Questions, Part 4: If We Live Now Amid a Constitutional Extinction Event….What Next for America?
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 13
We of TRP tribal affinity have come at last to the fourth and (probably…little is certain these days except ambient chaos) final part of our extended Questions essay. In case you are new to TRP—and there has been a flush of new subscribers lately, some of them even forking over dollars!—the first three appeared in this space earlier this month, on May 2, 9, and 16, each of them pointing to seemingly obvious questions that ought to be the focus of collective pondering, but that are not.
Those essays in turn were the ninth, tenth, and eleventh in the “Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle” series, which followed the 46-part Age of Spectacle manuscript roll-out that serves as the plinth for TRP. Today’s post is TRP’s 84th since its commencement on January 4, 2024. Now that all of TRP’s essays are accounted for, its stars and planets placed in their suggestive constellation in a mind’s eye sky, we can get down to brass tacks (I’ve no idea where that idiom came from, just in case you were wondering.).
The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
The United States of America, as it has existed as an independent federal liberal democracy, has undergone a series of transformations in its two-and-a-half-centuries-plus existence. Historians differ somewhat on how to typologize the periodicity of the phases of change, but consensus more or less exists on their having been, so far, six American “republics”: (1) the Articles of Confederation period, 1776-1789; (2) the Founders’ Antebellum Republic, 1789-1862, divided roughly in half by the suffrage expansion of the Jacksonian period; (3) the Post-Bellum Republic, 1863-1912; (4) the Progressive Republic, 1913-1933; (5) the New Deal/Great Society Republic, 1933-1980; (6) the Contentious Republic, 1981-2024; and so (7) the current yet unnamed period tumbling into an ever open-ended future. It is a law of historical awareness that the period one is living in cannot be named except from hindsight, just as Ernest Cassirer showed in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that no stage in the evolution of human culture can objectify and understand itself until after it has been transcended.
This is not the time or place to quibble over the periodicity of U.S. political history, or the fuzzy transitions leading from any one “republic” to the next (eg., Theodore Roosevelt’s only full term as President, 1905-1909, can easily be reckoned as falling within rather than before the Progressive Era, even though it preceded the key amendments to the Constitution that defined the era, the 16th and the 17th in particular, and the key structural changes to government, such as the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the Department of Labor in 1913). The point is twofold: First, to acknowledge that things have always been changing, as mortal things tend to do without our necessarily being cognizant of it, just as Plato posited in Book VIII of The Republic; and second, to get to the unnamed era in which we are living now, an era that began with the coup within the coup that stretched from November 5, 2024 to January 20, 2025. (This “double coup” paradigm for understanding the Trump 2.0 Administration is laid out in TRP’s March 28 post, “Firehose Authoritarianism and Gnostic MAGA,” which sits in the archive awaiting your attention or review.)
It being stated off the bat for the sake what is right and just that Malcolm Gladwell did not invent the concept of a “tipping point,” we are at one. What has been spilling out of newly tenured Washington since this past autumn is off the charts of the post-1776 American experience. Just as all three elements of traditional American governance are now at risk of being overturned—democratic probity, liberalism in its original sense and definition, and the separation-of-powers federal constitutional design for the rule of law—so too the implications are huge for all three aspects or dimensions of what we casually call the United States: the country, the nation, and the state.
In a recent post I wagered figuratively that the educational shortfallings in this country have grown so vast in recent decades that few adult Americans could accurately define these three nouns if their lives depended on it. So let us make sure that TRP readers are not among that majority by you, all of you, taking a poke-in-the-ribs quizzlet I once used to tender to my undergraduate students to stir their sensibilities of emergent humility.
“Define these three nouns and one noun-phrase:” I demanded of them in writing, “country, nation, state, and nation-state.” I told them that if they regularly used these four terms as synonyms in their writings for me going forward, as is the wont of the American hoi palloi, I would flunk them. Here are the answers: a country is a usually contiguous geographically territorial place; a nation is a group of people persuaded that they have enough in common—the formula is somewhat variable and constructivist—to be called a nation; a state is the governmental apparatus that rules/administers public functions for the nation in the country; and a nation-state is a normative 19th-century term of art presuming that, contrary to the longstanding but rusting imperial principle from of old, each nation should have its own state so that the people living in a given country ought to be ruled by those like them instead of by those not like them. It is the binding basic premise of nationalism. After this drill, nobody flunked.
