merely mean that American global hegemony will collapse, or that the United States federal government will collapse, but that life as ordinary Americans themselves have known it will entirely cease to be.

Once again, it is hard not to be struck by just how profoundly the most basic, underlying assumptions of people in America have entirely shifted over the past three or four decades. For about half of my life, everyone I met assumed on the deepest, most inchoate level that America would last forever. By this they did not merely mean that some vague American cultural distinctiveness or territorial unity or economic and social life would last forever: they really seemed to mean that the United States Federal Government and the Alabama State Government and the US Constitution and c. 2008 consensus liberal capitalist progressivism and Alphabet co. and Coca-Cola, inc and Verizon Communications Inc and Starbucks Corporation and McDonald's Corporation and Dr Pepper 7UP Inc and World of Warcraft and Barney the Dinosaur and Captain America would all be doing just fine a thousand years from now. 

And so as a child I would scandalize people, sometimes deliberately, more often accidentally, by merely stating that all of these things would inevitably fall apart and cease to be: as indeed they will. As the ancients knew well, nothing intrinsically bound up with change and decay and entropy and corruptibility can conceivably last forever, because to do so would contradict its most basic nature and the most basic nature of the sublunar world. 

Of course, if America in some or any of these senses was not merely another cultural or political or commercial entity, but rather the manifestation or even fulfillment of a transcendent spiritual entity and/or pseudo-Hegelian world-soul and/or immanentized divinity acting through particular historical conditions and institutions, then of course things would be different, and we would expect this to last forever, at least in some form. And this, I really and truly believe, is what virtually everyone in America, from Evangelical Christians to secular humanists and from conservatives to leftists, deep down really and truly believed when I was a child.

When I was a child, the smart adults told me to watch Babylon 5, because it was a smarter version of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Now that I am an adult, I can recognize that Star Trek Deep Space Nine is a profoundly great work of art, and Babylon 5 is a profoundly stupid piece of art. The primary (though by no means only) reason for this is that Deep Space Nine is in essence a television show defined by a fundamental doubt about whether it is in fact possible, and whether it would in fact be good, if the history of all peoples ended in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. On the other hand, Babylon 5 is a show defined above all else by the fervent, unswaying assertion that it will in fact be very, very, very good when the history of all peoples ends in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. In the final season of Babylon 5, after the US Military has committed a heroic and righteous and democratic military coup against the elected President of the United States, and after all the gods have been told by our American military/cult-leader hero to get the hell out of our Galaxy, the Interstellar Alliance is formed, a vast and vague liberal-democratic-proceduralist multi-cultural American government founded in a boring ceremony written by the prophet of a new non-theistic, pan-cultural religion, after which (to quote the inestimable "Babylon 5 wiki"):

"The Interstellar Alliance survived and fulfilled its duties for well over one million years after its formation, with the names of all major players in the ISA's creation remembered and even revered throughout this time. By this time the ISA had achieved mastery over organic technology, with some of its member races evolving beyond the need for physical bodies, becoming beings of energy."

To which the only possible response is AMEN!

Anyway, it is no longer 1998: and now instead people tell me that America and/or the world will end in a year or five years or twenty years. And I don't believe that either.

The secret to both of these remarkable states of affairs, I would argue, is one and the same: which is once again that despite having lost faith in the goodness of the immanentized divinities that have in modernity defined every institution and belief system, people still cannot help regarding institutions and peoples and realities in their light. If America ceases to be believed in as the final divine ending of all of human history, people assume deep down that America will simply cease to exist, or at least that its sleigh will stop running like Santa Claus' in Elf. And yet, most things in the world, even most human institutions, do not in fact cease to exist when people stop believing in them: that is, in fact, kind of the whole problem. 

This belief admittedly takes very different forms. If many right-wing people who host podcasts and have Twitter accounts are right, then after the desperate failed rally of Trumpism fades, America will be overrun with Third World barbarians and become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican warlords. If the smart people who write for the New Yorker and are interviewed on NPR are right, then some benevolent divine entity called Democracy will abandon the earth and return to the heavens, another malicious divine entity called Fascism will descend in its place, and...well, for an awful lot of them actually America will again become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican and Straight White Male warlords, while for others Adolf Hitler will return from the moon and start building exact-scale replicas of Auschwitz and Selma, Alabama while forcing everyone to wear vintage Nazi uniforms and goosestep. According to a recent Atlantic piece I read, America will for some reason become "feudal" early Medieval France.

What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that, as in all great epochs where great civilizations fall, the planets will stop spinning, the stars will fall from the skies, and on their thrones deep in the bowels of the earth the great powers will tremble: and when the dust settles, the world as we know it will have ended, and something totally new and strange and foreign will begin. 

Far be it from me to disagree with my superiors who run podcasts and write for the New Yorker, but as at least some kind of historian, I do not think this is in fact how history works.

I am not a Marxist: by which I primarily mean that I do not believe in inevitable dialectical historical progress, and hence regard the purported alternatives of violent proletariat revolution and accelerationism as categorically unhelpful. Nevertheless, Marxists when they existed played many positive roles in society, and one of them was reminding people that economics existed and that how people fed themselves was a rather important factor in history. And from this point of view, the idea that the territorial bounds of America will not continue to be the home of prosperous and powerful political entities for the foreseeable bounds of human history appears somewhat absurd.

A basic truth that should be repeated vastly more often is that from the perspective of the settled peoples of the world, America is not only a new country, but a very embryonic and drastically underpopulated one. In absolute and not relative terms, America has the largest amount of arable land of any country in the world, including India and China--and this, too, using the more restrictive definition of "arable land" to include not any land that could relatively easily be cultivated, but merely land actually under present cultivation for temporary crops. America, meanwhile, has about three times the land area of India, including vast amounts of land that could easily be cultivated and used to produce food. India, meanwhile, has about four times the population of the United States.

As I pointed out in my last post, the simple reality is that America is not an intensively settled country. Indeed, it is barely a settled country at all. This remains true not only relative to the famously populated nations of Asia, but even relative to the baseline of places like Europe. America has only about five times as many people as the United Kingdom of Britain, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, despite having seventeen times the land area.

Yet this fundamental disconnect is even greater than any statistics or demographics could possibly convey. Traveling across America is a fundamentally opposite experience to traveling across Europe. One does not travel from places through other places. Rather, one moves from one place to another through vast tracts of wilderness pierced by monumental, alien infrastructure built not to connect communities so much as to carry commodities from periphery to center. I have been frequently attacked since my childhood for saying that America is not a nation but an Empire: a statement that people usually interpreted to mean that I think that America does not exist, or that Americans have nothing in common, or even that America as a political entity is fundamentally evil. I do not really believe any of that, though: or rather, it has nothing really to do with what I do mean when I say that America is not a nation but an Empire. 

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which I mean this statement has to do, not with Americans' cultural unity or lack thereof, or the American government's repressiveness or lack thereof, or the prevalence or scarcity of Americans' post-1945 "overseas" military interventions, but merely with this rather basic matter of economic and political structure. America simply is not structured as a nation, where a government has arisen to embody and enable the communal life of a political collectivity of a settled people living for a long time in a place and sharing some kind of basic culture or language or religion or way of life in common. America is structured as an Empire: which is to say, taken as a whole, it is structured by a vast commercial and military infrastructure built from the top down over many different political collectivities formed out of people of many different cultures and languages and religions and ways of life. 

Even that, though, is rather too abstract to get at what I really mean, which is merely that most of America--most, even of American cities, let alone American suburbs and towns and countryside--consists not of places or things but of the empty space between things. 

All my life I have been fascinated by the human deserts of America--deserts not in the highly modern sense of a climatologically inhospitable place but in the much more ancient and fundamental sense of a place that is not human, where human beings do not live and where they are not welcome. For ancient Egyptians, these were the literal deserts, where only bandits and soldiers and nomads lived: for Medieval Germans, these were the great forests, where only robbers and monks lived. For America, though, these deserts are primal and absolute, and they are everywhere: they are both within and around every public building, only a few feet from every private home, outside and around and in-between every town and city and suburb and restaurant and coffee shop and gas station. 

If you try to exist in these spaces for any number of time, hang around them, wander around them, carry out any function of life in them from eating to sleeping to defecating to merely sitting and reading or thinking, people will regard you as a homeless person, a criminal, a gangster, a terrifying alien invader, a desert nomad, and there is a good chance that cops will come and arrest you. And this is, when you think about it, rather strange for places that are in theory public spaces. If you try to do any of these things in an ordinary American neighborhood, though, full of allegedly private spaces, you will find much the same state of affairs. It is increasingly true that even daring to live or letting one's children live in the primal deserts of one's own yard or porch or sidewalk or street is seen as suspicious deviant behavior. There is something rather bizarre about this American insistence on surrounding ourselves at all times with vast empty spaces, woods and yards and streets and parks and sidewalks and parking lots and parking decks and walls and fields and landscapes, that are not there for anyone human to live in or cultivate or use for any human purpose, but merely to pass through and act as background setting. Jean Baudrillard saw the desert as the primal scene and reality of American life, the true, original backdrop and screen in reference to which American life was oriented: and I think he was right.

In any case, this discussion is necessary to communicate just why I regard it as absurd to think that America will come to an end any time soon--as well as the highly restricted sense in which I think it possible that it will. The human race has from its beginning to its end shown a very strong bias for life over death: and in the long run, life always wins out over death. In the 20th century, the powers ruling the human race did their level best to overcome this ingrained bias with more enlightened counsels, setting entire populations to kill other populations down to the last child, scientifically gasing millions, turning ancient cities into piles of rubble, and for the first time deciding as a matter of policy that under certain circumstances they could and would kill hundreds of millions and render most of the earth's surface uninhabitable. Still, by the end of the century there were vastly more people alive than there had been at its beginning.

In a similar way, I have personally no doubt at all that in a hundred years, in five hundred years, in a thousand years, in two thousand years, there will be many, many people living in the bounds of what is now the United States of America: and I find it highly, highly unlikely that these people will be living in a filmic post-apocalyptic wasteland or a filmic Third World gangland. Even a substantial nuclear war with Russia or China, while always theoretically possible, would not change that basic calculus.

Of course, what I actually meant as a child when I said that America would not last forever had little to do with this: it was merely the (for me always obvious, though now confirmed by many thousands of pages of historical and philosophical reading) point that political and cultural entities always change and always come to an end and are always superseded and replaced by other political and cultural entities not because they are evil dystopias or tragically failed utopias or quasi-Gnostic failures to realize an infinite divine essence, but rather because all political and cultural entities are fundamentally secondary realities, existing only in and for the temporal world of contingency and change, and by their inmost nature subordinate to the actual personal and common goods of actual people, and for this reason necessarily changing as the practical needs or practical goods or unpractical whims of those people amid history require. 

To be honest, I see nothing particularly tragic about the idea that in five hundred years people living in what is now America will not be governed according to the originally-deeply-flawed and now long-superseded text of an 18th century written Constitution designed largely to prevent the regional elites in thirteen mercantile coastal colonies from using a national legislature to commercially and culturally dominate each other. In fact, it is the idea that they would be governed according to that constitution that strikes me as tragic and fills me with feelings of disappointment and sorrow: for it would necessarily mean that these future people were being governed badly, and also that they showed a rather severe lack of intelligence and imagination. The societies and governments of these people will hopefully be rather better than ours: they could conceivably be much worse: but in neither case will these people be living in America in the sense in which I today live in America, let alone the (extraordinarily different) sense in which people in 1790 were living in America.

