Late Imperial Phantasmagoria

Election Season Postscript

When I was in 8th grade at a small Catholic grade school with a dwindling number of students—Our Mother of Sorrows, the school was named, and it long since closed its doors—I was elected as class vice president. The vice presidential duties were minimal; the greatest task was to stand in front of the chalkboard and tally the votes that would determine the destination for our end-of-the-year class trip.

It boiled down to two options: a two-day trip to Washington DC, or a six-day trip to Philadelphia. The two-day trip was the winner, beating out Philadelphia by two votes. It seemed absurd to me: what fascination could the Capitol have possibly held that would have beaten a full-fledged vacation? Philadelphia held no special sway either, but the trip’s duration was appealing. I made the decision to simply switch three votes over from DC, and Philadelphia was now where we would be headed.

There’s not really any point to this story, no long-winded diatribe about the fickle winds of democracy and how easily its statistical regulation can be manipulated on the whims of those ‘in charge’.

That same year I successfully ran a simulated corporation in this weird Young Entrepreneurs program that the school had forced upon us. The prize for the top three budding young neoliberals from the class was a circuitous flight above the Louisville skyline in the private jet of some local banker or real estate executive.

A nervous flyer—I still am—I had visions of our twenty-five minute voyage going something like ValuJet Flight 592: we would take off, volatile ascension into the harsh gaze of the burning sun, and an event, an electrical malfunction, a cabin fire, an essential component in the vertical stabilizer shaking loose, would take place. The jet would rip its way across the sky, silhouetted against the vaulted blue expanse, it would bank violently from the left to the right and then finally enter into its terminal spin as every microsecond indexed the closing gap between us, sealed up in the flimsy metal fuselage, and the muddy Kentucky soil rushing upwards. Some farmers would see the fireball (they’re always the ones anointed to bear witness to the final moments of doomed flights) and it would be called a tragedy on the news.

I opted not to go on the jet, convinced that my overwhelming intuition signaled some sort of foreshadow or premonition, like those people who take a left turn instead of a right at an intersection due to a gut feeling and wind up avoiding a massive car accident by seconds. The flight landed safely. There’s no point to this story here either, just another memory dislodged by the previous one, itself dislodged by Tuesday night’s election, or really by the muted response that has come on Wednesday morning.

Of all the responses, it was those offered by Dave Troy that I found to be the most affecting (I’m always aggressively annoyed by Troy, feeling about him much the way I do about his right-wing mirror image, IM-1776). See him, in a state of abject mourning after a sleepless night spent counting down the minutes to Trump’s Second Big Moment, putting his ghoulish desire for military strikes against the Kremlin on full display:

We now live on “Post-Democratic Earth” (incredible that we could vote our way to such a situation):

Troy would be a deeply silly character if not for his own direct links to the national security establishment, a fact that makes it probable that the increasing insane views that he expresses are coming directly from them. He’s a fellow with the Future Frontlines program at the New America Foundation, which is described in classic wonk-speak as a platform to help “the public and policymakers” “make sense” of “how technological transformation is changing the character of competition, conflict, and influence”.

Of the three senior people at Future Frontlines, two come from the International Crisis Group: program manager Ben Dalton and senior director Candace Rondeaux. The latter individual is connected to a program at Arizona State University called the Future Security Initiative, itself another program of the New America Foundation. It works hand-in-glove with the military establishment, adding to the brutality of the war machine that awful sort of faux sophistication unique to so-called ‘defense intellectuals’.

Rondeaux also has an affiliation with the US Institute for Peace. This organization was profiled by Sara Diamond (the author of Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States) and Richard Hatch (not to be confused with the winner of Survivor’s debut season) in an article, published all the way back in 1990, titled “Operation Peace Institute”. Here’s how they described it:

The USIP is a funding conduit and clearinghouse for research on problems inherent to U.S. strategies of “low intensity conflict.” Among the results of U.S. intervention in Central America, to take a prime example, have been a judgment against the United States by the International Court of Justice in the Hague; the swelling of refugee populations in the region; and the growth of a committed domestic solidarity movement. Similar problems apply to other terrains of conflict…

In practice, the USIP intersects heavily with the intelligence establishment. Nearly half its board members played some role in the Iran-contra operations, and an analysis of the USIP’s grantmaking priorities since 1986 reveals substantial funding for “scholars” already on the take from other military and intelligence agencies…

Just as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has become a central tool for the promotion of political parties, labor unions, and media voices deemed acceptable by bipartisan foreign policymakers, the USIP, using the same rhetoric of “peace” and “democracy” and many of the same recycled defense intellectuals, seeks to control debate and decision-making on conflict resolution. Also like the NED, the USIP performs in public view some of the functions traditionally conducted by the CIA and perpetuates the trend toward public funding of policy-making elites not in any way accountable to taxpayers or voters. 

