We're all living in America now.

Explaining the political reality catching up to the cultural one.

In many ways, the most poignant and meaningful fights between Americans about allegiance have nothing to do with battles and borders, but instead they have to do with athletics. Europe and South America have their analogue in football (soccer), but in the United States, the most passion people muster is often for sports teams, and specifically the NFL. When the Eagles and Giants meet, or the Steelers face the Ravens, all attention turns. And these cities may not like each other those days, but they’d be livid if they didn’t get their bread and circuses as a Sunday sacrament. Because, they are part of the same system.

It’s a pithy example, but let’s try something larger, harder, and yet more opaque. Consider the cultural zeitgeist of the West, how it is multicultural, multinational, and yet very American, after 80 years of cinema, 30 years of the Internet, and generations of having a unified West. Yes, we wave flags, but we live on the same terms. It’s even true in Latin America - three weeks in Argentina made clear that the aspiration is universal. Whether it is good or not is another, fair and valid question, but having spent two decades as a dissident, I’ve learned that people choose to listen to those who offer more rather than less, and perhaps the right, under Trump and Musk, is applying that lesson. Their motives are up for debate, but the logic of the moves to follow is far simpler, and self-referential.

The intersection between American domestic politics and global international politics has shifted the primary debate in the West, at least, from being between nations, as to being between ideologies. People, within the CONUS and without, see their friends as shared believers far more than countrymen - I get along better with Albertans than Massholes, as simple example, because we live in a world that is instantly, visually, and viscerally interconnected. The global tentacles, for a long time, and with subversive control that is impossible to hide, leaned primarily left and we saw those weaponized against nations in vision of culture war since Obama, a force that profiled their nanny state tyranny during Covid, the era which scarred us all which we don’t discuss. Most want to move on, but the old world is gone, so now we find ourselves being carried forward by those who look at this moment and see a world united with crowns in the proverbial gutter.

For the United States, the new Administration looks at people like Trudeau and Starmer, and sees enemies. For Trump, this is ideological, but also personal, as there was clearly heavy foreign interference in our 2020 election and beyond, and so turnabout is fair play, but the right does not play, effectively, the institutional long game. But in a world where lines on the map are redrawn by force of arms and will, which Russia is amply demonstrating on the killing fields of the Donbass, and where soft power and sanctions only built strength away, the shrewd see we are returning to the world before the world wars, before the consensuses, and where power politics and real territory, resources, and productivity matters. For America, it is a world where the dollar is no longer the arbitrary unit, where the grand navy is indefensible, but a fortress is there to be built as the Empire consolidates its gains. Its rivals can be allies in this reformulation, and I think, sooner than not, we’ll see a grand alignment between America, China, India, and Russia to this extent. Spheres of influence.

Are you living in America? Do you Netflix and chill? Are you living the American meme? Have you been captured? I say this without shame, for the Empire is not the end of your local existence. In truth, because it will be bigger, it will do less internally, and you might actually be freer in the way empires must be. But, it is also the day to admit that the universal dream of one world fails, because it must. We like fighting, we like the dialectic, and though for a season we’re bumping up like it is Sunday and the pigskin is warmed up, on Monday, we remember how culturally, economically, and militarily connected we are. Europe chose that by keeping America in and Russia out. And the Americas never had another chance.

Sovereignty was the dream of a time outside reality where America was a leviathan. America is now weak, debt is high, cohesion is low, and inflation is real. So, it must recalibrate or die, and just like any starving person, it will consume what is closest, but the sickly thing is that might just be the return to health, as the Western problem is a mental prognosis. Self-hatred must die, and instead of facing ourselves, if we begin to face outside, strength may return. The era of imperial duty does not have the same virtues as republican vigor, and Rome is ever the model, but it does have pomp and gallantry, and it could give us a few more generations, should the world hold, to find the next frontier and paradigm shift. It certainly is better than dying in embarrassment to Houthi rebels sinking a supercarrier in a world where proximity and speed are returning to warfare, and where instant media has made campaigns of violence assured to be a death warrant in the conduct of nations, as Israel is doing to themselves through their sheer barbarism in Gaza.

But, as I said in my latest book, The Golden of Trump and the American Empire, written before the recent noise as a prescient but straightforward observation, America will take direct control of what it can integrate. Trump has made clear through voice and deed that includes Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. I expect it will also include Mexico in short order for reasons I explain therein, and dominion over the Western Hemisphere, and potentially parts of the Anglosphere and/or Europe in some configuration. It’s more efficient, and the war of our age that has begun is to build the AI temple. One doesn’t have to like that to see it, and one can say technology doesn’t matter that much - but you’re reading this on a screen where you probably spend much of your day and most of your mental energy for exploration versus sustenance. We made tech magnates rich, let them control the flow of data, the points that assault reality into being, and now we will see what we have built.

If it ends up being an enormous red, white, and blue golem with some tattoos that look like an old visa stamped passport, doesn’t that reflect the world as it is actually is? Not the lagging vestigial bureaucracies, but much like the failing EU, the reality that you can simply capture institutions in new configurations if you promise greater wealth and comfort than the other guy. America is easy, you get what you want, and you aren’t asked to think if it is good for you. It is an addiction, and we’re not ready to break it, and so now we will see it evolve as a reflection of us. We can’t stop anyone else, perhaps, but neither can we stop ourselves, and so a metamorphosis arrives.

The other way was a sad death. This way, we can’t know. But bet on 2026 seeing a map that looks a lot different, and not just in the West. The world wars are finally behind us, and the noble myth was killed by its own mythologers. Covid and Gaza allowed an insurgency against what was to win. But people remain and power abhors a vacuum. What will happen next? I don’t know - but if you’re reading and understanding this - you’re one of us whether you want to be or not. The only question now is do you want to be safer on the inside, or a token for exchange on the outside?