Of course, it is certainly possible that these hypothetical future people will call themselves Americans, or call their political entity America--as they have every right to do. Some people get very mad at Medieval Germans and Italians for calling themselves Romans, as though Julius Caesar was likely to be upset about it: but after all, Julius Caesar was dead, and the Medieval Germans and Italians were alive, and they had every historical and human right to take whatever they thought was good in Ancient Rome, including the Ancient Roman language and the Ancient Roman name, and use it for their present purposes. So too I have no objection to the early American habit of calling themselves Romans; and no objection if in five hundred years people living in vastly different societies, whether in the bounds of what is now America or in India or China or Russia or anywhere else, decide to call themselves Americans. So great is my intellectual magnanimity that I do not even get mad when people in 2025 call themselves Americans despite having no substantial culture or values in common with their own ancestors of a few centuries ago.

Now the one thing I sincerely hope is not the case is that people in the future continue to believe in America--which is to say, in the modern legend of some kind of immanentized divinity expressing itself through the American economy or Constitution or government or way of life, who must be held to and worshipped and served regardless if He in any way helps or improves human beings' actual lives and even if He pervasively harms and destroys them. 

It is only if Americans continue to believe in that divinity, whether as the inevitable source of good or the equally inevitable source of evil, that I think there is any particular chance that they will find a way to prevent anyone from managing to live prosperously in the territory of America or calling themselves American in the future: whether by nuking the cities, salting the earth, fighting and winning the Great Gender War, building data centers everywhere that dry up all the rivers, preventing themselves or anyone else from having children, and/or in one of these ways or another making "American" into such a cultic name of fear that future generations shun it as they shun the names of Sodom and Gomorrah. Barring those unlikely scenarios, I think that, by and large, human life and history will continue: and so in some form will America.

What is actually going on in America in 2025, I would argue, is something quite different from the end of America or the world. It is merely another crisis of legitimacy, such as has periodically afflicted nearly every nation and government and Church and Empire and corporation and township from time to time, usually justly, and often for the good. 

These crises arise in essence from the unavoidable human fact that we are rational entities, and so act always in rational pursuit of some perceived objective good: and also the fact that we are familial and social and political entities, who cannot seek or gain any of the goods we desire as isolated individuals, but only as part of some institution or another. 

For both of these reasons, no institution can function except on the basis of some firmly-held belief on the part of those who make it up that the institution itself and its overall purpose and its particular rules and laws and policies and structures and acts and specific human leaders are all good in the sense of relatively rationally oriented towards the gaining of some thing genuinely desired and perceived as objectively desirable by human beings. And from time to time, in every institution to have ever existed, some people begin to think, correctly or incorrectly, that this is not quite true, or not quite as true as it used to be, or not quite as true as it should be. 

Of course, to some extent this will always be true some of the time for some people associated with every institution; it is only when this state of affairs reaches some point of extremity, both in severity and definiteness of belief and in numbers of people affected, that what results is a genuine crisis of legitimacy. These crises of legitimacy are temporary by nature: but for all that can last for decades or even centuries, or for as long as it takes for some genuine alternative to the present state of affairs to be proposed and desired and pursued by a sufficient number of people. In the end, though, after some kind of collapse or war or struggle for power or mass defection, either enough people become convinced that the institution and/or its leaders were just fine the way they were, or they change the institution and/or its leaders: and either way the crisis is resolved.

Anyway, I have for a really quite tedious amount of time been telling everyone that America was in a crisis of legitimacy--and I have not been the only one. Post-Pandemic, though, and also post-2024-election, the name and concept seems to be falling out of favor, replaced with other generally less legible and insightful concepts, from the birth of a new AI economy to the rise of fascism to America being great again. I still persist in regarding this as closer to the truth of What is Going On Right Now than any of those other options.

To "prove" my case, I will in this lengthy essay examine a number of recent works of art that in my view convey the contours of our crisis of legitimacy, as well as another work of art about a crisis of legitimacy in a Near Eastern power from 500 years ago. I apologize: this is simply my way. 

Captain America: Brave New World

To demonstrate the existence of a crisis of legitimacy by watching a Marvel movie may appear like a strange way of going about things. In one sense, I yield the point: but nonetheless contend that anyone who wants to understand the political trends of the moment would be well advised to watch nothing but the very worst and most popular franchise films. Any rational attempt to predict the future would begin, I firmly believe, not with bond markets or tech companies, but with the top ten films of the year: and if it just so happens that I have not seen any of the top ten highest grossing films of the year in the US or globally, it should be ascribed first and foremost to my lack of commitment to the thankless task of predicting the future.

Still, now that the Marvel Era is well behind us, we can simply look back and note that the output of Marvel Studios has always been intensely, overtly political, with most of its films thematically focused, not to say obsessed, on questions of rule and procedure and war and peace and legitimacy. After all, this is a franchise that kicked off in 2008 with the film Iron Man, in which a billionaire arms dealer "privatizes National Security" by beating up terrorists and rescuing villagers in Afghanistan while fending off a hostile corporate takeover of his family business. Shortly thereafter, Barack Obama was elected President.

Of course, one might argue that this is absurd, that no meaningful political thought can be derived from a series of overtly silly films focused around the moral imperative of men in spandex costumes to join together to beat up Purple Shrek. It is of course true that the politics of Marvel films are stupid, thoughtless, unreflective, and simplistic. Surely this does not make them unrepresentative of American politics, though?

Jokes aside, as I have again and again pointed out in this space, the most important thing to understand about any given time or place is not the conscious beliefs and ideologies that people say they hold, but the actual, frequently unconscious, schemes of value and narrative that cause them to make decisions. The proportion of American Christians whose actual perceived schemes of value reflected in their actual choices corresponds even vaguely to the explicit moral system of historical Christianity is not high. It is for this reason above all else that to try to make sense of American politics and economics and culture in the 2020s through the lens of historical Christianity is even less sensible than trying to make sense of the actions of Tamerlane by reading the hadiths. The real American religion, as I recently argued in this space, is not a religion of communalized saints striving to image and attain the Trinity, but a religion of ghostly professionals striving to emulate dead heroes. The extraordinary, overwhelming cultural dominance of superhero films and television shows and books and comics over the entirety of my lifetime is only one of the more obvious proofs of this much deeper reality.

Further proofs can be derived from merely looking at the last twenty years of Marvel movies, noting the bizarrely overt political content of each film, and noting the precise correlation with contemporary political and cultural trends and events. 

As already noted, in 2008 a flamboyant playboy arms dealer decided to embrace morality, patriotism, and individual responsibility while changing how he fought the War on Terror, and Barack Obama was elected President. In 2012, four years of individual filmic heroes came together to join a benevolent secretive international security force, interrogate an imprisoned terrorist, and defend New York City from a second 9/11: and the same year, Barack Obama was reelected. Anyone paying attention at the time ought to have been able to predict both events merely from watching these films.

In 2014, though, Captain America: The Winter Soldier proposed that said benevolent international security force was controlled by Actual Nazis, and that all its employees should quit and join the CIA instead. A few years later, in 2016, two groups of superheroes fought over whether American heroes should submit to international UN oversight, with the nationalist individualist faction ultimately vindicated by the discovery that the entire thing was another Nazi conspiracy. The same year, Donald Trump announced his intention to stop American Carnage and entered the White House.

During the Trump Presidency, meanwhile, Marvel embraced a "more is more" approach and released endless films about how African-American Imperialism was a serious threat to global security, technologically-advanced isolationist states should build basketball parks in the Inner Cities, Gods Just Want to Have Fun, arrogant neurosurgeons should embrace tantric magic to defeat Cthulhu, Sony Studio's Spiderman is actually also a big fan of Marvel Studio's Iron Man, something something Ant Man, and individualist heroes should put their individual moral systems aside and join up to defend America and the World from an evil genocidal environmentalist. All this culminated in the best worst film of all time, Avengers: Endgame, in which attractive, well-groomed men stand endlessly around large well-lit rooms talking about science, rewatch and provide commentary on all the best moments from Marvel Studies' output so far, and then build the One Ring and use it to genocide the environmentalists and undo the last five years. 

Admittedly, as this summary indicates, the 2020 election could have gone either way; but Avengers: Endgame's techno-salvationism, indifference to genocide, vision of people of all colors and costumes and moral systems working together on vague non-specific science, and insistence that all we had to do was defeat one large brightly-colored man and undo the last four years and all our problems would be over all quite naturally heralded the victory of Joseph R. Biden in the 2020 election.

Then, of course, as Joseph R. Biden's cognitive abilities slowly declined and the worms in the sink slowly devoured all that we loved from 2021 to 2025, Marvel gave us endless tedious multiverse remixes of all the things we used to enjoy from the Presidency of Barack Obama in an attempt to divert us from our lives: until we were all so bored that we elected Donald Trump again.

And this account of Marvel Studios as a More Effective Version of the Delphic Oracle is only focusing on the Presidential elections! Imagine what could have happened if we tried to predict actual cultural trends based on this! Or used it to play the stock market and guess lottery numbers!

I repeat my point: any serious student of contemporary American politics and culture and religion would be well advised to religiously watch Marvel movies: and again, if I have failed to watch most Marvel movies over the last twenty years, it is because I am simply not a serious student of American politics and culture and religion. 

Of course, I fully admit that Marvel Studios is not what it once was: that like most great media franchises of the 2000s and 2010s it is now more or less on life-support, popping out one creative and box office disappointment after another. Still, I would argue that our failure to be able to rally around a single narrative or value system is itself is part and parcel and proof of our broader crisis of legitimacy. 

On the most fundamental level, the concept of the multiverse as understood in Many Worlds Quantum Theory is nothing less than the absolute, metaphysical denial of the existence of moral responsibility, narrative, and value itself. A multiverse film in which infinite versions of infinite Marvel heroes with different costumes and characters and moralities and lives and choices come together out of necessity simply to prevent the annihilation of all existence tells us, in a way that perhaps nothing else can, that the American people no longer believe that there is any good worth seeking, or any system or narrative or moral system or group of people or structure of power and responsibility capable of attaining it. In such a world, as Nietzsche might have said, Just Continue Existing becomes the whole of the law--which means, it turns out, mostly wallowing in depressive nostalgia in which we divert ourselves from our suffering by endlessly and repetitively simulating all the times in our lives when we still believed in something and felt joy and desire. Hence, Make America Great Again Again. 

I confess that I would quite literally rather be crucified than watch a Marvel multiverse film: which means that I have not watched many Marvel films over the past five years. 2025, though, was in theory a turning point for the franchise, a moment when they stopped making multiverse films and instead started making more explicit nostalgia films, like a Fantastic Four film set in the 1960s, or an Avengers: Doomsday film in which Iron Man is Dr. Doom, or something.

Captain America: Brave New World was also very clearly intended to be a turning point and fresh start in the franchise. It was not, however, nearly as successful as the Fantastic Four movie set in the 1960s: it was, to Kevin Feige's everlasting shame, another critical and commercial disappointment. Nevertheless, in the year since, something rather strange has happened: it has, apparently, become a streaming hit, vastly outpacing all other recent Marvel films. Neither event, I confess, really surprises me: for no Marvel film, no popular film, in the last few decades has been more directly associated in its imagery and artistic choices with contemporary American political events. 

