Elon Musk recently made headlines when he posted a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris, with manipulated audio to make it sound like she called herself the “ultimate diversity hire” who doesn’t know the “first thing about running the country.” A month earlier, a Republican congressional candidate in Michigan posted a TikTok using the AI-generated voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to say he’d come back from the dead to endorse Anthony Hudson. In January, President Joe Biden’s voice was replicated using artificial intelligence to send a fake robocall to thousands of people in New Hampshire, urging them not to vote in the state’s primary the following day.
AI experts and lawmakers have been sounding the alarm, demanding more regulation as artificial intelligence is used to supercharge disinformation and misinformation. Now, it’s three months before the presidential election and the United States is ill-prepared to handle a potential onslaught of fake content heading our way.
Digitally-altered images — also known as deepfakes — have been around for decades, but, thanks to generative AI, they are now exponentially easier to make and harder to detect. As the threshold for making deepfakes has lowered, they are now being produced at scale and are increasingly more difficult to regulate. To make matters more challenging, government agencies are fighting about when and how to regulate this technology — if at all — and AI experts worry that a failure to act could have a devastating impact on our democracy. Some officials are proposing basice regulations that would disclose when AI is used in political ads, but Republican political appointees are standing in the way.
“Any time that you’re dealing with misinformation or disinformation intervening in elections, we need to imagine that it’s a kind of voter suppression,” says Dr. Alondra Nelson. Nelson was the deputy director and acting director of Joe Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and led the creation of the AI Bill of Rights. She says that AI misinformation is “keeping people from having a reliable information environment in which they can make decisions about pretty important issues in their lives.” Rather than stopping people from getting to the polls to vote, she says, this new type of voter suppression is an “insidious, slow erosion of people’s trust in the truth” which affects their trust in the legitimacy of institutions and the government.
Nelson says that the fact that Musk’s deepfake video post is still up online proves that we cannot count on companies to abide by their own rules about misinformation. “There have to be clear guardrails, clear bright lines about what’s acceptable and not acceptable on the part of individual actors and companies, and consequences for that behavior.”
Multiple states have passed regulations on AI-generated deepfakes in elections, but federal regulations are harder to come by. This month, the Federal Communications Commission is accepting public comments on the agency’s proposed rules to require advertisers disclose when AI technology is used in political ads on radio and television. (The FCC does not have jurisdiction over online content.)
Since the 1930s, the FCC has required TV and radio stations to keep a record of information about who’s buying campaign ads and how much they paid. Now, the agency is proposing adding a question asking whether AI was used in the production of the ad. The proposal wouldn’t prohibit the use of AI in ads; it would simply ask if AI was used.
“We have this national tool that has existed for decades,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel tells Rolling Stone in a phone interview. “We decided that now is a good time to try to modernize it in a really simple way, when I think a lot of voters just want to know: are you using this technology? Yes or no?”
Rosenworcel says there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to AI and misinformation. She points to the fake Biden robocall, which the FCC responded to by invoking the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which restricts the use of artificial voices in telephone calls. The FCC then worked with the New Hampshire attorney general, who brought criminal charges against the man who created the robocall.
“You’ve got to start somewhere and I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” says Rosenworcel. “I think building on a foundation that’s been around for decades is a good place to start.”
The Federal Election Commission’s Republican chairman Sean Cooksey opposes the FCC’s latest proposal, claiming it would “sow chaos” since it is so close to an election.
“Every American should be disturbed that the Democrat-controlled FCC is pushing ahead with its radical plan to change the rules on political ads mere weeks before the general election,” Cooksey said in a written statement to Rolling Stone. “Not only would these vague rules intrude on the Federal Election Commission’s jurisdiction, but they would sow chaos among political campaigns and confuse voters before they head to the polls. The FCC should abandon this misguided proposal.”
The FEC has for years routinely deadlocked on matters as Republicans on the commission have worked to prevent new regulation on nearly anything for years.
The watchdog group Public Citizen petitioned the FEC to engage in a rulemaking on artificial intelligence, and in the past Cooksey said the agency would have an update in early summer.
Cooksey told Axios that the FEC won’t move to regulate AI in political advertising this year, and the commission is set to vote on closing out Public Citizen’s petition on Aug. 15. “The better approach is for the FEC to wait for direction from Congress and to study how AI is actually used on the ground before considering any new rules,” Cooksey told the outlet, adding that the agency “will continue to enforce its existing regulations against fraudulent misrepresentation of campaign authority regardless of the medium.”
