The Emotional Stress of Imperial Decline

No empire is permanent. No “great” power remains so forever. But I missed the history lesson that would’ve prepared me for the emotional turmoil of the end of the world.

Trying not to crash out—an emotional overload in response to the chaos that imperial decline invites. As I see the American state once again actively repressing its own citizens and the people fighting back, it kills me. Whatever my role is in this conjuncture, my circumstances have made it impossible to physically be in America’s streets, where I feel I should be. It’s probably saved me from arrest multiple times over, so I guess I should be grateful. But it brings other stresses. If they can shoot a white woman in the face like it’s no big deal, they can and will do it to you. Prepare for a General Strike. And if you’re able, find an ICE protest near you to join. ✌️

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I don’t know how anyone is getting any work done. My brain has been stuck in quicksand. I can’t even get through my emails each day. And I spend more energy than I‘d like trying to keep up with the fire hose of bad news, because as much as I’d like to ignore it, willful ignorance about what’s happening will not save you from its consequences.

What might look like me being productive—regularly pushing out this newsletter and appearing on podcasts—is more like catharsis. Writing and talking helps me cope. It’s also all I’ve been able to muster beyond the obligations of my day job. Teaching has become less about lectures than about pastoral care and mental health counseling for hordes of troubled students (and no, political scientists are not qualified to offer that but it’s what’s being demanded). My big book projects, meanwhile, are technically “active,” yet I’ve put no words on the page for them since MAGA’s counter-revolutionary war began.

And it’s not just the emotional toll of what has already happened, but also the shadow of the future.

Yes, I have friends (and former friends) with mortgages who are suddenly unemployed. Yes, I have friends who are legal immigrants but advised by their lawyers to erase any digital evidence that they’ve ever supported the right of Palestinians to live. Yes, I have friends in academia who have lost research funding, lost scholarships for study, and even lost their employment contracts. And yes, I have friends, mostly in New York, who have been arrested for protesting for peace in recent months.

It’s all stomach-churning on its own, but the greater dread comes from why I think it’s all happening. When I project that understanding forward, I can only conclude that things are going to get way, way worse before they get better…and I’m not sure how many of us will be around when the sun finally rises again.

The day after the 2024 election, Lyle Jeremy Rubin and I did a stocktaking of our vibes and where things were headed. What’s happening now is the early stages of the worst-case scenario that we mused about:

Where Democrats Go From Here: Election Lessons, Mainstream Media, American Fascism, and India-China Rivalry

I’ve explained this before in various ways, but the worldmaking projects the MAGA guys are undertaking squarely aims to wipe out the middle class as it actually exists. That means crashing the economy, yes, but it also means purging the federal workforce and—closer to home—destroying America’s (formerly) best-in-the-world university system.

I saw this coming into view a while ago, so I’ve had more time than most to make my peace with what it ultimately means—and I can’t give full voice to that quite yet. But suffice it to say that the world we thought we knew is over. The only nostalgia we really have time for is the critically minded kind.

The Affect of Hegemonic Decline

Anyway, it never crossed my mind to ponder what kind of paralyzing, pharmaceutical-necessitating sense of overwhelm might come with experiencing hegemonic decline from the inside of it, as a beneficiary of it. If we are honest, that’s what’s happening: Anyone reading this has probably enjoyed an imperial mode of living and we are watching our ability to keep living in it being destroyed in real-time.

For those associated with US foreign policy—think tankers, foreign service officers, intelligence analysts—the objective indicators of US decline as a superpower are mournfully felt. Whether re-writing the “rules” of international order, imposing tariffs on allies, or convincing the world that it should seek security without the United States, every new Trump decision feels like a betrayal of a world they gave their lives’ work to building. And there is no denying that US hegemony is over—a gut blow to many a policy wonk.

But foreign-policy people are not normal.

Folks with everyday concerns disconnected from the ruling class don’t think about shifting power distributions in the world-system; they prefer to think about the idealized aspects of American identity that are under siege. An assumption that “who we are” was a democracy with at least symbolic equality made us feel good. The belief that if we followed the law as we understand it, we would be safe. All of that is under assault. Ironically, the ease with which our favored myths are being stripped away owes to the fact that they were never as true as we supposed.

But there is a material threat here beyond identity, which gets to my point about imperial decline: A Great Depression aimed at killing the middle class will reduce the physical comforts and luxuries—the bourgeois lifestyle—that many of us have taken for granted. MAGA does not represent an end to the imperial mode of living—it represents the removal of its Janus face. MAGA’s myth-making dispenses with democracy and equality in favor of explicitly justifying the imperial mode-as-nation. And “nation,” for them, is rich white dudes and those who attach themselves to them. MAGA represents a dramatic reduction in who gets to enjoy the imperial mode of living; a regime of even greater exclusion.

There is no exit. We can’t even distract ourselves to death as during Trump 1.0 or the Biden years. Our only way out is through, and that means fighting. But fighting is hard when you’re not sleeping well, struggling to focus, and having to medicate just to get through the day.

Thank god for ingrained habits. Way back in high school, Dead Prez taught me that healthy eating, self-discipline, organization, and training routines were radical practices—the opposite of what the capitalist system encourages:

Thank god for hip-hop.