American Empire

People, including me, have spent the last decade predicting the collapse of the American Empire. This has been a mistake, or at least a category error. Empires do not collapse when their myths fail; they merely become more naked. Rome’s fall did not happen when belief waned. Rather, it fell when belief could no longer conceal force. America today is not an empire in decline so much as a nation undergoing myth failure. The aircraft carriers still float. The dollar still speaks. What no longer convinces is the story the US tells itself about why any of this belongs together.

Empires can survive material exhaustion. They cannot survive symbolic delegitimation. What is breaking in the United States is meaning. American power is going strong.

A nation is not a contract so throw that ‘social contract’ stuff out the door. It is not even a constitution, I’m sorry to say to Jefferson. (This section reads like I am saying Jefferson wrote the constitution. Rather I am referring to Jefferson’s letter debate with Madison where Jefferson speaks of the binding substance of the law.) It is a collective hallucination with administrative consequences. From Rousseau through Benedict Anderson, the point has been made repeatedly: nations are imagined communities, and imagination requires maintenance. Myths do the heavy lifting. They convert hierarchy into destiny, inequality into order, and violence into necessity.

The US has always been particularly myth-dependent. Its self-conception; the exceptional nature of its collective liturgy, the providential chant of ‘God bless the United States,’ the innocent shining city on the hill; is an engine of it’s existence. Woe betide thou if you think it is but an ornament. When that engine fails, the pistons keep firing, but the motion becomes erratic. Power remains; legitimacy does not. What follows is seizure, though some will call it reform.

The question, then, is not whether the US is dying, but which US is dying.

There have been, at minimum, three United States.

The first was founded on Enlightenment universalism with a racial asterisk. Liberty for all, provided “all” was carefully delimited. This US died in the Civil War, when blood clarified what philosophy had obscured: slavery was the founding myth of the US and not a contradiction to some great US ideal.

The second United States emerged from Reconstruction into industrial expansion. It was a nation of railroads, smoky factories, and bright-eyed brutal optimism. Its myth was progress. Its ballast was white supremacy, which stabilized class conflict by offering even the poorest white citizen a psychological wage. This US died in 1929, when the market revealed itself as neither moral nor maternal.

The third United States rose from the wreckage: the New Deal settlement, postwar prosperity, and later its neoliberal refinement. This US promised abundance within limits. It widened the tent while keeping the hierarchy intact. Race remained the silent guarantor that no matter how far the floor dropped, someone else would fall first.

This is the US is now dying. And it’s Barack Obama’s fault.

Barack Obama did not kill this myth deliberately. He did so symbolically, which is more dangerous. He embodied competence without apology, authority without caricature, intellect without servility; all while being Black. The old reassurance, that race would always correct the ledger, failed.

Obama governed moderately, often economically right. He did not redistribute radically despite what some continued to both hope and fear he would. But he represented a civilizational impossibility for those whose identity relied on racial ceiling and floor. Economic grievance was real during his presidency; the recovery was famously K-shaped. But grievance could no longer be metabolized through race alone. The myth had cracked.

What followed was not policy disagreement but ontological panic. If hierarchy is false, then who am I? Where do I fit?

Donald Trump gave this panic costume and permission. He was not the progenitor of it, merely a kind of jockey. His first term was a revelation. He wasn’t so much as deviating from the American Myth, as embracing it tenfold. His first time was a politics stripped of justification, operating on volume and resentment. January 6 was a failed restoration ritual; a theatrical attempt to re-enthrone a discredited order by force once belief had run out. This was not a mere riot and I would recommend to stop calling it that.

This was Carl Schmitt’s exception made flesh: ‘sovereignty declared not through law but through action.’ It failed, but the failure was instructive. The myth would not resurrect itself.

Joe Biden represented an attempt at myth repair through procedure. Competence without vision. Stability without transcendence. It was not enough. His neoliberal management could not generate belief amongst those who had seen the abyss. The Biden years only delayed collapse. Perhaps, he will be remembered as a Hindenburg type figure. The parallels kind of build themselves. The result was Trump 2.0: less restrained, more explicit, no longer pretending that dog whistles were necessary.

Power without myth becomes spectacle. Spectacle without belief becomes violence. This is the terrain we, the world, the aghast mouths of those looking in, now inhabit.

A fourth United States may yet emerge. But only conditionally.

It will not be born from nostalgia, nor from a reassertion of racial hierarchy. That road leads only to fragmentation and internal colonialism. If there is a future US, it will require a new binding myth: one that does not rely on supremacy as its adhesive, but on shared vulnerability, mutual obligation, and an honest reckoning with power.

Without such a myth, there will still be a territory called the United States. There will be flags, borders, and armed men. But there will not be a nation. Only rival claimants fighting over the corpse of a story they no longer believe.

Empires can survive many things. They cannot survive the death of meaning.