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.