It is easy to make the case that the United States now stands at a tipping point between an evolutionary flow of change like that common to the past 250-plus years—with the single main exception of the Civil War—and a revolutionary disjuncture with that flow. That case rests on four evident points, all of which we have mentioned in earlier posts but now bring together in a manner in which the whole, I think—I hope….—exceeds the sum of the parts.
First, the entire Trump 2.0 phenomenon rests on the fact that two, twinned and entwined enormous Big Lies form the premise of what passes for current political reality: that the November 2020 election was fraudulent, and that the January 6, 2021 attempted coup was actually an attempted act of democratic restoration. Trump and his MAGA minions doubled down on this twin lie for four years and what happened on November 5 justified their judgment: That election was won fair and square, as was Trump’s victory in November 2016. Nothing like that has never happened before, and it is not normal, no matter how normal sounding some of the Trump 2.0 Administration’s declared goals could be construed as being.
To put it somewhat oddly, maybe, different kinds of vending machines can dispense the same candies and snack packages, but that doesn’t make the vending machines all the same or fix the price of the product as the same from machine type to machine type. What Americans need to care about is the brand and pricing mechanisms of the machine, not just the products dispensed. Alas, a non-deep literate political plurality don’t seem to care, so long the price of snacks, and eggs, are low. The result is an Administration based firmly on what can only be described as a conspiracy theory. Yes, American history is cranky—the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Masonic Party, and others—but they never amounted to more than fringe curiosities. So what we have have today is not normal.
Second, as also argued in earlier essays, we have a President and an Administration that refuse to recognize government as a social trust and instead treat it as a for-profit business in which those in control are the owners who privatize the profits both directly (eg., Elon Musk stealing billons of dollars worth of data from the Treasury Department for his own later use) and indirectly (eg., Trump’s own cryptogrift and Qatari 747 airplane), and everyone else is, like it or not, part of a progressively de-serviced and legally unprotected labor force. What happened between November 5 and January 20 was that a mostly clueless but emotionally revved up clot of garden-variety populists—the pitchforks and torches type you see in old black-and-white Frankenstein movies—whose grievances had been carefully nurtured and shaped over previous years by MAGA conflict entrepreneurs, got snookered in a hurry by avaricious cybergarchs—some have called them techno-feudalists, others hyper-libertarian “sovereign individuals,” still others broliogarchs….you can choose whatever label you like, but these people are not in any way populists, as the aforementioned March 29 post limned specifically and carefully. Populists are the “woke” Right’s “useful idiots.”
The result has been an attitude toward government similar to those of corporate raiders who, after a hostile takeover, shed all functions lacking a revenue flow and otherwise seek to improve “efficiency” defined not as anything having to do with the product but only having to do with the value of the corporate property for its owners and, maybe for a while as a calmative smokescreen, its shareholders. This, too, is unprecedented in post-1776 America. It is not normal but radically discontinuous with the past. Gradually, yes, the populist naïfs who elected Trump in November are beginning to wake up to their own gullibility, just as happened after Louis Napoleon pulled off the elected coup that killed the second French Republic in 1852—yes, the parallels are downright eerie. But now as then….too late, probably too late…..
Third, and I hope this doesn’t upset too many of you with residual wokeish sympathies, the Trump 2.0 Administration is the first American administration ever to discount reality, reason, and science for the embrace of the surreal, the subjective, and the crackpot mystical. In short, notwithstanding its origins on the 20th-century European anti-Enlightenment Left, this is the first, only, but maybe not the last postmodernist U.S. administration.
It is not accurate to describe it as crazy, for that term is much too loose. It is not useful to describe it as evil, for that term is too theologically diffuse for the times. It is not even smack on point to describe it as realist-materialist despite the apparent snug fit of its alte-ellite. I have employed this quotation before, but it needs to be brought back into service now, so read careful this description of a major Western philosophical figure who
. . . sought to obliterate all references to eternal justice, the equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization, and other phrases that were the stock in trade . . . of the democratic movements of his time; he looked upon these as so much worthless cant. . .[1]
Worthless cant or “moralistic garbage,” as the Vice-President has recently called it. Who is being spoken of in the quotation, do you know or remember? Of course: Karl Marx (now you can peek at the footnote to learn the author of this perfectly apt description).