AI experts believe that action needs to be taken, urgently. “We’re not going to be able to solve all of these problems,” says Nelson, adding that there’s no silver bullet answer to fix all AI-enabled deepfakes. “I think we often come to the problem space of AI with that kind of perspective as opposed to saying, unfortunately there’s always going to be crime and we can’t stop it, but what we can do is add friction. We can make sure that people have consequences on the other side of their bad behavior that we hope can be mitigating.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) has been calling for congressional legislation on artificial intelligence for years. A bipartisan bill targeting non-consensual deepfake AI porn recently passed the Senate.
“It was inevitable that these new technologies, particularly AI, that enable you to distort imagery and voices, would be weaponized at some stage to provide confusion, misinformation, disinformation to the American people,” says Clarke.
“[There’s] no way of truly discerning a fabricated picture versus something that is factual and real, [which] puts the American people at a disadvantage, particularly in these no-holds-barred campaigning.”
Clarke introduced the REAL Political Ads Act in May 2023, to require campaign ads to disclose and digitally watermark videos or images in ads created by generative AI. “We’ve gotten quite a few co-sponsors of the legislation, but it hasn’t been moved by the [Republican] majority on the Energy and Commerce Committee,” says Clarke.
“It’s an open field for those who want to create misinformation and disinformation right now, because there’s nothing that regulates it,” says Clarke. She points out that she’s also working on this with the Congressional Black Caucus, given the fact marginalized communities and minorities are often disproportionately the targets of misinformation. “We’re behind the curve here in the United States, and I’m doing everything I can to push us into the future as rapidly as possible.”
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury used to run ethical AI for X (formerly Twitter) before Musk took over and is now the U.S. Science Envoy of Artificial Intelligence. She says the broader issue at hand is that America is at a dangerous, all-time low of trust in the government, elections, and communication institutions. She says the FEC could be further eroding its own credibility by not taking action.
“Here we are in a state of crisis about the institutions and government which we should trust, and they’re going to sit on their hands and be like, ‘We don’t know if we should do something?’” says Chowdhury. “If they are not seen as doing something about deepfakes, this may actually further tarnish the image they have from the American people.”
As for Musk’s specific sharing of the Harris deepfake, Chowdhury says she doesn’t know why people are so surprised that he’s doing it. Musk has turned X (formerly Twitter) into a misinformation machine since he took over the platform.
“Is it terrible? Absolutely,” says Chowdhury. “But it’s kind of like we’re the people at the face-eating leopards party. You’re going to be mad because this man is doing exactly what he said he was going to do? If you’re upset, then literally, don’t be on Twitter. Or know that if you are on the platform, you are complicit in allowing this man to manipulate the course of democracy.”
The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism
In 2017, I published a book called, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. For the next year, I lived mostly in transit around the world — 50 cities, dozens of stages, endless conversations about how the tech empires had bent our culture out of shape, numbed public life, and hollowed out the foundations of democracy.
It was outside the United States, though, that the dissonance struck most deeply. I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself, watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets. In country after country — places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours — I kept asking the same question: how could they manage to build what we could not? Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism?
Conversations in Europe added another layer. People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege; of sending their children to university without dread or debt; of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet. It was not utopia — just an older, steadier faith in the public good. The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination.
Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore. We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State. In the 2026 budget, 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon (even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion), another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security. No other democracy has made such choices — or lived so comfortably with their consequences.
President Eisenhower famously warned us in his farewell speech that the military and the defense contractors would be unwilling to give up the giant budgets they had gained since the end of World War II:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
For more than three decades, presidential campaigns — from Clinton through Obama to Trump — have promised a reckoning: an end to “stupid wars” and a redirection of national wealth toward rebuilding America itself. Yet once in office, each fell under the shadow of Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. None dared to reduce defense spending, and so Eisenhower’s second fear — that this imbalance would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes”— has slowly come true. But now under Trump we are engaged, as The New York Times noted, “in a resurrection of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples.”
Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world, that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over. Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,” as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership. Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.” The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation, even “temporarily,” ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.
We are entering a new era of American imperialism. Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” As Jonathan Last wrote in The Bulwark, in both Venezuela and in Minneapolis, “What we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies. There is a name for that. It is fascism.”
