It’s…the Empire in Twilight
How to read Trump 2.0
“Late capitalism,” the moniker for our time of monsters, dates to 1902. More than a century ago, German economist Werner Sombart published the first book of what would become a tripartite history of capitalism.1 The final volume, on late capitalism or Spätkapitalismus, was released in 1927, just two years before Black Tuesday.
A lot has changed since then. Has capitalism? Or are we still stuck in that final battle between capital and labor, as the two duke it out in the dialectical combat arena. Capital has the upper hand now, as it did in 1927, though as always it is hampered by its greatest contradiction: its desire to be free of labor and its desire to rule over labor. Artificial intelligence is the latest — and, if the technologists have their way, last — skirmish, as capital seeks to instantiate abstraction itself and thus overcome its reliance on labor, the body, the world.
Is this late, very late, capitalism? It seems to me the question ought to be: what if this stage of capitalism is not late at all? Something is surely dying. But if it’s not late capitalism, then what is it?
Call it, in this moment of Trumpist restoration, the age of late imperialism.
Where capitalism is flexible and canny, empires become rigid and complacent. They are prone to decline. The sun has set on every empire which claimed eternal dawn. What if the gloaming rays on the horizon are not the sign of morning in America? What if America is now the empire in twilight?
Maybe this has occurred to you as well. I know it’s old fashioned to talk of empires, but these are unseasonable times. A land war in Europe? The president rattling his saber at our island neighbors? If the Cold War started heating up with Sputnik, then maybe DeepSeek augurs a new era for us, too.
Then there is the Gulf of America. Is this the most muscular version of the Monroe Doctrine? Surely an empire more concerned with influence than vanity could muster better than so:
While Google users in the United States will see the Gulf of America name, those in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” which is how that country refers to the body of water.
Users elsewhere in the world will see both names side by side, the company said in what it described as a “longstanding practice.” The Gulf of Mexico name will appear first for these users, followed by the Gulf of America name in parentheses, said two people with knowledge of the company’s plans, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
When I read those lines, a phrase that has been lodged in my head since last summer started rattling around again: “a dying empire led by bad people.”
That’s how pollster Evan Roth Smith summed up young people’s attitude towards their presidential choices back in May, in a piece for Semafor. The lede? “Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born.” America for spacious skies!
This is not the politics of joy but the politics of pessimism. It’s also, frankly, a pedestrian sentiment, and not just from young voters. A poll from The Economist last week finds 61% of the public in agreement that the country is on the wrong track. The last time a majority of the nation felt satisfied in the direction their country was headed, according to Gallup, was January 2004.
That month marked the highest tide of America’s 21st century imperialist ambitions. In December 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured in his foxhole. In January, the Afghan constitution was ratified and the US could still claim some pretense of nation building. “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him” (December 14, 2003) endures as a meme because we all know what happened next.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. If my last post glanced on cultural stasis at the end of history, this one considers political upheaval during the same time. (Is upheaval the right word? For as much as the country has boomeranged between political parties, as many crises as we’ve endured, nothing has fundamentally changed: the rich get richer with a staid certainty.)
What was called the end of history looks to me more like the end of empire, the tragic moment of triumph when the empire that finally had nothing left to prove lost faith in itself.
The end of history meant, really, the end of political struggle and the rise of rational commodity exchange. The irony is that the capitalists, too, imagined Marx’s “withering away”2 of the state, not by world communism but by the free market. The unipolar globe was not supposed to be governed by an imperial Great Power (so quaint) but managed by free trade’s invisible hand. This was all bunk, of course, which is why Bush cuts an honest figure in spite of his lies about Iraq: the scion of wealth and privilege donning cowboy boots to go play gunslinger on the frontier.
The narcissism endemic to the end of history reminds me of Marcus Aurelius, philosopher-king of the bourgeois tech crowd and tragic hero of that great document of pre-9/11 American empire, Gladiator. The film captures well the restless undercurrents at the end of history. Aurelius’s brow is heavy with a weary triumphalism as his legionnaires decimate yet another Germanic horde. With no more worlds left to conquer, the time has come to hang up the spatha and deliver Rome back to its people.
But the emperor would not return home and America would not find herself managing the globe like the stock exchange. America-Aurelius is betrayed by his son Capital-Commodus, all while venal politicians jockey for position and Rome’s subjects reenact their own conquest for entertainment. The film’s themes — the vengeance of the dispossessed, the fragility of rule, the protean whims of the crowd, the power of mass spectacle — are a good summary of the last 25 years.