The Trump 2.0 Administration is obviously not Marxist by any conventional definition, but it shares with Marxism and postmodernism their zero-sum, conflict-only conception of political struggle. It shares with them, too, ironically so given the populist MAGA base, a radical ridiculing atheism. (So what kind of convert to Catholicism J.D. Vance could possibly be to adopt and articulate such views one has to wonder about, no?) Whereas Marxism has posited eternal class warfare this side of earthy messianism, postmodernism in current form posits eternal bioessentialist group “identity” warfare this side of overthrowing the hated liberal Lockean state.
Of course, Trump and his thirteen inside-the-administration billionaires do not know much about or care much about philosophy or philosophers. The closest most of them have ever gotten is Ayn Rand, and Trump only in movie, not book, form. They do not have actual ideas but only emotional tics masquerading as ideas, as Lionel Trilling once described an analogous circumstance, in an intellectual desert where most of their prime populist audience cannot even begin to tell the difference between the two.
As to that audience, the leaders among them most closely resemble Ortega y Gasset’s “señoritos” who are described in the Age of Spectacle manuscript, some will remember, this way:
The common, not particularly well-educated person, Ortega y Gasset argued, has ideas in his head but did not produce those ideas from having read and thought about them. The señorito. . .
. . . wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. . . . To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such a thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority . . . and therefore believing that the highest form of inter-communion is the dialogue in which the reasons for our ideas are discussed. But the mass-man would feel himself lost if he accepted discussion, and instinctively repudiates the obligation of accepting that supreme authority lying outside himself.
This, he continued, gave rise to both the rightwing and leftwing extremists of his day: “The Fascist and Syndicalist species. . . characterized by . . . a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason’.”[2] Such people never experienced the intellectual process that of necessity must dwell in and with the written word that actually produces ideas. So all they could summon were emotional tics they thought were ideas, since they simply did not know any better. But an emotional tic is to an actual idea what a grunt is to articulate language.
The reason of unreason, with its extrusions of gleeful bullying and punching down, is exactly what describes the chest-bumping body language of the Trump 2.0 Administration. Think of its current little mini-war with Harvard. Think of its cowing of elite universities generally, and elite law firms. Think of its manifest disgust with anything that smacks of “moralistic garbage” and “worthless cant”: the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, all the human rights and democracy and trafficking in persons offices in the State Department, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the entirety of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and one can go on.
As noted in an earlier post, we’ve not quite yet gotten to the 1936 Francoist raid on the University of Salamanca, but it’s worth at this point to add a detail or two for those unafraid to look ahead. When the leader of the raid, Franco’s chief military aide General Millán Astray, confronted the university’s chancellor, the great Miguel de Unamuno, he shouted ‘¡Mueran los intelectuales!’, ‘¡Abajo la inteligencia!’, ‘¡Viva la Muerte!’ (No, I am not going to translate this for you; I will point out that whether Astray said the first or the second remark—not both probably—is still a matter of debate.) Now Astray by all contemporary accounts was surely no intellectual, and as it happened he was not a particularly popular fellow either. He felt humiliated and demeaned, and wished to see Spain a crippled supplicant. That spasm of diffuse nihilism was how he expressed his desire for revenge against Professor Unamuno and all those like him.
So fourth, the nihilism that seeps like sewer stench from the Trump 2.0 Administration is unmistakable, and it traces back to those, like General Astray, who could not cope with ideas, who did not read, who hated what Americans like to call “eggheads,” and who exercised the reason of unreason against them because he could. Unamuno understood it: “You will win because you possess more than enough brute force, but you will not convince.” But Unamuno perhaps missed the point on that miserable day going on ninety years ago: Those whose only weapon of words is the reason of unreason do not care if they convince. They only care to prevail so that they can destroy. That is their own personal form of revenge.
The best contemporary description of nihilism armed I have seen is that of Timothy Burke, which is worth repeating here is the context of a new framing. The second Trump Administration can be seen plausibly as a Rieffian deathworks art project—the reference is to Philip Rieff’s My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (University of Virginia Press, 2006)—in the making. It is a project that is less about abolishing wokeness and DEI than it is about elevating anti-pluralism and several forms of bigotry on a faux-nostalgic pedestal. But it is most about, argues Burke, a howl of purpose-free anti-humiliation nihilism. Elaborating the theme of a “shithole country” turned inward, Burke concluded about three months ago:
Telling the people with authority in Washington right now that they’re destroying something valuable, that they’re harming even their own prospects for sustainable corruption, doesn’t inhibit them at all. They know that. It’s the point! . . . . [T]hey’re setting out to make life unstable, poorer, and radioactively erupting with untruth. They do this with no master plan of a better world on the other side. They are going to level everything as an object lesson to us all. The plan here is the same plan that an angry toddler has when they start throwing all their toys out the window. It is about vast and unmotivated anger that has no goal besides itself.