This happened, though, only over the drastic objections of the film's creators. Though originally filmed in 2023 and intended to be released Summer 2024, the film was extensively retooled and reedited, with entire new plotlines and characters added and others removed, in 2024 and 2025: in large part, as many have speculated, around fears that Donald Trump would win reelection in 2024 and the film might be seen as too critical and/or supportive of him. Somewhere around this time, the title of the film was changed from the conspiratorial New World Order to the vaguer dystopian Brave New World. Also around this time, purportedly, the film's villain and President of United States, William Ross, was drastically softened.

When the film was finally belatedly released in February, Donald Trump had already returned to the White House, spurred to DOGE-esque ambition by a wave of popular hope and support; by the present date, that popular hope has already turned nearly universally into different flavors of more or less despairing or self-interested cynicism. Still, the film's meaning and even content has become entirely tied, both critically and popularly, to the figure and persona and image of President Donald J. Trump.

I would argue, then, that Brave New World continues to be essential viewing for anyone interested in understanding contemporary American political and cultural trends: and reflects a moment in which, amid the domestic policy failures and neo-Imperialist successes of the second Trump administration, the general American crisis of legitimacy is reaching greater and greater heights. 

For the reality is that Captain America: Brave New World is the most directly political Marvel film probably since Captain America: Winter Soldier: and like that film represents in its essence an attempt by the American media imagination and narrative and value system to digest and make sense of the present reality of American and global politics. That both films entirely fail to make anything coherent or plausible out of contemporary American politics is itself the greatest proof yet of the fundamental crisis of American institutions and American political life in which we are all, at present, living. 

Poor Anthony Mackie. After more than a decade in Chris Evan's shadow, Captain America: Brave New World was intended as his debut star vehicle, giving him the chance to take up the suit and the shield on his own behalf with the best possible chance of success. That Marvel Studios chose to debut him by making a "paranoid political thriller" film in the style of Chris Evan's most critically acclaimed solo outing, Captain America: Winter Soldier, was likely intended as yet another way to ensure his success. The much bolder choice of making the President of the United States the villain of the film was also likely seen initially, during the long apolitical drought of the Biden years, merely as a bold creative choice--though Ross's character certainly reflects contemporary anxieties over Biden as well.

Still, by 2024 at the latest, the greatest American star of the past fifty years had asserted his overwhelming, magnetic screen presence and power: and even the makers of the film began self-consciously conceiving their President Ross in and through Donald Trump. By the time the film was released, there was simply no doubt in anyone's mind that Harrison Ford was the star of the film, and that he was playing Donald Trump. 

Hence, in the end, the American people were treated to a film in which President Donald J. Trump, an aging firebrand regretful over his past rhetorical excesses, attempts to morally reform and become a figure of international peace and development, but is undone by a terrorist plot carried out by an exploited victim of government overreach who previously, it turns out, kept him from dying of cancer and stole the election for him, causing Trump to lose control of his emotions, imprison an innocent Black man, and almost go to war with Japan, before he is ultimately redeemed by his love for his daughter, resigns from office, and goes to prison. Meanwhile, Black Captain America wanders around and fights Mexican cartel terrorists with the help of a funny Hispanic sidekick.

What makes Captain America: Brave New World compelling viewing, to the extent it is compelling viewing, is how profoundly the film is defined from moment to moment by a profound, internal anxiety and confusion: an anxiety and confusion attaching themselves not merely to the figure of Donald Trump, but to nearly every aspect of American political and institutional life. An extended part of the film is taken up with a nearly incomprehensible naval confrontation between the United States of America and Japan fighting over a critical resource on an island in the Pacific Ocean--and the film legitimately does not know what to make of this, whether to portray the Chinese invasion of Taiwan as a tragedy or a trivial misunderstanding or a battle between good and evil or merely a fun action setpiece, whether the Chinese or the Americans are the good guys or the bad guys, the aggressors or the victims or only the dupes of badguy technological terrorists. 

An even larger part of the film is taken up with an extended plotline in which it is established that an aging Black boxer is the past victim of government experimentation, after which he was framed for a crime he did not commit and then tortured in prison for decades: yet the film mostly spends its time portraying him as a funny old man who likes old music and doesn't know to use cell phones, and who repeats over and over again what a true and loyal American patriot he is and how overjoyed he is to be invited to the White House to meet the President. Then he is mind-controlled and framed for another crime he didn't commit and imprisoned, after which he more or less vanishes from the film until he happily helps the Israeli agent resolve the main plot and then gets back to boxing and making jokes about cell phones.

Nothing reflects this basic confusion, though, more than the film's alleged villains, several of whom were added in post-production. With Donald Trump returning to the White House, the filmmakers, in their infinite wisdom, chose to add extended sequences in which Giancarlo Esposito chews scenery as an evil Mexican cartel warlord holding innocent nuns and orphans hostage. One can feel the palpable relief of the film in these sequences: thank God, at least as Americans we can all agree that these are bad guys! 

Is it a coincidence that less than a year after the release of the film the President of the United States decided to bring a divided people back together by bombing fishing boats and overthrowing the government of Venezuela in the name of fighting drug cartels? 

If you're reading this essay still and don't answer no to that question, well, shame on you.

All this, however, is admittedly straightforward enough, even if confused. Where the film really reaches transcendent heights of twinned Pythian insanity and insight is when we meet the film's ostensible Main Villain, a sneering Tim Nelson with an awful green CGI head, who spends the bulk of his screen time delivering endless exposition as he tries to explain to the audience how he is both the victim of Government Experimentation, and a Anarchic Terrorist, and an Exploited Victim Seeking Revenge, and some kind of metaphor for Internet radicalization who uses smartphone signals to control people's minds, and some kind of metaphor for Biden's dementia and/or the DNC who has kept President Ross from dying of a terminal condition by giving him magical pills, and the means by which Biden stole the 2020 election using mind-control tech, and the politically nihilistic source of all of Donald Trump's character defects who has been secretly mutating him into the Red Hulk and causing him to lose control of his anger so that people will "see him as he is" and stop believing in him and/or the Presidency and/or America. 

And...well, you certainly can't deny all of this is interesting! Nor can you deny the deep, overpowering desperation in the American psyche that fuels all this nonsense: the urgent desire, the urgent need, to find a scapegoat somewhere to blame not just for all the moral errors and character defects of our leaders over the past ten years, but for the creeping popular loss of belief in the military and the government and the Presidency and America itself. And watching the film, you can't help but feel it yourself, this desperation, this need. 

Wouldn't it be a relief if there was some evil genius somewhere, some filmic mad scientist, some Guantanamo Bay detainee, some really good actor with a green CGI head, who was behind all this? Wouldn't it be great if this one guy did steal the 2020 election, and kept knowledge of Biden's declining health from the public, and got innocent Black people put in prison, and got us all addicted to smartphones, and (above all else) sabotaged Donald Trump's efforts at moral self-improvement and international peace?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we did have someone to blame for all this? And most of all, wouldn't it be wonderful if the one person we had to blame for this was in no way a political figure, was in no way a member of any American public institution, the military or the intelligence services or the White House or the Pentagon or the tech companies or the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or Congress or Marvel Studios? If he was just like this guy, who happened to have some Hulk blood spilled on him one time, and wanted revenge? 

Nothing reveals the absolute, pervasive apoliticism of the American people more than our popular attempts to address politics. Here is a film that culminates in a literal battle between the President of the United States and Captain America in the Rose Garden during which the White House is torn to pieces: and the film--and I cannot emphasize this enough--makes nothing of this. The White House, the most globally iconic symbolic representation of American governmental power, is destroyed; the President of the United States is transformed on camera into a gigantic red rage monster; a Black guy called Captain America dressed in Red White and Blue fights him to clear the name of his imprisoned innocent Black comrade; and it all means nothing. This battle is in no way portrayed as the visual emblem of the decline of a great society, or the tearing-off of the mask of American power, or a heroic battle for true American justice against a corrupt system, or the destruction of institutions by well-meaning efforts at reform, or even a crucial battle between two conflicting visions of American society and politics for the future. It is literally just a cool action sequence.

Or rather, what this sequence ultimately is made to mean, extremely abruptly, in its last few minutes, is that despite having stolen the election and used mad science to mind-control his own people and hide his declining health from the public, the President of the United States is, deep down, a good person who loves his daughter.

Americans in 2026, as I have again and again pointed out, are the least political people on the planet: almost entirely because they are the most isolated and atomized people on the planet. We can barely handle personal relationships, let alone political collectivities. Hence, in Captain America: Brave New World, the political is ultimately subordinated entirely to the personal. The question is not: can Donald Trump become a good President? Nor is the question: can Donald Trump be brought to account for his crimes and sins? In the end, the film boils all those questions down to: does Donald Trump love his daughter? 

To which the answer is an obvious no. But wouldn't it be great if Donald Trump did love his daughter? And wouldn't it be great if to prove to her that he really loved her and had really changed and was really a good person now, he voluntarily resigned from office and voluntarily accepted responsibility for his many crimes and voluntarily went to prison? And wouldn't it be great if this all happened offscreen? Wouldn't that be great? Then maybe we could all stop thinking about politics for a while and go to the movies more.

Again, the desperation is palpable: though not at base foolish. It is in fact true that the most important thing about powerful people is their fundamental moral character; that what is most frightening about Biden was merely that he was a corrupt, immoral person in obviously declining health incapable of acting responsibly and controlled by unaccountable others, that what is most frightening Donald Trump is merely the fact that he is a corrupt, immoral person driven by mass media image and fundamentally not in control of his own actions, who has done many harmful things out of vicious whim and might well do almost anything; and most of all, it is in fact true that powerful people, inasmuch as they wield great power they should, can and should and must be held accountable for their sins and crimes and lapses.

What is most striking though, again, is how thoroughly the film, and therefore the American imagination, lacks any image whatsoever for any kind of political solution or even method of addressing any of these stark glaring problems. It would indeed be wonderful if Trump voluntarily stepped down inspired solely by love of his only daughter and a desire to prove his moral worthiness to her. This will not, in fact, happen: nor will Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu or Sam Altman relinquish their power or accept responsibility for their acts inspired by any such private sentiments. Public religion might well bring such men to repentance, as it has in the past; private sentiment never has, and never will.

Here, then, is the American crisis of legitimacy: that consciously and subconsciously, the American people regard both their own leaders and the institutions over which they preside as deeply, profoundly corrupt and immoral and indeed insane, controlled by no religion or morality or rule or law, and capable of unfathomable harms and evils without recourse. Yet for all that, the American people have no image, no narrative, indeed not even any image of a resolution to this basic, fundamental problem. All they can do is hope desperately that somewhere out there, there is a superhero fighting drug cartels, or a terrorist to blame for it all, or a person who has not only power but conscience, who will be inspired by private love to relinquish his power and take responsibility for it all. 

One could well argue that in all of this, the American people are merely seeking a good leader, almost merely a good person. One could also argue that what they are seeking is a hero, another death-dealing, transcendent emblem. On the deepest level of all, perhaps, what they are seeking is a scapegoat: the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. One cannot help wondering just what they will find.

Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought 

This academic volume by Hüseyin Yilmaz provides an interesting analogy and form of analysis to approach the contemporary American crisis of legitimacy: and, importantly, demonstrates both the extraordinary diversity of events and frameworks that can provoke a crisis of legitimacy, and the extraordinary diversity of possible ways to resolve one.

Over the past year, I have read a great number of books on Islam, mostly inspired by a mix of idle curiosity and a conviction that it is somewhat shameful for America and Americans to be so deeply involved with contemporary Islamic states and religious movements while knowing so little about Islam itself. This reading has only cemented my already definite sense that the popular impression of Islam in American and increasingly European life--of an extremely narrow and uniform rule of life defined by a singular, strict, mysteriously repressive code of manners and dress and political life--is almost the opposite of the reality of Islam in history, where it has more commonly been marked by an extraordinary practical flexibility and theoretical diversity to the point of contradiction in every aspect of life and law and morals and rituals and beliefs. 

Perhaps a more neutral way to put the same point would be to say that Islam, like Christianity, has undergone in its fourteen centuries a number of fundamental revolutions and upheavals and divisions and reforms, but that unlike at least some forms of Christianity, these revolutions and upheavals and reforms have left little or nothing of the institutional or dogmatic or ritual structure of the religion untouched.

In a recent previous post, I discussed the contemporary crisis of Islam in post-colonial states such as Pakistan, which has hinged on the total annihilation of not only the Caliphate but all other pre-modern and pan-Islamic legal and political structures, as well as the superseding of more popular, Sufi-inflected authorities and forms of piety with barer, more juridical, more Scriptural, and more broadly "Salafi" practices and authorities. 

This is far from the first such crisis to afflict Islam as a whole, though: in some ways, an even more extreme version of the same thing came with the Mongol Invasions and the practical annihilation of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad by the nomadic conquerors of the steppe. As discussed in previous posts, this crisis led not only to the destruction of the (already much weakened) pan-Islamic religious authority of the Caliphate, but also to the fragmenting or destruction of virtually every pre-Mongol Muslim polity. What filled this vacuum was not only a chaotic diversity of Mongol-descended or -inspired warlords and dynasties and micro-states, each claiming some kind of political "Khanate" in the image of the great Genghis Khan, but also a proliferating diversity of Sufi orders and sects. 

As discussed extensively in previous posts, these Sufi orders represented a fundamental and unique form both of religiosity and of politics: generally well-organized and well-armed religious brotherhoods initiating members from every layer of society, promising some form of intuitive and internal (as opposed to external and dogmatic) knowledge of God, operating according to a strict hierarchy centered upon a usually hereditary dynasty of Shaykhs including famous saints or friends of God whose tombs and bodies served as sites of power and the locuses for popular religious festivals, and engaging not only in ritual meditation and worship but also at times in practices deliberately designed to cut them off from juridical Islamic practice, including in extreme cases the consumption of alcohol or human flesh or more commonly in some form of ritual worship of the Shaykh as an embodiment of the divine. 

From central "orthodox" juridical perspectives of later Muslims, as well as from the perspectives often of modern scholars, these orders have seemed rather strange and inexplicable: yet the strength of the scholarship both of Azfar Moin and of Yilmaz is to understand Sufi orders not only in the private terms of post-modern religion and with reference to concepts of ecstatic experiences of the divine or intuitive as opposed to dogmatic knowledge, but more with reference to the universally public and political nature of Islam and hence the intertwined political and religious crisis of Islam in the post-Mongol era. 

As Azfar Moin has argued very effectively in his scholarship, the troubles of post-Mongol Islamic states were not merely a military or organizational crisis, but a fundamental religious crisis of legitimacy. After all, the Mongol politico-religious order, premised upon a direct, universal grant of authority by Heaven or God to Genghis Khan and his heirs, had in straightforward terms triumphed over the politico-religious order of Islam, premised upon a direct, universal grant of authority by God to Muhammed and his. In simple terms, the Khan had defeated the Caliph, and trampled him to death with horses: and so the question of Islamic religion was frequently not how to fit new Mongol and Sufi forms of rule and ritual practice in with the religious and juridical order established by Muhammed, but whether that order had not in fact been superseded altogether by something new. 

Hence the concept, explored by Moin in his scholarship, of the brutal, genocidal burner and builder of mosques Timur, and later imitators thereof, as a "Lord of Conjunction," the builder or heralder of a new cosmic order replacing that inaugurated by Muhammed a thousand years before. And hence, too, the proliferating religious authority of Sufi Orders, promising forms of religious knowledge and power superior to those accessible through the juridical or Scriptural traditions of Islam, political forms of law and conquest superior to those accessible through the authority of Muslim rulers and warlords, and following "saintly" leaders not infrequently imagined to possess both supreme political authority over the earth, and identical or even superior authority to the Prophet Muhammed himself.

While Moin's scholarship has mostly focused on the Mughal realms of India and Central Asia and the new Safavid state of Iran, formed out of and based on a fanatical Sufi order, Yilmaz's extensive work centers on the Islamic state that would ultimately supersede and outlast all others: the Ottoman Empire, emerging chaotically out of the "gazi" Turkic Muslim pirates and warlords of Asia Minor, eventually becoming the super-state of the Early Modern world, annexing both the entirety of the Byzantine Empire and the bulk of the Muslim world and thereby claiming the offices of both Roman Emperor and Caliph of Islam, repeatedly threatening Western Europe through a series of famous invasions throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and even in its decline enduring to the end of WW1 and the rise of the modern state of Turkey. Virtually nothing, I would argue, about either Islamic or European history over the past 500 years can be understood without reference to the Ottoman Empire.

And yet...as Yilmaz points out again and again in his in-depth and fascinating, though not always insightful or perspicuous study, the Ottoman Empire had in the terms of classical Islam law and history neither an honorable pedigree nor a valid claim to supreme authority. The Ottoman House of Osman was in origins merely one of many minor Turkic warbands engaging in warfare and and piracy and slave-raiding on the frontier with the Byzantine Empire in the previous Roman agricultural heartland of Asia Minor. Even when fictitious ties of blood were eventually claimed for its ruling dynasty, they were generally only with past Turkic and Mongol rulers, and not with any respectable Arab Muslim lineages. As Yilmaz concedes, of all the many titles held by the Ottoman Sultan, for most of its history the most basic and widely-used one was merely the Mongol title of Khan. What then could possibly explain, let alone justify, the rise of this backwater band of Turks to the supreme rule of Islam?

Perhaps most surprisingly from a modern Muslim perspective, where nostalgia for the Ottoman Caliphate continues to multiply in media and television and politics alike from Turkey to Indonesia and back again, the Ottoman Sultans possessed no valid claim to the universal Caliphate in the terms of classical Islamic law: nor, for most of their history, did they even pretend to. After all, as Yilmaz again and again points out, and as many of the Ottoman political and religious authors he chronicles openly acknowledged, every Medieval Islamic school of jurisprudence had insisted that one of the absolute legal conditions for holding the title of Caliph was descent from the Arabic clan of Muhammed, the Quraysh. The Ottoman Sultans never at any point claimed such descent, even via legends or legal fictions: and yet from the 16th century on they employed the title of Caliph as one among their many titles, and by the late 19th century were acknowledged as the valid holders of the office by virtually all Muslims save for the Shi'a and the radical Salafis of Arabia.

Put in simple terms, Yilmaz's goal is to explain how this happened: and though he does entirely achieve this goal, he does provide a great deal of critical information for how political power was conceived of by Ottoman thinkers and Sufi orders alike, and how this nexus of beliefs aided and supported the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps his most important insight is merely to note that the term Caliph was itself, during this period, the subject of a rather radical shift in meaning: so that what classical Islamic jurists meant by Caliph was not at all what Ottoman political writers and Sufis understood by the term, even or especially where the latter were juridically-informed and followers of Medieval schools themselves. In other words, what happened to the Muslim concept of Caliph in the 16th century was very much what I have described in the past as naturally and necessarily happening, save for extraordinary divine intervention or extraordinary mental effort, to every term and concept in every religious or political or intellectual system in all of human history merely due to the passage of time and the inevitable changing of generations. Regardless of the intellectual commitment (or lack thereof) of Ottoman writers to classical Islamic law, they unavoidably existed in an almost entirely different political and religious milieu to their predecessors: and so unavoidably exposited the same terms and concepts, with varying degrees of conscious or unconscious innovation, but with very different meanings.

The Arab term Caliph, as Yilmaz explains, means merely "successor" or "deputy": and in the early Medieval juridical schools was exposited ubiquitously as "successor or deputy of Muhammed," and even then not in the sense of successor to his full authority and Prophethood, but merely in the sense of partial successor to his political and juridical role as leader of the whole Muslim community within the Scriptural and juridical framework of established Shari'a law. 

However theoretically limited the Caliph's authority was in this framework, however subject to Islamic Scripture and law, in practice this position of political monarch of Islam, with de facto supreme legislative, judicial, and executive authority, was a powerful and coveted position. And so, as Yilmaz again points out, most discussion of the role of Caliph in early juridical texts centered not on defining its role or powers, but merely in chronicling the legal requirements for gaining and holding the title: with jurists offering various theoretical frameworks within which the many, many Caliphal claimants could frame and justify and hopefully resolve their conflicts, but in practice often acting as partisans for one claimant or other. 

As Islam splintered from a single state into rival dynasties of Umiyad and Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphs frequently rocked by internal civil wars and troubled with sectarian religious groups denying the authority of their dynastic Caliphs and instead asserting the hidden authority of Imams or buried Alawid lineages, jurists did their best to trim these conflicts down into a few manageable schools and legal traditions, ultimately giving birth to the recognizable varieties of modern Sunni and Shi'a Islam. Even the reduction of the Abbasid Caliphs to a politically powerless, ceremonial role within the borders of proliferating Turkic and Egyptian emirates did not pose an insuperable problem for jurists willing to accept a reasonable prudential gap between theory and practice.

Yet the fact remained that none of these schools could account for the realities of religion and politics following the Mongol invasions, let alone the claim of the Turkic Osmanites to the title of Caliph of Islam. As Azfar Moin in particular has rather polemically asserted, most Early Modern Muslim states were neither "Sunni" nor "Shi'a" in the terms of either the Medieval or later consensus juridical traditions: rather, the concepts of religion and politics within which they situated their own authority were drawn mostly from neither the theory nor the practice of past Muslim states, but from the Mongol Khanates and the Sufi orders.

What Yilmaz accomplishes is mostly just to prove this point by exhaustively reviewing the political literature of the Ottoman Empire at its height, and showing that even extremely literate authors, and indeed even trained jurists, reflected the reality that the House of Osman had risen to power in large part through the support of the Sufi orders of Asia Minor. The Ottoman Sultan might be merely one gazi fighter of many enacting jihad on the borders of Islam: but he was nonetheless the "Friend of the Friends of God," an ally and supporter fervently endowing shrines and tombs and orders and granted by the hereditary Shaykhs both practical support and theoretical legitimation. Innumerable legendary accounts exist of the Ottoman Sultan being either recognized as a destined agent of God by, or even directly deputized authority from, the leader of a Sufi Order--and then being aided by the alleged magical or divine powers possessed by these Shaykhs and saints.