American fascism, to the extent that it exists as more than a slur, expresses itself less in blackshirts than in the quiet normalization of permanent imperial management. The classic fascist regimes insisted that a nation’s vitality depended on expansion — that without new territories to subdue and administer, the social order would atrophy and turn inward on itself. Contemporary American power dresses this same logic in the language of “stability operations,” “rules-based order,” and “responsibility to protect,” but the underlying premise is familiar: the United States must supervise, discipline, and, when necessary, occupy other societies in order to preserve its own sense of mission. What Hitler called “Lebensraum” and Mussolini cast as a “proletarian nation” bursting its confines reappears in the Washington vernacular as forward deployments, security partnerships, and transitional authorities that somehow never transition. The point is not that today’s policymakers are closet Nazis, but that a republic which comes to believe it cannot remain itself without governing other people’s territory has already internalized a key article of the fascist creed: that conquest is not an emergency measure or tragic exception but the normal condition of a serious country. As Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, noted, “Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless struggles and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”
Trump is not wrong to demand that Europe shoulder more of its own defense. In March of 2016 he told the New York Times’ David Sanger, “at some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world.” The irony, of course, is that under his watch American defense spending has only swelled and America has assumed a belligerent stance towards both competitors and former allies. No American troops have been withdrawn from Europe. Trump’s new demand for a 50 percent jump in the Pentagon’s budget is not a policy so much as a symptom. It reads less like a response to any discernible strategic assessment than as a sequel to the Maduro raid, an attempt to convert one clean, televisable operation into a permanent line-item tribute to himself. In that sense the proposal is pure Trump: spontaneous, grandiose, and retroactively draped in the language of “long and difficult negotiations” that plainly never occurred in any conventional budget process. The point is not whether Congress ever enacts a $1.5 trillion authorization; the point is to establish a new psychic baseline in which anything less than a “Dream Military” feels like an insult to the man who ordered Maduro’s capture.
Seen from the vantage of America after empire, this is what late-imperial politics looks like when the imperial story has outlived the material conditions that once sustained it. The old language of sober responsibility and tragic necessity has given way to the logic of the algorithmic feed: each crisis, each boat bombing, each killing, each “decisive” show of force must be instantly topped by something louder, costlier, more spectacular. Trump is only the most garish embodiment of a broader political class that long ago internalized the idea that military power is the last reliable currency of national meaning; he simply strips away the last restraints and says the quiet part out loud, equating the health of the republic with the size of his own arsenal. The danger in such a politics is not just fiscal or geopolitical. It is that, in a country willing to spend $1.5 trillion to feel invincible abroad while treating the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at home as collateral damage to be managed with fearmongering and lies about domestic terrorism, the distinction between security and domination disappears entirely.
Follow the Money
Adjusted for inflation, the United States will spend in 2027 almost a trillion dollars more on the military than it did at the height of the Cold War. The combined military budgets of China, Russia, Germany, India, United Kingdom, and France are only $786 Billion. Yet for all that money, the structure of the armed forces has been hollowed out: we have roughly half as many active-duty service members, half as many ships in the Navy, and half as many aircraft in the Air Force. More than half of the Pentagon’s budget now flows not to soldiers or sailors, but to private firms — the contractors, consultants, and corporate intermediaries who have become the real custodians of the American war machine. For more than three decades, the Pentagon has functioned as a kind of black hole in the federal ledger, failing audit after audit even as nearly a trillion dollars a year disappears into a fog of untraceable contracts, “improper payments,” and bureaucratic bloat that its own buried studies estimate in the hundreds of billions. The inability — or refusal — to produce a clean set of books is not a technical glitch but the operating system of American militarism, a permanent state of engineered opacity in which waste and fraud cease to be aberrations and become the business model of empire itself.
When Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland in 2019 — and later mused about “taking” it — the impulse seemed so outlandish that much of the world laughed it off as another episode in the long-running theater of American excess. Yet the Greenland moment, in retrospect, looks less like farce and more like a kind of tragic symbolism, the twilight gesture of a hegemon that had forgotten the difference between dominance and delusion. Trump’s threats to “conquer” or annex the island — a NATO-protected territory of Denmark — encapsulated a fantasy of American omnipotence that no longer existed, while accelerating the very unraveling it sought to deny. The fantasy that Washington can script another nation’s political future at the point of a gun survives only by ignoring the wreckage already left behind — from Saigon to Baghdad and beyond. It rests on a peculiar imperial arrogance: the conviction that history’s verdicts do not apply to us, that this time the occupation will be brief, the technocrats wise, and the locals grateful, until the cycle of disillusion and violence begins again.
The financial foundations of U.S. power have also begun to look less secure. A Deutsche Bank report that once would have been confined to economic circles recently became geopolitical fodder, noting that Europe is America’s largest creditor, holding roughly $8 trillion in U.S. assets. If Trump’s trade wars once seemed like symbolic politics, they have since revealed an unsettling asymmetry: the United States depends more on foreign financing than most Americans realize, and its leverage is waning. The same government that once underwrote the Marshall Plan and NATO’s defense architecture now talks like a debtor demanding tribute from its lenders. It is vintage Trump. Having driven his Atlantic City casinos into bankruptcy, he fixated not on his own recklessness but on the temerity of those who financed it. He even threatened to sue one of his lenders, as if the real offense lay in having believed him capable of repayment.