This is not a revolution, it is a negation. It is a colossal expulsion of the entire contents of a body politic. This is not just a bowel movement expelling what the body no longer needs, it is an evacuation of everything that has kept the body alive up to this point. They are digging a shithole so deep that there will be literally no way to climb back out again. They want us all to be down there in the dark as a punishment for the temerity of having been who we have been.[3]
Burke may be closer to truth than any conventional political analysis possibly can be these days. Whether he realizes it or not, he may be describing not just an explosion of the “reason of unreason” but also a collective act of megalothymia, led by the head pathological fake-Alpha male archetype of them all: Donald Trump.
The nihilist fourth element can explain why the principals of the Trump 2.0 Administration do not care about process connectivity in the government, or even in the Executive Branch. They do not care about efficiency or effectiveness because rhetoric aside they have no broad positive public goals in mind. They want to pull down the barn, not build a better one. They are destroying the rule of law and the Constitution? They don’t care except to note what a grand “no one’s ever seen anything like this” destructive act that is. They are perverting democracy? Well, as MAGA star Jack Posobiec has infamously said, like J.D. Vance channeling Carl Schmitt, destroying bourgeois democracy is the goal, so that the great leader can save the nation by linking the souls of leader and led in a mystical, magical embrace.
One of nihilism’s key characteristics as a pathological mentality, as Nietzsche insightfully discerned, is that it is time blind. There is no logic in worrying about or planning for the future if there is to be no future. Ecstatic destruction is a purely emotional impulse, so the fact that an Administration and a party that claims to care about the national debt just passed a budget bill that will bloat the debt, not reduce it, barely registers. The policy mentality of the Administration taken as a whole resembles a perpetual parenthetical of contradiction and incoherence that oscillates from day to day and from week to week with no sign, at least not yet, of settling on any practicable course of action. So even those who favor at least some of the Administration’s stated goals, and that would include me in a limited way, should by now recognize that this juggernaut of demolition-derby building capacity is not going to achieve a single one of them.
Put the four pieces together: We behold an Administration whose election to office is based on a conspiracy theory whose level of sophistication is roughly that of a lately typical streaming television thriller series—engrossing thanks to its glitz, salacity, and badassery on display, but tendentiously simplistic all the same. It thinks of itself as a business, not a government-cum-public trust, and of Americans as a labor force and aggregate demand generator—Eloi with debit cards—not as citizens. Its guiding mentality is postmodernist—the romantic mystical rejection of the Enlightenment, dismissive of facts, reason, and science and embracing of ideology, subjectivism, and crackpottery. And its visceral motivation often resembles one of revenge destructiveness, of nihilism empowered. It feels like, often enough, a mad mash-up of a Marvel comics fantasy tale and the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelations. And We the People by way of political plurality are OK with this, apparently. It is undeniably entertaining, true: “At least they’re doing something” is what a lot of people say in defense of it. Even most of those who are terrorized by the para-apocalyptic prospects to hand cannot look away. The Lord of the Flies, after all, is captivating, in more ways than one.
Extinction Event Ahead?
So on May 15 Jonathan V. Last, in his “American Cthultu” Bulwark essay, got around to asking the pregnant question of the moment, the question at the very heart of The Age of Spectacle argument:
And here lies the madness. What if American society is rotten? This happens. Just as a matter of history, we have seen societies fall apart, or tear themselves apart, because the people were no longer capable of sustaining them. All empires fall, eventually. Why would American society be impervious to degeneration? Give me that argument?”
Jonathan asked for comments from paid subscribers. Me, being a surgical troublemaker, sent him the entire Age of Spectacle manuscript. It was a joke, of course, but I did point him to just one paragraph on page 141, and within that paragraph to one italicized sentence—which some of you may remember from last year: “. . . understanding the Enlightenment origins of our political culture, which twinned religious and secular scripture into an ideational whole, is unimaginable except in a deep-literate context.”
So is American society rotten? Better put, is American culture rotten? It may be, but that depends on a whole boatload of value judgments. I’m not shy: I think it is mostly rotten, yes, but that’s unnecessary to answer the question of whether the American political order has reached a tipping point and is now tumbling toward an extinction event. To answer “yes, it is” to that more delimited question, all we need is to understand fully the italicized sentence just above, and nothing much else beyond it.