In this, as Yilmaz points out, the concept of "Caliphate" most relevant to the Ottoman Empire was not the juridical concept of a successor of Muhammed as public and political ruler of Islam, but the (originally Quranic) concept of Adam as the Caliph of God on earth, deputized and granted supreme authority over the whole world and even the angels. In the theology of most Sufi orders, this was interpreted not as a generalized dominion of humanity over the world, but as a specific role granted to an individual. This idea was associated with the concept of qutb or Pole: a perfect human being perfectly imaging divine attributes and so in a genuine sense holding the whole cosmos together. This concept was in turn frequently made the same as that of Imam in more Shi'a traditions, the successor of Muhammed in his full religious authority and generally also in his perfect humanity, reflection of divine attributes, infallibility, and impeccability. 

From a specific idea of a successor to Muhammed, then, Sufi thinkers and Ottoman political theorists alike developed a much looser and more generalized concept of a succession of perfect human beings embodying divinity and possessing both intuitive knowledge of God and sole, legitimate political authority on earth. extending from the beginning of time to the end of it. This lineage of Caliphs or Poles, it was true, had included both the recognized Prophets and the Prophet Muhammed: but it had not stopped there, but continued in operation, not through the public political Caliphate of Islam but through some more or less hidden lineage of saints or Imams or Shaykhs (generally beginning with Ali but sometimes passing through the other Rashidun Caliphates) to the particular leader of a particular Sufi Order.

The advantage of this concept for the practical situation of Islam after the Mongol Invasions should, I think, be obvious. Despite the dissolution or discrediting of the previous recognized religious and political authorities of Islam, and the general division of the Islamic world into numerous competing political and religious domains, Islamic societies still possessed a deeply felt need for a truly universal and divine political authority on earth. Failing to find this universal authority existing in fact, they transferred it to the more or less hidden and private realm of the spirit and the order--in this, of course, following earlier sectarian groups that had rejected the authority of claimed Islamic rulers in favor of their own sectarian leaders and frequently continued to follow them even after the "occultation" of these leaders into a hidden realm of the spirit. While members of particular orders might identify the sole Pole or Caliph with their own particular religious leader, this was done usually in secret--and a disagreement over precisely where the singular Pole might be found did not necessarily need to lead to the denial that he existed somewhere. 

Of course, on the other hand, the positing of such a sole universal source of legitimate authority also posed practical problems for Muslim rulers. Not only was their own authority subject to being undercut by practically any leader of an order or charismatic figure who might claim to be or even be seen as the sole legitimate authority on earth, but the question of their own legitimacy in the eyes of this leader would also constantly be present both to them and to many of their subjects. 

As Yalmiz chronicles, the nascent Ottoman regime seems to have been obsessed with the religious threat posed by the new Safavid regime of Iran--whose Shah was himself the head of a hereditary Sufi Order and therefore a claimant to divine authority--to a degree far beyond any conceivable military threat. In Ottoman political writings, it is the Safavids who were the true eschatological evil that the Empire existed to counter--not the Christian nations of Europe, posed merely as the indistinguishable realm of unbelief destined for conquest. The reason for this, as Yalmiz points out, is relatively straightforward. The Ottoman Sultan's status as a gazi warrior fighting and conquering the unbeliever was a powerful source of legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects and other Muslims--while the Safavids by their very existence posed an immediate threat to the divine legitimacy of Ottoman power. 

The Ottoman approach to dealing with the problem of gaining and keeping legitimacy in such an environment was in the end an intelligent and successful one. At the beginning, the House of Osman ostentatiously posed itself as the patron and supporter of any and every Sufi order, the "Friend of the Friends of God" to be relied upon for practical support and homage alike. By doing this, they ensured in theory their own legitimacy in the eyes of God, since whoever the legitimate Pole or Caliph or Imam might happen to be, he would be a friend and supporter who would happily delegate power over the earth to them while he managed the affairs of the cosmos as a whole. They also more practically ensured that regardless of the religious commitments of their subjects and the political power of the orders, they would be seen as legitimate.

Of course, as Yalmiz also chronicles, this did not always happen. As the Ottoman Empire grew and expanded and importantly transitioned from a predominantly rural and Turkic state to an agricultural and urbanized "Rum" Empire centered on Constantinople and the former Byzantine Empire, the Sultan faced challenges and rebellions from numerous rural Orders incensed at the arrogance and religious violations of the leaders of the House of Osman, who drank wine and kept harems and styled themselves Emperors of Rome. As Yilmaz points out, at least some leaders of Sufi-inspired rebellions seem to have openly claimed the title of Pole or Caliph for themselves, and declared their own authority, not under, but over the Sultan and the whole earth. 

In the long run, though, the approach taken by the Ottoman Sultans ultimately ensured their success. For every Order rejecting their authority, there were plenty of other Orders willing to uphold it in exchange for lavish support: and in the meantime, the House of Osman had continued to draw to itself nearly every title and means of legitimacy available, including even that of Caliph. Ottoman political writers gradually began to assert, not merely the Sultan's status as a gazi warrior and "Friend of the Friends of God," but his own status as reformer of Islam and Lord of Conjunction and Restorer of the Age, and, increasingly, openly or implicitly, his own supreme power as Caliph of God. 

Hence, when the Ottoman Sultans claimed the title Caliph, Yilmaz argues, they were not claiming to be merely the successors of the Abbasids and the Ummayads to the role of successor to Muhammed and guarder of the shrines of Mecca juridically required to be descended from the Quraysh: they were claiming to be the sole legitimate deputies of God on earth, whose authority came from direct divine grant and/or their nature as perfect human beings and/or their embodiment of divine attributes. The Ottoman Empire at its height was increasingly conceived in eschatological terms, the final and promised dynasty of divine authority on earth that would last forever and rule the whole earth. At this point, the claims of individual Sufi Shaykhs and saints to higher power hardly mattered.

There is much to Yilmaz's account that I am leaving out--mostly the more abstract and juridical side of Ottoman political writer's speculations, particularly those who had served as bureaucrats in the Ottoman regime, and their views both of the requirements for Sultanic authority and the means of establishing it. 

One more relevant point from this part of the book, though, is that, as the supremacy of the House of Osman continued to grow, conflicts over succession became ever more frequent, resulting eventually in an established system in which the many sons of the former Sultan fought to the death in mass civil wars to establish their claims. In this milieu, questions arose very naturally over whether there was in fact any way to establish in advance which of the claimants to Sultanic authority might be the one chosen by God, or whether one simply had to wait and see who happened to win the civil war. 

In some sources, this was framed as a debate between rival schools establishing political power on the basis of Grace, Merit, or Subjugation: but as Yilmaz again points out, nearly every political writer accepted all three conditions in some form, and nearly every one recognized how easy it was after the fact to recognize that the person who had gained power through Subjugation had in fact also been granted Merit thanks to unmerited divine Grace. In the views of most writers, since rule descended solely from God, it would be in fact wrong for either previous Sultans or bystanders to try to anticipate God's choice.

What all this hopefully establishes is, once again, the extraordinary variety of ways of establishing political legitimacy both practically and via religion. The Ottoman House of Osman arose in an environment where legitimacy had been diffused almost to the lowest level possible into individual provinces and states and religious entities--and yet it ultimately formed an extremely centralized state that claimed authority over all Muslims the world over, and had its claim recognized by many. It did this not just because of its successes on the battlefield over Christian and rival Muslim states--though of course it could not have flourished without these--but because of its extraordinarily flexible approach to accruing legitimacy and relating to potential threats. Rather than treat the Sufi Orders as rivals, the Ottomans monopolized them as allies and supporters, trading both resources and symbolic submission for support and legitimation. Rather than merely picking one Order to support, as the Safavids did, and opposing all others, the Ottomans did their best to support and gain the support of them all. Rather than merely affirm the authority claims of these Orders, the Ottomans gradually took over and assimilated these claims. And all the while, of course, the Ottomans were drawing on and freely contradicting innumerable other traditions and sources of legitimacy, ranging from Sunni Muslim juridical authorities to Turkic epics to hadith traditions to eschatological hopes to, ultimately, the office and legacy of the Roman Emperor himself. 

In this sense, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most successful and long-lasting Muslim regimes of all time in a real sense not despite its fundamental original lack of legitimacy, but because of it. 

Of course, there are certainly reasons to not want to emulate the Ottoman Empire in any or all of the above; including their constant civil wars, autocratic system, harem politics, fundamental economic reliance on the slave trade, fundamental political and military reliance on slavery, and ultimate decline and internal take-over by European powers. Still, open imitation of the Ottoman Empire is one of the oldest traditions in European politics--and even has made its mark on American politics through the Masons and others. 

Regardless if one sees the Ottomans as models to be emulated, or a warning to be avoided, though, the point still stands. Legitimizing power is something that has been done by human governments and societies since the beginning of time. There are many, many ways to approach the problem, religious and theoretical and economic and self-interested and heroic and epic and mystical: and in this realm, flexibility and self-contradiction are not always insuperable obstacles to success. 

So what approach will America take?

One Battle After Another

Well, perhaps the real threat is that America will take none of them. One of the most surprising filmic successes of 2025 was the Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another, which in the eyes of many critics seemed to meet the needs of the political moment as much as Captain America: Brave New World had failed to.

I watched One Battle After Another, and I enjoyed it. Paul Thomas Anderson is an old-school director, which means that unlike the people making franchise films today he still remembers how to frame a shot and use lighting and edit an action sequence to make it exciting. In all these ways, the film is a rousing and enjoyable success--a far better action movie than anything else in cinemas this year.

Nevertheless, what struck me about the film as I experienced it, as opposed to how the critics interpreted it, is how similar it was in fundamental ways to Captain America: Brave New World: and how in many ways, its fundamental political vision was rather less coherent, less realistic, and certainly far less hopeful than that piece of dreck.

One Battle After Another is rather easier to summarize than Captain America: Brave New World, though also (as many people have pointed out) almost equally puzzling in many respects. 

The film, though set in the modern day with contemporary technology, posits that sixteen years before the modern day, it was the 1960s. Or, at least, 16 years before 2025, part-way through Barack Obama's first term, there were active Leftist liberationist terrorist groups planting bombs in banks and liberating people from ICE camps all while evincing 1960s language and slogans and racial attitudes and ideology.

This apparent reverse-anachronistic time warp has puzzled a large number of critics and analysts alike: but of course is absolutely key to understanding the film. The simplest way to approach this facet is to note that both Paul Thomas Anderson and his star Leonardo Di Caprio were born in the 1970s, and are Gen Xers: and that One Battle After Another, despite being theoretically a film set in the 2020s about Zoomers dealing with their Millennial parents, is of course in reality yet another in a very, very, very, very, very long line of films and other media by Gen Xers about their parents, the Baby Boomer generation.

This choice, though, is appropriate on many levels besides the biographical. Few things have played a more decisive role in Americans' concepts of narrative and value than the overwhelming, ubiquitous, endless dominance of Baby Boomers in media and film over the past eighty or so years. This dominance, it should be clearly noted, has not been merely or primarily a dominance of actual Baby Boomers in positions of wealth or wielding power and institutional responsibility, though it has to some extent become that. For most of the period of Baby Boomer dominance, the world was still largely run, as it always must be, by members of previous generations: and younger generations have long since taken over at least most of the lower positions of all organizational totem poles.