This time around, as David Wallace-Wells pointed out last week, there’s an imperial ambivalence in our entertainment. The cinema of the Cold War depicted brave Americans persevering against all odds against the evils of communism.3 Today’s films feature rather anonymous villains like the bad guys of the MCU. Even a work of propaganda as sublime and as obvious as Top Gun: Maverick stars villains from nowhere. They could be anyone. They could be us. America has plenty of enemies that could credibly wish death upon Tom Cruise, but as the sun dims on the empire, it’s as if the Department of Defense had its own Oppenheimer moment of despairing realization: the enemy was always within.
The wise fool Aurelius knew this, too, which is why he conspired to keep his son from the throne. When Commodus takes over, he feels his own illegitimacy reflected back at him from the Coliseum. The sheen of Aurelian nobility that the old emperor afforded something as brutal as conquest is gone. Commodus cannot command so instead he conjures, arranging a festival of gladiatorial combat to invoke Rome’s glorious past.
Gladiator, of course, is a hopeful film, released to the pre-millennium euphoria of a new American century. In the movie, the tyrant is slain and Rome is returned to the people. Wasn’t that the premise of another Ridley Scott picture, the free individual unyoked from the Orwellian state by personal computing? America no longer believes the future belongs to her.
Our tyrant now enjoys democratic legitimacy and boy does he enjoy it. “My recent election,” he said in his inaugural address, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal” (doesn’t he sound like someone out of Wayne’s World) “to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
This is standard right-wing demagoguery. Once, America was strong, but now, we are diminished is a foundational animating feature of MAGA. It’s also an easy narrative to slot a scapegoat into (see: “LA fires lay waste to DEI agenda”) This was the Trumpian playbook ahead of his 2016 victory, widely interpreted as backlash to the gains of the sexual revolution and civil rights era. Indeed, Trump’s political career caught fire out of a conspiracy against the nation’s first black president. He called Mexicans rapists; he was disparaging towards women; he enacted the Muslim ban; his supporters include Nazis and the KKK.
But what Trump offers America now, I think, is more than blame. He dishes plenty of that, still: “They’re eating the dogs” was both dogwhistle and meme from last summer’s campaign. But given the gains he made among Latinos, Asian Americans, and the working class, I wonder if backlash alone remains sufficient to explain Trump’s success this time. I think something important comes into view if we expand our unit of reference, from individual identity to national identity.
How does living in a dying empire led by bad people make you feel? The national mood is sour. Some among the liberal establishment accuse Trump and his cascade of executive orders for this atmosphere of pessimism (“The Second American Republic (1868-2024) is over,” wrote the consigliere of one Dem billionaire), but these are the types for whom questions of national pride are moot. The rot goes deeper, to the heart of our national self-understanding. Giving up on the future is a post-imperial feeling.
That’s why Trump wants to be seen pulling out the defibrillator. When he says “America’s decline is over” and “we will pursue our manifest destiny to the stars,” it’s both a threat to literally expand the empire, from Greenland to Panama to Mars, and a conjuring of the nation’s own brutal and glorious past. He’ll rob the country blind doing it, of course, but the trade might be worth it for those desperate for something to believe in.
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Burn After Reading
One of Arendt’s titular origins of totalitarianism was imperial expansion, as
reminds us. “Imperialism,” she wrote, “must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.” In Arendt’s telling, the capitalists of the late 19th century took over the state in order to keep feeding their insatiable desire for growth. Here’s Ganz:I couldn’t help but think of the Cecil Rhodes quote that furnishes Arendt with an example of the thought of imperialistic businessmen: “Expansion is everything,..these stars . . . these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.” Now the heirs of Cecil Rhodes, South African business titans, share the stage with Trump, a kind of mascot for crude capitalist competition and expansion.
According to this digitization on Archive.org, the relevant line in the first volume: “Späteren Arbeiten bleibt es vorbehalten, die Entwicklungsgesetze der hochkapitalistischen bezw. der spät-kapitalistischen Epoche, die mit der frühsocialistischen Epoche zusammenfallt, aufzudecken.” So far as I can tell, Der moderne Kapitalismus has never been translated into English.
The operation that led to Hussein’s capture was named for one such film, starring Patrick Swayze. The 2012 remake replaces Soviets with North Koreans, though according to Wikipedia, it was originally the Chinese:
While in post-production, the invading army and antagonists were changed from Chinese to North Korean in order to maintain access to the Chinese box office, though the film was still not released in China.