The great American experiment, once the lodestar of the democratic world, now resembles a discarded shredder in a bankrupt law firm. The recent news that a congressman endorsed by a convicted felon, who is himself missing in action during the campaign, has won a primary is not merely an embarrassment. It is a symptom of a profound rot, a decadence that would make Gibbon weep.
Our British allies, with their stiff upper lips and historical memory, watch with a mixture of horror and a familiar, sinking resignation. For we have seen this before: the collapse of the Republic of Rome, the debasement of the French Third Republic, the slow decay of the late Victorian Empire. The pattern is unmistakable.
A population exhausted by political chaos retreats into a cult of personality, ignoring the crimes and contradictions of its chosen leaders. The endorsement itself is a sacrament of the new faith: loyalty to the leader trumps any and all questions of competence, morality, or even basic presence. And let us be clear: the missing congressman is the logical endpoint of a system that values celebrity over substance.
In the age of the reality television presidency, vacancy becomes a virtue. The candidate is a blank screen upon which voters project their grievances. Their absence is not a bug but a feature; they cannot be caught in a gaffe if they never speak.
This is the ultimate victory of hermeneutic suspicion: every action is a lie, so inaction becomes the only truth. The intellectual decadence here is staggering. Our elite classes, both in America and in Blighty, have long abandoned the messy business of actual governance for the sterile pleasures of social media signalling and 'strategic communications.
' We produce managers, not statesmen; spin doctors, not philosophers. And when times turn sour, the masses turn to the crude, the cruel, and the absent. This is not a democracy.
It is a tantrum, a collective howl against the complexity of modernity. For the United Kingdom, this is not a matter of smug schadenfreude. Our own body politic is infected with the same disease.
The spectacle of Boris Johnson's premiership, the endless dance of Brexit indecision, the hollowing out of our civic institutions: these are all variations on the same theme. We are sliding, together, into a post-liberal fog. The question is not whether the missing congressman will ever reappear.
The question is whether we, as a civilisation, will find the will to demand that our leaders be present: present in body, in mind, and in spirit. Until we do, we will continue to elect ghosts and be governed by spectres. The Empire, once again, is striking back.
But this time, it is striking itself.