The real dominance of the Baby Boomer generation in America--a dominance frankly unprecedented in the history of the human race--comes in their cultural power: the degree to which, for the past 80 years, Americans have thought and felt in terms of the images and values and narratives from the Baby Boomer's lifetime. Whether one was fifteen years old in 1975 or in 1985 or in 1995 or 2005 or 2015, you could not help but thinking and feeling and framing your life in terms of the stories of teen rebellion and anarchic joy and electric music and peace and free love, couched as often as not explicitly in terms of the artists and songs and clothes and aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s. 

No generation, it should be said, was so shaped by this trend as Gen X: nor has any generation ever been so thoroughly convinced of the rightness and value of their parent's experiences and narratives and values as Gen X. This conviction has generally been more a matter of faith and flattery and imitation and submission to authority than any kind of understanding.

I would argue that virtually all Gen X art is, in one way another, a reflection on or imitation of the art and lives of Baby Boomers and their idols. This means that it is virtually impossible to grow up in America without absorbing some version of precisely the same story that One Battle After Another tells: which is, basically, the story of a young person struggling to understand the bizarre, uncouth, violent, sexual, and fundamentally alien experiences that have entirely defined the lives and psyches of their (usually rather distant, self-centered, unloving, and/or actually absent) parents, rebelling against them, but ultimately choosing to embrace and affirm their parents' values precisely via shared affirmations of some kind of rebellion.

The really funny thing about One Battle After Another is that it is one of the gentlest versions of this story ever put to film. Leonardo Di Caprio's father figure is hapless, out of it, and addicted to alcohol and marijuana but fundamentally present and loving to his daughter Willa: and his daughter, to my great surprise watching the film, is never seriously tempted to reject him or what he stands for. At the end of the film, after affirming both him and the movement of which he was a part and killing a white supremacist, we find Willa helping her father work his smartphone before heading off, with his permission, to attend a protest in Oakland, California. 

The film, admittedly, does function in part as a critique of the Leftist '60s Boomer revolutionaries it affirms, though in a rather strange way. This critique may be most clearly summed up in the treatment of our young protagonist's mother, Perfidia Beverlyhills (the characters all have names like this). Perfidia's revolutionary fixation on guns and explosives, the film clearly indicates, is first and foremost a racialized sex thing--one that leads her first to a sexual relationship with the evil General Lockjaw, and ultimately to sell out the revolutionary group entirely and abandon her husband and young daughter. At the end of the story, she writes a note to her daughter apologizing for all of this, and saying she hopes that they can one day be together as a family.

This is, really, a rather weird viewpoint on Leftist revolutionary violence--one that really only makes sense retrospectively from a Gen X or later perspective. The 1960s, it is true, did feature racial civil rights and revolutionary movements, Leftist revolutionary movements, feminist revolutionary movements, and sexual revolutionary movements--but these were not, in the 1960s, at any point at all the same thing. Feminists were almost always opposed to sexual revolutionaries, who were in turn in most cases the bitterest enemies both of the (very socially conservative) racial justice and Black power movements and of Soviet-inspired Leftist movements. 

But then, all these movements were defined and led, not by Baby Boomers, but by the generations before them--just as the musicians that Baby Boomers idolized were mostly from older generations. It was the vague Baby Boomer kids above all who drifted vaguely between these movements, taking some or all of them in, and ultimately came away with, and passed down to their kids, only the vague sense both that it was all a lot of fun, and that it was undoubtedly deep down all about sex.

In any case, One Battle After Another ends up being about as socially conservative as a Gen X film celebrating the allegedly sexual nature of Leftist revolution can be. The real flaw of both Perfidia and the rest of her movement, it is implied, was always and all along their lack of commitment to family, tradition, and the next generation. Perfidia comes from a long family tradition of radical Black revolution, and is aided in her childrearing by her mother and grandparents: it is she who rejects both legacies and brings them to an end. Similarly, the Leftist revolutionary movement of the Obama years is portrayed as more or less nonexistent 16 years later, the result of the fundamental inability of its leaders to pass on their ideals to the next generation.

This view of the Baby Boomers primarily not as the originators of revolutionary ideas or actions, but as the generation that took over existing movements, sexualized them, betrayed them, and brought them to an end is in fact about as accurate as could be portrayed simply on film. 

The main exception to this dim view, oddly enough, is the existence in the present day of networks of Hispanic resistance tied to the Catholic Church. Benicio Del Toro gives a rousing performance as a Karate sensei who directs his large family and extremely well-networked Hispanic Catholic community in rescuing undocument immigrants and aging Leftists alike and sheltering them in the local Catholic parish. While Leonardo Di Caprio's aging white revolutionary is isolated, paranoid, drug-addled, and incompetent, Del Toro is committed, networked, healthy, strong, resourceful, brave, and effective. In the film's strangely socially conservative Leftist world, family and community (and possibly religion) really are the keys to the revolution.

In all this, we might well see the existence and positive reception of One Battle After Another as the emblems, not merely of a crisis of legitimacy, but of at least one way out of it: embracing an idea of Leftist revolution with more room for family and community and possibly even religion than the actual ones that have existed in the '60s and since.

There are a few key problems with this reading, however. The first and most obvious is simply that the film's idea of Leftist revolution is an absolute void of content. The film likes the aesthetics of '60s Leftism, but it mostly portrays it, as already stated, as some kind of strange racialized sex thing. The film recognizes that this is problematic: but has nothing really to take its place other than a loose dedication to family and community. 

This is not, to say the least, the stuff of which revolutions are made: nor is it even an ethos capable of granting any legitimacy whatsoever to leaders or rulers or even politicians. Inasmuch as the film gives any advice to people seeking power, it ends up being the same advice delivered in Captain America: Brave New World: love your daughter and get out of politics. At the end of the film, our revolutionary hero is parked on the couch learning to use an iPhone while his daughter attends a protest. Is this the germ of the society of the future? 

No.

The second reason why the film acts rather as a sign of the existence of a crisis of legitimacy than a means to resolve it is that its entire idea of Leftism, its entire view of politics and institutions and the world itself, is premised on the absolute evil of more or less all the actually-existing political institutions of America. 

The real protagonist of our story, it should be noted, the real driver of the plot and its events, is not the ineffectual Leftist father Leonardo Di Caprio, but his romantic and paternal rival, General Lockjaw. General Lockjaw is admittedly a great satirical representation of a military man, in the best tradition of actual Leftist art going back to Dr. Strangelove and MASH. Sexually and racially obsessed with Perfidia, he allows her to humiliate him again and again, and ultimately is left behind as well: but it is he who runs the world, in the past and the present: and it is he who is the actual biological father of Willa. 

Ultimately, the most effective thing about the film One Battle After Another, and the heart of its worldview, is not its portrait of loveable aging Boomer revolutionaries trying to convey to their kids how fun and sexy it was to blow things up: it is in the aesthetically and literally overpowering representation of military and police and government and financial power in America. The film's actual aesthetic is not anarchistic and Leftist, but an endless panorama of prison camps and men in uniform and barking dogs and interrogators and streets filled with tear gas and truncheons. At the beginning of the film, violent, lawless soldiers and police officers acting at the behest of government and financial power are rounding up and imprisoning and torturing innocent citizens and migrants: sixteen years later, they are still doing so: at the end of the film, they are still doing so. 

The main reason One Battle After Another got so much attention in 2025 is that its treatment of the government indiscriminately rounding up and cruelly abusing migrants seemed suddenly politically relevant once the second Trump administration made it a partisan issue again. But then, as the film notes, this was going on long before the second Trump administration. Whether the film's proem is set during the 1960s or only Obama's first term, it was certainly going on then. At least within the parameters of the film's world, it was always going on: and always will be.

For One Battle After Another, then, the rise and fall of Leftist movements, the birth and dissolution of families, and generational conflict and reconciliation all exist within the parameters set by this overwhelming and evil power bestriding the world like Leviathan.

It is for this reason fundamentally that the film's Leftist politics is so devoid of content: because in the world of One Battle After Another politics as such is defined entirely with reference to this overwhelming violent, militarized power. Actual '60s Leftists were inspired by actual coherent ideological visions of a better world that they wanted to bring about or enact here and now: whether that better world was a futuristic utopia or a Black Nationalist state or an anarcho-syndicalist network of communes or only the Soviet Union. The revolutionaries of One Battle After Another, though, have no positive vision or goals at all. All they have is the present vision of what they oppose, and its total dominance of them and the world.

Indeed, so dominant is the evil militaristic power of America that it both constitutes and in a real sense contains all its own opposition. The Leftist revolutionaries of the 1960s opposed it: but they were also enamored of it, employing its weapons, obsessed with its violence. Perfidia the Leftist revolutionary wanted nothing more than to have sex with General Lockjaw the militarist pig; and General Lockjaw wanted nothing more than to have sex with her too. 

In a key scene, General Lockjaw confronts his daughter by Perfidia, Willa: and when Willa denounces her mother as a rat and a traitor, Lockjaw angrily refutes her. "She was a warrior, a righteous warrior of freedom. And she fucked the weak." This is the ethos, the film proposes, on which American society and all American institutions and indeed American culture itself is centered: and it is equally present both in the "right-wing" military and the "left-wing" revolutionaries.

Of course, the film ultimately suggests, or rather hopes, that some more effective way might be found to resist those institutions founded on making perpetual, violent war against the weak. Perhaps if the aging Leftist revolutionary can stop getting high all the time and learn to use an iPhone? Perhaps if the mixed-race teenager goes to more protests? Perhaps if she reunites with her mother? Maybe the Hispanic Catholics can get involved...?

But all the while, a random group of comical white supremacist businessmen are ordering around the General, and General is ordering around the military, and the military are ordering around the cops: and the are all tracking you all the time via your smartphone, and if they want you imprisoned or dead, you pretty much will be. 

In the end, then, One Battle After Another is most effective at presenting, not a hopeful vision of a new world, but a deeply dystopian view of our current world. All our leaders and our institutions are enslaved to a primal, sexualized, racialized, bottomless lust for violence against the weak. And what can we do about it?

Seriously, what can we do about it? The film knows even less than Captain America.

Eddington

What is really going on here? Why have we all suddenly agreed that all of our institutions are enslaved to absolute evil, inspired by bottomless malice, actively harmful to life itself, without having any positive vision at all to present even as a point of contrast? Or, put a different way: what went wrong?

This is not a partisan question: Leftists and conservatives alike are asking this question right now, in slightly different terms.

There are different possible answers to this mystery, of course. One is the more or less economic answer: that life has been getting steadily harder for most Americans for decades. Another is the Imperial answer: that the fundamental social contract on which the American Empire was founded, that the middle classes and up would be allowed to share in the plunder of global rule and gain moderate wealth and moderate status and above all security through their participation in the system, has broken down. Another still is what may be called the Trump answer: namely, that what has happened is that our institutions have all been taken over quite recently by evil fascists. Another still is what may be called the generational answer: namely, that younger people are incompetent, entitled, anti-social dweebs enslaved to half-digested critical ideologies. Another still is what may be called the social answer: namely, that people have gotten so isolated and atomized by technology and economics that they can no longer conceive of institutions or common life in anything but hostile and threatening terms. Another still is what may be called (depending on the precise viewpoint) the Internet or smartphone or pandemic answer: namely, that all of us, including both our leaders and ordinary people, have quite recently gone stark raving mad.