Meanwhile, the ghosts of the old Cold War have returned, but their allegiances have shifted. Critics accused Trump in 2016 of election collusion with Putin — an allegation Republicans dismissed as hysteria — but in dismantling NATO’s cohesion, Trump pursued what had long been the supreme objective of Putin’s worldview. For Moscow, NATO’s eastward reach has always been seen as aggression; for Washington, it was deterrence. But in the grand scheme of things Russia is a minor power, with a GDP considerably smaller than California.
For now, the center of modernity is in Shanghai. While we borrow money from China to fill the coffers of the military industrial complex and subsidize the fossil fuel industry, the Chinese are building the low carbon, high intelligence future. The United States, restless and unfocused, turns again to the vanities of empire — scheming over Venezuela, coveting Greenland, bombing Iran — while across the Pacific, China gathers its strength in silence, investing colossal sums in the instruments of the coming age: artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum code, the manipulation of life itself. By purchasing power, its economy already surpasses America’s by nearly a third; its factories and power grids hum at twice the scale; its navy, relentless in construction, will eclipse America’s within the decade. China now leads in the engines of the future — electric mobility, fourth-generation reactors — while the United States grows dependent on its former pupil for the most vital sinews of modern life, from antibiotics to rare earths. The balance of the century is shifting — not with banners or battleships, but with algorithms, reactors, and the quiet gravity of accumulated power.
So, what drives us to spend our blood and treasure on the military? Surely the answer lies in Eisenhower’s “unwarranted influence … of the military-industrial complex.” In 1993, Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin and his deputy William Perry effectively told the big prime defense contractors at the so‑called “Last Supper” that post–Cold War budgets would not sustain the existing industrial ecology, and that they were expected to merge or die; over the following decade the number of major prime contractors collapsed from dozens to roughly a handful, even as the top five’s share of federal defense contract dollars rose from around one‑fifth to nearly 50 percent. What was sold as rationalization and acquisition “reform” in an era of peace dividends instead entrenched a structurally dependent state, increasingly reliant on a few leviathans whose pricing power, political leverage, and freedom to offshore and financialize only grew as real competition disappeared. Although Clinton, Bush and Obama paid lip-service to the idea of competition they were all neo-liberals at heart who had adopted Reagan’s mantra of deregulation. And the monopoly defense contractors stopped investing in R & D and instead became vehicles to funnel their cash to shareholders and executives.
Now, a new group of monopolists, based in Silicon Valley are vying to create a digital military industrial complex. Their philosopher king, Peter Thiel, made it clear to the Wall Street Journal, “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits are competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, build a monopoly.” Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s drone maker, Anduril, and Elon Musk’s Space X are determined to put that philosophy into practice. And because figures like Musk and Thiel are exceptional hype artists, they have a new trillion-dollar project for Trump to fund: the Golden Dome.
The Golden Dome is a $3.6 trillion bid to turn the old Reagan Star Wars fantasy into a homeland missile shield, using constellations of space-based sensors, AI-driven command systems, kinetic interceptors, and eventually directed-energy weapons to track and kill missiles in every phase of flight. In theory it promises an always-on, automated perimeter for the continental United States: satellites watching for launches in real time, software fusing the data, and interceptor swarms — some in orbit, some at sea and on land — firing fast enough to handle hypersonics, saturation attacks, and decoys. The Silicon Valley pitch is that breakthroughs in AI, sensor fusion, quantum computing, and commercial space launch finally make this dream technically attainable, and the roster of expected winners — Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and other “defense tech” firms — reads like a venture-backed sequel to the classic Beltway contractors.
The deeper logic, though, looks very much like the metaverse hype job: a totalizing, almost theological solution — this time to nuclear vulnerability — built out of still-maturing technologies and wrapped in seductive imagery of an impenetrable sphere around America. The physics of missile defense have not changed: “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” discriminating real warheads from decoys at scale, intercepting in time, and doing it reliably under stress remain brutally hard problems, and partial success is indistinguishable from failure if even a handful of warheads get through. That makes Golden Dome less a plausible end-state than a funding boondoggle — a way of organizing trillions of federal dollars around a shared fantasy of perfect protection, in which the tech sector sells the software of invincibility while strategic reality stays stubbornly analog and vulnerable.