Well then, is this the beginning of the end? Are we on a trajectory toward constitutional-rule-of-law extinction in the United States? My answer: We’ll know pretty soon; specifically, we’ll know in and just after early November 2026. If free and fair midterm elections are possible in states with Republican governors, and if winning Democrats can actually take their seats despite a certain new lawfare “stop the steal” lie campaign directed from inside the state this time around, coincident with the attempted literal intimidation of election officials and judges, then the answer will be no—no extinction event, at least not yet. But if not, the answer will be yes: It will be the end of the constitutional republic created in 1787 and ratified by the states in 1789.
And So Then….?
If the answer is yes, what will it mean for country, nation, and state? (And why is pretty much no one willing to pose and ponder this question?!)
Such a tease I’ve been today. We’ll get to the answer next week, based on the framework set forth above. But just to whet your appetite……
The country: As the future unfurls, will the United States hold together as one nation? Should it? I don’t know, but I doubt that it will. That said, it might be better for most of us if in fact it doesn’t.
The nation: We are not one nation, at least not anymore. As best, the American nation was never much more than a frail hybrid of a nation—so James Davison Hunter argues persuasively in his recent book Democracy and Solidarity. For a variety of reasons our divisions now exceed the carrying capacity of our governmental set-up, unless we radically centralize them in an authoritarian mode. We have “disunited” ourselves—so argued back in 1991 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—and he was more right than wrong even way back then (and yes, Hunter quotes him at some length). We must either launch ourselves on a masterful path of subsidiarity devolution, one that can enable those who want “blue”-style government to have it, and those who prefer “red”-style government to have it in the same cohabitation arrangement. Is that even possible? Yes, I think so. Is it likely? Can it happen without some de-scaling of corporate concentration and Net-Effect gigantism? Much too dangerous without it, and probably impossible anyway unless people are willing to make serfs of themselves to the techno-feudalists. So as the nation disassembles the country will likely fragment.
The state: It follows that if the country fragments because the nation divides within itself that more than one polity must come into existence in what are the current boundaries of the United States. This sounds shocking and radical, and it is. But it is not necessarily bound to end badly.
Consider, just as an appetizer to next week, that the real “next” question for us as a people, or peoples if it comes to that, is more cultural than political or narrowly economic: How to redefine human flourishing in a way that puts less emphasis on monetarily gainful work, and so, very relatedly, how to adjust material distribution modalities in a way that they are less dependent on conventional rewards for work so as to maintain some degree of aggregate demand—but preferably aggregate demand for quality items, for true craft, and not for plastic garbage, i.e., true trash.
I remain a believer in the nobility and spiritual value of all honest labor. People need to work at something; but it doesn't have to be a something tied tightly to earning a living in the old-fashioned sense. People, even Jimmy Carter, have been searching for ages to find a "moral equivalent of war" so as to sate the male thymotic urge. Fine; now we need also to find or invent the moral equivalent of gainful labor, a way that people can appreciate the value of work that is not tightly tied to market exchange relationships. I have nothing in principle against undistorted market mechanisms, don’t get me wrong. But given the technologized character of the Net Effect what market can be undistorted these day? Not to speak of the robotic, AI-powered days ahead?
We need to find a way for the culture as a whole to climb a newly defined value-added chain in which creative destruction produces more human creativity and less destruction, social, spiritual, and environmental. That could, or at least might, reduce unevenly distributed rewards for producing trash as opposed to craft.
This is not a new idea, not even close. But most older versions have tended to imply that a program of leavening unadorned capitalism required some sort of socialist "nudging" incentive rigging? I think the terms capitalism and socialism are becoming functionally obsolete at a time when the real divisor here is revolutionary production modalities and related unprecedented capacities of organizational scale—the Net Effect, remember? Social software engineering like “nudging,” seems almost trivial in comparison to facing what is the real challenge.
I do not see away to effectively address this new ur-question, let alone solve it, in a United States of America that exists in its current Net-Effect condition, and in its current territorial scale. It may be addressed effectively only in a new distribution of territory, population, and governance. Maybe.
Ever heard of Leopold Kohr? Probably not, huh? Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin? More likely, I suspect. You’ll meet them, so to speak, next week.
[1] Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 10.
[2] Ortega y Gasset perhaps based his insight on Machiavelli’s The Prince: “. . . there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.” Alas, it seems impossible to know.
[3] Burke, “The News: A Shithole Recipe,” Eight by Seven (Substack), February 22, 2025.