There is truth to all these answers, as a matter of fact. Still, the more truth is granted to one or another of them, the less easy it gets, in many ways, to put them together into one clear causative picture.

What is going on here?

To begin to understand this question, a truly committed thinker might do well to turn to the best and most insightful political film of 2025: you know, the one that everyone hated: Eddington.

I should preface this by saying that if you, like most people, didn't like Eddington, if you found it puzzling or annoying or obnoxious or even offensive, I both entirely sympathize with you and I don't trust you.

The reason for both of my reactions of course is the same: namely that Eddington is one of the only films I've seen in the 2020s that is even remotely redolent of the actual 2020s, and perhaps the only film that has had any genuine insight into what is actually going on and what got us here. But also that what it portrays is deeply, deeply unpleasant on nearly every level.

Eddington is another high-concept film from Ari Aster, the wunderkind director of Midsommar, Hereditary, and Beau is Afraid. I have not seen any of Ari Aster's other films: I once tried to watch Beau is Afraid, but couldn't get through the first half-hour. I am, as stated above, profoundly lazy and uncommitted in my search for the truth.

The "high-concept" Aster has chosen to tackle in Eddington was "Pandemic Western." This is an inspired choice in a number of ways that are as elusive as David Lynch's famous idea fish.

As already stated, Jean Baudrillard saw the desert as the primal scene of America: was struck above all else by the desert towns of the American Southwest, miraculous materializations of distant European and East Coast houses and stores and institutions by sheer force of will in a place that desiccates and fossilizes them and where life itself struggles to survive. This sense of the alienness and hostility of the natural world, constantly working to break down and destroy the brittle, artificial zone of human habitation is a constant, pervasive presence in Eddington, and is key to the film's atmosphere.

Then, of course, there is the Western ethos itself, centered on a zone of chaos and lawlessness and conflict on the very frontier of something new. For the world of Eddington, this "something new" is no longer geographical but temporal: it is quite simply the post-pandemic world of the 2020s, the world we are all living in. Putting the birth of this strange entity into the terms of American frontier conflict gives a dramatic and aesthetic shape to something that has otherwise gone entirely unrecorded in American art and even American consciousness.

Finally, there is the American Hero himself, the center of both the American Western and American art and religion as a whole. Having just written a lengthy tirade on this figure, I will refrain from discussing him much here: only pausing to say that the fundamental ambiguity and even self-contradiction of this figure in American art, caught between the privatized Protestant conscience and bottomless violence, between being the locus of cult and community and being its absolute antithesis, between defending life and dealing death, between being alive and being dead, provides a very potent and perspicuous way to read the travails of the human psyche during the global Pandemic. 

For after all, isn't this really what happened to us all, or at least most of us, during the Pandemic: that we were for the first time in our lives really and truly transformed into heroes, into the thing we had always worshipped and served and wanted to be, into absolutely isolated individuals standing completely apart from society and religion and politics and relating to others only through the cultic relations of relationless sex and presenceless conflict, that we became dead men imprisoned in the ground and worshipped only via text and images?

The most powerful thing about Eddington is its ability to capture the terrifying chasmic moment at which isolated people fell into the abyss of Internet unreality: and the even more terrifying moment when that Internet unreality manifested and materialized itself in the real world. But this Internet nonsense, alas, was not new at all: it was in fact only the same American narratives and myths we had all already absorbed all our lives. And these myths were stories about isolated individuals: legends of heroes...

But I see I am getting a bit ahead of myself. The ostensible hero of Eddington, played by Joaquin Phoenix in another unsettlingly effective performance, is Sheriff Joe Cross, who at first appears to us as exactly the positive, mythic version of the small-town law enforcement agent, embodied perhaps most timelessly by Andy Griffith. He is, or at least appears to be, a kind, upright, moral man who cares for others and stands fundamentally for common sense and common decency. 

Even at the film's beginning, though, something has already gone wrong with the script. A global pandemic is taking place: everyone is required by law to quarantine away from each other, to wear masks and socially distance everywhere and always in the presence of others. However these measures might be conceived of in public health or virological terms, in aesthetic and mythic terms, they all have very clear, very overwhelming meaning: one constantly present to me, like I suspect nearly all of us, throughout the actual real-life pandemic. 

A person who spends their days and nights locked in their house, a private space barricaded against all others, emerging in public only rarely and fearfully and with their face covered with white gauze, is symbolically simply the annihilation of presence, relationship, community, and love: an emblem of anti-humanity if ever there was one. Some alien creature is out there; you cannot see them at all, most of the time; you know only that they are hiding from you, from your presence, your touch, your breath, the deadly contagion possibly pouring from your skin; but you know also that they are thinking of you, obsessing over you, watching you through texts and images, judging your compliance with their anti-social code. Have you stood closer than six feet to another? Have you looked into another's eyes? Have you let another see your mouth? Have you touched another, breathed on another? If you have (and we all know you have) you have conspired to murder them and their loved ones. Rarely, you do see them, shuffling shamefacedly down the street, their eyes lowered: and when they see you, they shy away from you, they stand as far from you as possible, they hide their faces: only their eyes are visible, in which you can see a bottomless fear. 

When, that is, they are not lashing out at you in a rage born of that fear. The film Eddington starts with a scene that should be familiar to nearly all of us from the years of the Pandemic: a grocery store in which one person, an old man, is refusing to put on a mask due to neurotic fear, insisting he can't breathe, practically having a panic attack, as bored, frightened employees insist that he must do so regardless. When Sheriff Cross intervenes, the old man is again accosted in the grocery store by multiple strangers, led by the mayor, who angrily, moralistically assert the overriding imperative of the rules, accuse the eccentric old man of being uncaring, cruel, violent, murderous, a contagion, a monster, a threat to the life of all, and drive him physically from the store: after which everyone claps.

This was, in fact, a nearly daily occurrence at one point in many places: and I can still recall, after the mask mandate had been lifted in our area, a friend who went into the grocery store without a mask, after which she was followed around the store, and then out into the parking lot, by a masked twenty-something man who spent the whole time screaming misogynistic slurs at her and accusing her of not caring about the service workers and her fellow customers. 

What was going on here? How had human society, defined at all times by presence and closeness and commonality, come to constitute one vast machine for moralistic condemnation and repression and exclusion in the service of enforced isolation? Regardless of what one thought or thinks of the mask mandates and their utility and/or wisdom, the remarkable thing is not that political authorities put forward one public health mandate or another, but how little it took for ordinary Americans to turn on each other, to flee from one another, to hate and condemn one another, to embrace absolute aloneness.

Sheriff Cross, however, in the best Andy Griffith style--and we might remember that Andy Griffith, in the original show, spent most of his time defending eccentrics and outcasts from public shamings and/or themselves--refuses to go along with this. He posts a video to Facebook in which he denounces the mayor of the town for imposing the mandate and being present at the public shaming: and then, when the video goes viral, decides to run for mayor, on a platform of common sense and personal decency.

Here, then, we have the germ of a story that is not unfamiliar, but nevertheless rather shockingly un-politically-correct, perhaps even right-wing. The story of the Pandemic, as many right-wing people have come to view it--indeed, I would suggest, as many many people of both parties have to a  large extent come to view it, to such a degree that it has been completely buried as a partisan issue for all but the most extreme--was fundamentally a story about government outreach, about oppression of the individual: and the answer was, and is, a return to common decency and good treatment and an authority that encourages community instead of trying to ban it.  

In Eddington, however, there is much, much more going on here than meets the eye. As the film continues, we learn gradually but definitely that, whatever he is, Sheriff Cross is emphatically not Andy Griffith. What he is is a man who like many others is falling apart in real time, with a live-in mother-in-law addicted to COVID conspiracy theories and a depressive wife, Louise, who spends all day every day alone in her bed scrolling her phone. His opposition to the mayor is neither a right-wing political declaration or a simple call for common decency, but a much more desperate personal appeal: an attempt to find some kind of reason in the middle of growing madness, a madness that is infecting not just society but the Sheriff himself. 

As with Captain America and One Battle After Another alike, the attempt to find a reason turns quickly into an attempt to find someone to blame: not so much for the mistreatment of elderly neurotics as for the depression of his own wife. On one level, of course, Cross' wife (played in another excellent unsettling performance by Emma Stone) is being made miserable and crazy, like nearly everyone else, by her social isolation due to the government-imposed lockdown. On another level, one might say she is being driven insane by the Internet content fed to her through her phone and forwarded by her increasingly unhinged mother. But then, as we gradually learn, she was a troubled person long before the Pandemic ever happened.

Well, regardless of how one sees the problem, the question remains: why is this happening? Something, many things, have clearly gone wrong: people are isolated to a degree unimaginable for human beings in any time or place before, are suffering horribly, are unhinged, listless, insane. Even the simplest questions of causation seem increasingly impossible to unwind. The lockdown is clearly making things worse; but then so too is an actual virus that is doubtless making people get sick and die. The Internet and smartphones are also clearly making things worse; but what kind of society has produced and is producing the torrential flood of madness, cruelty, and pornography posted on the Internet and delivered to us via those smartphones? And where does the Internet itself come from? What society would conceivably produce a device as bizarre and extreme and fundamentally useless as a smartphone? And anyway, even before any of this, weren't Americans already isolated and hostile, separated and turned against each other by their work and politics and stranger things still? And wasn't violence going on long before in America, all around, everywhere, in the dark, in the desert: violence against the Indians, Cowboys vs Indians, Cowboys vs Cowboys, Detectives vs Mobsters, back to the beginning and all the way down? 

As I have put it since 2022 on this blog, the Pandemic is best understood as a selective hyperaccelerator of cultural, economic, personal, and political trends--which raises the question, in a uniquely impactful way, of where the trends themselves came from. 

Anyway, it is a very disconcerting experience to be hyperaccelerated, to have certain parts of oneself, certain features, inclinations, values, but not others, put through a time machine and made to age at a hundred times their proper rate, a thousand times more than the rest of oneself. A very painful experience...

How could one stop it, though? This was the question everyone was asking, in one way or another, in 2020: though mostly in very indirect ways. One very indirect way in which people asked it was to suddenly talk about police brutality and racism and to go out in the streets and protest about it, mostly, if we are honest, merely for the pleasure of being around people again in a socially- and media-sanctioned way. But then, when one is isolated, the attractions of personal contact, interaction, approval, become terrifyingly powerful, so powerful that they overwhelm the fragile barriers of the self, can make one do anything, say anything. 

In Eddington, this aspect is captured mostly through the travails of Brian, a vague, bored local teenager whose Internet-driven interest in a local girl leads him to begin attending protests and describing himself as a "white abolitionist." Meanwhile, in the small desert town of Eddington, there is only one Black person, who happens to be a police deputy, as well as Brian's romantic rival. What, Sheriff Cross asks the protesters desperately, does any of this have to do with them? What happened to George Floyd was of course horrible and unjustifiable, but...well, you don't think the Black deputy Michael is one of those radicals, do you? And have you heard about the Antifa terrorists gunning down cops in Ferguson? 

Again, what Eddington captures better than anything else is precisely the confusion of all these characters. I spent a great deal of time in 2020, in fact, talking to people who were simply flabbergasted and confused at everything that was happening in the world and the Internet and their own lives, none of which they understood or had even conceived of or thought possible. This was, for better or worse, never true of me: everything that happened in 2020, including people going crazy from isolation, only confirmed everything I had already believed. Which is maybe a sign that none of you should trust me?