Whether we want to put multiple trillions in Elon Musk’s pocket to build the Golden Dome remains a question that someone like Trump is not interested in answering. If the growth of the Military AI industry creates a new digital monopoly, resulting in millions of lost jobs, but spurring GDP growth, Trump is happy.
In the next few years, the billionaires who control the digital economy will also control the military economy. Their ability to influence Trump and Vance is evidenced by the behavior of Elon Musk during the 2024 election. By the time the filings closed, Musk had poured on the order of $300 million into the 2024 cycle, an amount large enough that it functioned less as “participation” in politics than as the purchase of a governing stake in the regime that followed. What shows up on FEC forms as roughly 290–291 million dollars in donations to Trump-aligned super PACs, outside groups, and party committees is better understood as a capital investment in state power, a way of turning one man’s private balance sheet into a dominant force in public decision-making. The scale is revealing when a single tech billionaire can outspend entire institutional coalitions, the election stops looking like a contest among citizens and starts to resemble a shareholder vote in which one owner quietly holds a blocking stake.
The time has come for Americans to decide, as Eisenhower once warned us to, whether we wish to be citizens or subjects — participants in a republic or passengers in an empire sustained by monopoly, militarism, and distraction. Perhaps only the Democratic Party has the independence from the oligarchs to return to its 1960s roots as the anti-war, anti-monopoly party of working people. During his 1968 presidential campaign in a speech at the University of Kansas, Robert Kennedy issued a broadside against an economy dominated by profit, militarism, and corporate corruption. If you read the speech, it is still relevant to our current dilemma. “It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country,” Kennedy said of America’s gross national product. “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
A Vision for Change
The arc of our decline was never inevitable. It was the cumulative result of millions of quiet abdications: of civic duty to marketing, of public good to private gain, of truth to convenience. What the republic most needs now is not another savior or algorithm, but a revival of responsibility in the old, exacting sense — the willingness to take part in self-government, to see the commonwealth not as an inheritance but as a trust. As Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Polling shows that the public wants a change. Chicago Council’s 2024 report notes that, “Americans largely agree the government should spend more resources on domestic priorities than on defense.” Let’s imagine a $300 billion yearly savings from a reduced Defense budget. How would we reallocate that money? Here are some ideas. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that a national free-college program focused on public institutions would cost about $58.2 billion a year. The Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed a policy fully lowering Medicare eligibility to 60 starting in 2026 would cost about $25 to 30 billion a year in the initial years. And if we wanted to have high speed rail with new 220‑m.p.h. trains along the Eastern seaboard, it would cost on the order of $151 billion for a Boston to Charlotte route. The Boston to New York City trip time would be 45 minutes. This kind of non-polluting electric rail service would make it possible for people to live outside of the big city centers and have a low stress commute.
We have lived during a decade of Trump’s political dominance, as the philosopher Antonio Gramsci foresaw, in an interregnum, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.” The term Interregnum was first applied to the five-year reign of Oliver Cromwell in England from 1653 to 1658.
If Trump is our Cromwell, then this interregnum is less a beginning than an afterglow, the long, strange light that lingers after an empire’s sun has set. Like Cromwell’s England, which mistook zeal for providence and the seizure of a king for the birth of a new order, Trump’s America confuses disruption with renewal, as if rage alone could rearrange a constitutional cosmos that no longer quite believes in itself.
Cromwell shattered the old regime in the name of redemption and left behind not the godly commonwealth he imagined, but a restoration that quietly tamed the crown and elevated Parliament, codified at last in the Bill of Rights of 1689. What endured were not his sermons or his armies, but the tired compromise that followed him, the slow drafting of limits and liberties by a society that had burned through its appetite for revelation.
So it may be with us. The MAGA years may come to look less like the foundation of a new dispensation than like the Whigs’ last flare before disappearance, an episode of furious improvisation that clears the ground for some other alignment not yet fully visible. The movement that once seemed to swallow the Republican Party whole may, in time, recede into a cautionary memory, leaving behind a scattered cadre of reactionaries and exiles — today’s Never Trumpers and disenchanted loyalists — who try to piece together a different vocabulary of right and left from the debris.
Every empire, it seems, breeds its own Cromwell, a figure who believes he is inaugurating an age when he is really presiding over an ending. And every interregnum carries the same sorrowful wisdom: that nothing begins entirely anew, that the future is fashioned instead from the spent materials of the past, as a people learns again, slowly and without guarantee, how to live after power — how to be America after empire.
Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of Move Fast and Break Things, The Magic Years, and The End of Reality.