The International Crisis Group, with which the Future Frontlines program interlocks so heavily, is quite similar. It couches its activities in a humanitarian-liberal veneer, pinpointing hotspots around the globe where ‘conflict prevention’ is deemed to be a necessity. Conflict prevention, by the way, is a codeword for a spectrum of foreign intervention techniques—leading right up to, if necessary, direct military engagement. It’s not surprising, then, that the ICG’s leadership has been a motley consortium of NATO supreme commanders, hawkish foreign policy experts, World Bank presidents, IMF representatives and a few liberal activists sprinkled in for good measure.

It’s a pretty big indictment, in my opinion, that in 2025 the best this network can come up with is David Troy going on Twitter X to say that we are now heading towards supra-national monarchical rule, that Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin are conjoined in an unwavering faith that they will psychically merge with the Noosphere, or that Donald Trump will soon abolish the CIA (fingers crossed!).

This speaks to the late imperial exhaustion I alluded to in my previous post. In the imperial mode, administration in the core takes the form of opinion management, and when all other opinions have withered on the vine what’s left is the constant modification of fear, which lurches headlong into a hallucinatory abyss. There is zero relation between the narratives spun about in our vertigo upon the precipice and ‘reality’—I was struck by the total absence of foreign policy in the election coverage, no mention of the genocide in Gaza nor America’s proxy war in Ukraine. Instead, the resounding cry was that this election would determine the outcome of American democracy’s so-called feeble existence, and that this is the issue that the electorate cares the most about.

Early this year a guy on twitter got mad at me for saying that Troy was at once a resurrection of the John Birch Society’s idiosyncratic form of political paranoia and a person locked into the ‘end of ideology’ technocratic continuum, birthed by the sort of Cold War intelligentsia that people like Daniel Bell exemplified. But how could it not be so? Empirically, Troy argues that Trump’s political ascendancy is the result of seventy-five years of KGB skullduggery and psywar—“Active Measures”—which is precisely the sort of thing one finds in the Bircherite playbook (besides the targeting of a Republican political figure, which is something they would never do).

At the same time, Troy filters this through the ideology of the end of ideology, holding that enlightened western liberalism marks the final point of ideological development, an imperfect (but ‘close enough’) victor over competing ideologies like state/actually-existing socialism. Liberalism, in this approach, is treated as detached from capitalism’s exploitative qualities; any form of exploitation that can be detected is understood as aberrant forms of abuse capable of being resolved within liberalism’s self-regulatory apparatus.

(As an aside: a decade before Daniel Bell coined ‘the end of ideology’, he spent two years in Paris serving as the seminar director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-backed cultural organization that brought together writers, artists, intellectuals, historians, etc. to ‘win the war over Europe’s mind’ against the Soviets—artistic experimentation and so-called free expression as the cultural codes that could undermine Soviet influence on the continent.)

One could make the lazy argument that Troy, but really the network he represents, mark a strange synthesis or hybridization of these dangling Cold War-era threads, but I think that’s a little too pat. To suggest that these threads were already wholly divergent in the Cold War era is to accept liberalism’s game at face value—its better to think of these two, the fiery Bircherite right-wing anti-communist paranoia and the high liberal ‘enlightened’ anti-communism, as two components operating within the same social totality. Far from being direct antagonists, these discourse modes legitimized one another, they could pose one another in a false oppositional position in order to ground themselves. Between the two stretches the arc of anti-communism in full, which is really just the ultimate justification for post-war imperial ambition.

This same dynamic is at work today. What we are told, repeatedly, is that the Democratic Party lost, suffered a defeat of unexpected scale, and that now the party must carry out a self-reckoning if it is to truly retool for 2028. But the Democratic Party didn’t actually lose: it’s the winner of this election, even if Trump sits in the White House. That’s because it has four more years to position itself as democracy’s only lifeline, four years to stoke fear and transform that fear into mobilization, four years to draw down immense funding, to line up the sections of the elite that it has carved out for itself. The Democrats auto-justify themselves through the image of Trump, just as the Republicans do in the reverse.