Still, Eddington captures extremely well, in a way that only true surrealism can, this sense of ubiquitous confusion of people in 2020 constantly encountering utterly alien, baffling, seemingly contradictory eruptions of something else into their world and their lives. This something else is sometimes just very distant real events, like the shooting of George Floyd. It is sometimes only the pervasive threat of catching a new virulent disease from China and dying in agony. It is sometimes merely very broad and abstract topics like structural racism and whiteness and social justice.  It is sometimes very confusing and muddled academic theory and verbiage made up by theorists and repeated in half-remembered fragments by Internet influencers. It is sometimes very new and extreme and pervasive but perhaps even more just political positions. It is sometimes simply the overpowering torturing psychologically annihilating experience of being alone all the time. It is sometimes rather the maddening experience of being around the same few people all the time, day and night, and watching both them and you go slowly mad. 

But it is sometimes, indeed increasingly often, a kind of terrifying, liquid unreality, flowing directly from the heart of the Internet, and intrinsically impossible to make sense of in any human way. As I have again and again argued, what we now call "AI slop" was something that existed long, long before ChatGPT: growing, festering, in the dark. We all had a very intimate and personal encounter with it, in one form or another, in 2020: and perhaps that's what we are all so afraid of still.

For Sheriff Cross, this eruption of unreality in his life includes the mistreatment of aging neurotics and the depression of his wife and the kids in his streets protesting structural racism: but it ultimately takes the preternaturally threatening form of Vernon, a strange Internet political figure under whose sway his wife slowly falls. Vernon is full of stories, horrifying, monstrous stories about pedophilia and child abuse and the rich and powerful trafficking children and hunting them for sport. He claims, in fact, to have been one of these children, to have been bought and sold and barely escaped with his life. But he is also smooth and charismatic and off-putting and rather predatory himself: and he shows up at Cross' house and sits on his porch as his wife in unsettling scenes that speak of the overwhelming, intimate, truly interior threat that only one human person can be for another. Vernon sits and smiles and looks at Cross and tells him bizarre unsettling stories of inhuman violence, tells him about his own wife, how brave she is, how important encountering Vernon has been in helping her to come to terms with what happened to her...

Well, what did happen to Cross' wife? One story, told to him by his wife and her mother in the past, is that she was sexually assaulted by the now-mayor when they were both teenagers. Another, never directly stated, but hinted at by Louise, avoided by her mother, and directly queried only by the Sheriff, is that she was molested by her father. But his wife will not answer him directly when he asks her what is true. And how could anyone know?

Again, the most terrifying feeling about the Pandemic, for most people, was merely the sense not only that anything could happen, but that anything could have happened, that the world and their lives and selves and psyches and America itself had always been much stranger and darker and more twisted than they had known, than they had allowed themselves to think...but how was one to know? And even if one could know, what could one do about it?

Well, as Captain America: Brave New World asked, as Rene Girard knew, wouldn't it be wonderful if there was someone to blame for all this?

Sheriff Cross, like a true American Western hero, decides to make a stand. The one to blame for it all, he tells the whole town, is the mayor. Not only is the mayor bought and paid for by a local property developer, who is diverting land and water and electricity to build a gigantic Data Center in the desert for some emerging technology of the future, but he is also the one who has imposed or at least supported the draconian lockdown and mask mandates that have made all their lives hell. And, most importantly of all, he raped the Sheriff's wife. He is to blame: and the Sheriff, like a true American hero, will meet the monster and defeat him, unifying the town once again around himself, around common decency and humanity and the scapegoat mechanism.

Only the trouble is that once he has told everyone publicly all this, his wife tells everyone equally publicly that it is all a lie, that the story of the teenage rape was made up by her mother to cover up a darker truth, and then leaves him to go on the road with Vernon. And the Sheriff, gradually but definitely, descends into madness.

Of course, more things happen before the story winds to its end: but all of them, in one way or another, focus on this strange isolation, this strange cruelty, this strange eruption of unreality into reality, and this increasingly desperate need to find someone to blame for it all, to make it stop somehow.

In the end, in a bizarre but nonetheless effective touch, this monster in the dark takes the inexplicable form of an armed squad of Antifa supersoldiers, who kidnap the Black deputy and burn him with fire and gun down innocents in the street until Sheriff Cross takes up arms to stop them and is finally gunned down himself.

This is justifiably the most controversial and indeed bizarre element of the film, corresponding to no known reality of the year 2020--but on reflection, it is also the film's most brilliant element, and brilliant precisely because it is so profoundly ambiguous. Antifa supersoldiers were never a thing that existed in the real world--they were, though, a thing that existed on the Internet. And so what better to embody this overwhelming, terrifying threat of the Pandemic, this eruption of pure Internet unreality into the real world, than a literal materialization of an insane Internet meme? 

Of course, within the world of the film, these Antifa supersoldiers might well have other meanings. They are first seen travelling on a private jet to Eddington, and are equipped with the latest technology, including smartphones and drones with cameras that they use to film all their actions. Maybe, then, they are just phonies, a false flag operation hired by the Data Center developers or other corporate or political interests to fake Antifa violence. Or maybe they are being paid to kill cops and pose as Antifa by some kind of real wealthy corporate or private pseudo-Leftists interests. Or maybe they are just more rich kids driven mad by the Internet, desperate to materialize an Internet meme in the real world with their bodies and fancy technology, or just to run around and shoot people while filming themselves like in a video game with the barest ideological justification. 

The angles and shots Ari Aster shoots here, both from Sheriff Cross' perspective and from the perspective of the drones watching him, take on more and more of the look of a first-person shooter video game: you know, the kind that so many people, during the Pandemic, spent their days and nights playing over and over and over and over again, hour upon hour upon hour, until it took over their every waking thought, then their dreams, until the running and shooting became their lives, until the gun on the screen became their selves, until it began to seem real... 

Again, how would one know? And what could one possibly do about it?

Well, in the end, of course, the Pandemic ends, on screen and in real life. But the world, and everyone in it, is never the same. In Eddington's closing scenes, we see our characters, perpetually scarred shells of their former selves, celebrating the opening of the Data Center in the desert. Sheriff Cross is now the mayor: Brian is a right-wing influencer; Vernon is an Internet televangelist, with Louise at his side; Michael is a scarred Sheriff shooting guns in the desert; all are equally servants of the new world of triumphant unreality. 

What makes Eddington for me among the most interesting films and indeed works of art of the past five years is that it is more or less the only thing I have seen to put forward an actual thesis of sorts on just what happened during the Pandemic, and therefore just where the present crisis of legitimacy came from. 

This thesis, like every thesis put forward by a genuinely great work of art, is intrinsically one that cannot be put into words, that can only be conveyed in the atmosphere generated by words and images, scenes and characters and narrative. It is also, I think, only part of the truth: though a very, very important and overlooked part of it.

Still, if I had to put it into words, this thesis would go something like this:

This was the Pandemic: this was what happened in 2020. Something strange and new erupted into our world, and in the years since we have given it a name: Artificial Intelligence, the final teleological manifestation of the devotion of a whole people, the sacrifice of innumerable bodies and souls and relationships and fragile psyches, in service of an infinite supply of stupid ugly meaningless nonsense. Of course it was there already, growing through a thousand acts of violence and a thousand mass-media nodules and a billion cell-phones; but we were not, yet, dedicated to it completely. An initiation, a sacred rite, was necessary for this; a ritual most of us completed in 2020. We spent two years sitting inside on the Internet; and when we emerged, forever scarred and disabled in body and soul, we were owned by it entirely, ready to serve it and sacrifice everything so that the supply of isolating stultifying soothing disassociating nonsense would never end.

Didn't you know that this what the Pandemic was always for? Don't you know this is why you suffered? Don't you know that it was AI that did this all to you? And don't you remember how powerful it was, how overwhelming, how little you could understand and resist the flood of overpowering meaninglessness? And didn't you know all along that you would serve it in the end? 

As Jean Baudrillard put it, the essence of American dominance of the rest of the world, of American elite dominance of America, is the triumph of absolute nullity, the destruction of every symbol in its own sign, so that no value remains on the basis of which power can be critiqued or constrained or resisted or opposed or indeed affirmed in any limited and rational and goal-directed way. When he wrote this, of course, the smartphone had not been invented, or the Large Language Model: but he had a point all the same.

This is what we are up against in America in 2026: not that all the institutions of this very large and mostly empty land are simply unworkable or that every person who runs them is ubiquitously evil, but that a certain American elite that runs them, and a increasingly great portion of the population ruled by them, has over time come to be consumed by and dedicated to a certain evil, which is in the final balance simply triumphant nonsense. 

Perhaps this, then, is the essence of the American crisis of legitimacy: the realization, in one way or another, that the leaders and institutions and cultures and beliefs of a great people have been dedicated, devoted, sacrificed to the absolute nullification of all meaning in service of a perpetual stream of isolating soul-deadening meaningless entertainment. Properly understood, this act of nullification of meaning and value and truth is nothing other than the dominating violence portrayed in One Battle After Another, than the forces of chaos driving the President of the United States mad in Captain America: Brave New World: to use an infinite supply of mass-media slop to destroy all meaning and value and narrative and family and community is to simply render human life impossible, to overwhelm and traumatize and isolate and torment fragile and vulnerable human bodies and souls, to, in the words of General Lockjaw, be a warrior of freedom who fucks the weak.

Of course, more is going on here than this: a great deal more. America is still fundamentally and in essence a place where people live and have desires and seek goals and eat and procreate in communities and through institutions--for the simple reason that this is the only way in which human beings can live and not die. I do not think people are wrong, though, in their inchoate sense that all of this, the human business of life, is threatened now by something dark and overpowering and alien, and that many of their rulers and many even of their neighbors are now acting in service to it: even if they are emphatically wrong in their belief that this thing is real and powerful and that it has already won and must inevitably triumph in the end. In the end, no matter what, life will overcome death: and in five hundred years, human beings will be living still.  

Still, if this is in fact the threat, if the crisis is simply the sacrifice of everything to meaningless nonsense, the immediate response is both simple and extremely easy to carry out. Stop paying attention to the meaningless nonsense; stop using AI in any form; stop consuming the algorithmic slop that preceded and constituted and trained the AI slop; get off of social media; Don't Follow the News; relate to other people through love and sacrifice rather than desperation and fear; relate to the world and your life through gratitude and wonder rather than panic and avoidance; form communities and collectivities to live life in common; come together with others to seek and achieve real-world political and social goals; find and follow leaders who will aid you in doing so; abandon and reject all those who will not; become Catholic; repent and submit to the Pope; pray daily; worship God and receive the Sacraments. 

Nonsense is in the absolute sense powerless; and it remains powerless no matter how much power it may happen to wield through economic and political institutions.

As I said before, I have no doubt at all that in a century there will still be people living and dying, farming and praying and marrying and eating and drinking and begetting, in what is now America. The question is only whether or not, by believing in America and the American religion, we will have made the name of America such a curse that it is execrated and abandoned and forgotten. The question is only whether we will destroy ourselves. 

Who will rule in the age to come? God and man, as before. The question is whether we will serve them and live, or serve nonsense and die.