American Eschaton

¶The world is aspirationally American. We are the ideal the world holds up, whether we always embody that ideal or not. We’re what the world measures itself against. American culture, American capital, American technology, American military, American language. These are exported worldwide. The world is not divided between those who want to be American and those who do not. The world is divided between those who admit they want to be American and those who pretend otherwise while consuming American media, wearing American clothes, using American technology, and seeking American education for their children. The pretense of resistance is mostly performance. What looks like anti-Americanism is usually just local elites managing their relationship within their orbit of America.

¶America already runs the world. The only question is whether we are honest with ourselves about what we are doing or whether we continue to pretend, in the manner of the Regime, that we are only "promoting democracy" or defending some neutral international architecture from which we accidentally derive disproportionate benefit. We are not. We are the world’s imperial center. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The American military is the World Police. American culture is consumed globally. English is spoken globally, especially among the youth. American capital sets the terms on which the rest of the world’s enterprise operates. This is what we are. Pretending otherwise is the same dishonesty the Regime practices about everything. It produces the same dysfunction: a state that can’t govern what it is because it can't see what it is.

¶Political factions like the libertarians and paleoconservatives argue for withdrawal. Withdrawal is not possible. Our economy, which runs on consumption, speculation, and intellectual property, depends on our hegemon status. Its structure is downstream of American military and monetary supremacy. Withdraw from the hegemony and the dollar collapses, the consumption economy collapses, global credit collapses. Isolationism is an insane fantasy. American interventionism has been disastrous because the Regime is dysfunctional. This is a temporary organizational problem. Frankly, America being world hegemon is a great problem to have, and our only strategic move forward is to roll with it.

¶We didn’t get here by accident. America hit the moment of total leverage in 1945, the only opportunity like it in history. The European powers were destroyed, the Soviets exhausted, the Japanese occupied, the British Empire bankrupt. The continent was hollowed out, the oceans were ours, and we held the only nuclear weapons on Earth.

¶And we flinched. The men who might’ve used the moment decisively toward world peace were not equal to the hour. We had just spent countless lives in destroying every rival power on Earth, and all we built was a global architecture of permanent non-decision dressed in 19th-century vocabulary. Sovereign equality of nation-states. Spheres of influence. Balance of power. Multilateral consensus. The Westphalian framework that had been functionally dead for decades was dug up and its corpse preserved as the operating fiction of the postwar order. Meanwhile America behaves as an imperial hegemon in denial. It’s hedging. It’s cowardice. It’s the pathology of the Regime exported worldwide. It’s the refusal to author history.

¶What we’ve got is a permanently iterative world where the game never ends. Every regional conflict is another round. Every crisis is managed instead of resolved. The Regime decided it would rather bomb an assortment of foreign countries for 80 years because that was emotionally safer than ripping the band-aid off and building something. The flinching from 1945 is still compounding over 80 years later.

¶What we are living in is in the long shadow of an interrupted project. The concept of rights and liberty. The eradication of deadly diseases. The end of food scarcity. Marvels of engineering. Electrical power flowing through the veins of every city on the continent. Flying machines that punch through the sound barrier. We put a man on the moon. “The moon in the fucking sky?”

¶We spent centuries solving every problem and breaking through every boundary we could find one at a time. We did this routinely. Constantly. Every day was one small step closer to a better world. That was modernity.

¶That optimism brought us two world wars that ended with a long standoff between nuclear powers that threatened humanity with global extinction. The postmodern critique was correct about a great deal of what it said. When your civilization’s highest achievements are turned toward industrial slaughter, you stop believing in your civilization’s promises. The critique was the coping mechanism for the shock and it radiated through the culture. Progress has victims. Neutral procedure isn’t neutral. Universal claims are used to mask particular interests. The truth is my truth and your truth. That was honest intellectual work.

¶But the postmodern paradigm is increasingly exhausted. The game is past being solved. The endless critique, subversion, irony, and deconstruction that were claimed to liberate us from the rigid oppression of tradition have become our new cage. Continuing the postmodern critique is no longer doing real discovery. It’s only preventing the next move.

¶The only factions who have tried to succeed postmodernity so far have been doing so from a position that’s already lost. Every postwar attempt to return to pre-postmodern certainty, nationalism, traditionalism, identitarianism, etc, has failed on the same grounds. They have no answer to the civilizational rebuttal that defeated their predecessors. Even worse, many of them operate within the cultural malaise postmodernity brought. A lot of today’s reactionaries hold their own beliefs with a certain kind of self-aware irony.

¶Irony is catastrophe insurance held as an aesthetic posture. It’s one of the strongest cultural phenomena of the postmodern era. It’s pervasive. Everywhere are people performing some kind of self-aware detachment. Hedging their bets. Refusing to fully decide. The civilization that nearly destroyed the world in the name of its convictions birthed a culture that has decided to never believe anything too strongly again. You can’t usher in a new era when you’re still working inside of the previous era’s socio-cultural tech. Especially when its conclusion is to do nothing with seriousness and never commit.

¶There have been attempts to defeat the cultural pervasiveness of irony but none of them work. “Post-irony” is not post irony. It’s sincerity performed with the same self-aware detachment. Innocence lost cannot be regained. What’s missing is a fundamental shift in public mindset and attitude. The postmodern man holds outcome at a distance. We must collapse that distance.

¶We can’t return to sincerity through forfeiting awareness. But that isn’t our only option. “If a man is prepared to accept a loss from the outset, he cannot be beaten.”

¶The solution is prospective amor fati. To love one’s future fate. To embrace the superposition of all possible outcomes as valid and eat the risk. We build the Tower of Babel knowing God will smite it down. And we build it anyway, knowing he can’t have unbuilt it.

¶This mindset may be called Hyperfatalist, that is, to go beyond fatalism, not in the sense of “extra fatalism.” To love and embrace one’s destiny, rather than to resign oneself to it. The gods at the twilight do not sulk because of their prophesied fate; they ride out to meet their doom with gusto to die well.

¶You make the decision. From that point the die is cast. Whether you win, lose, or nothing happens, you have already committed fully.

¶“A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.”

¶The world we’ve been living in hates men who act. In a consensus-governed system, agency itself is transgressive. Notice how in most of today’s fiction, the villain is always the character with a plan, and the hero is a blank slate defending the status quo. The collective unconscious trains itself culturally to see agency as suspect.

¶This is why figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are objects of common resentment regardless of their actual outputs. They are not just resented because they are rich. Many rich people are tolerated. They are resented because they act. They author things. The culture around us shaped by the Regime’s Cult of Consensus theology experiences this as a kind of blasphemy.

¶Musk is the cleanest case. He is a genuine disruptor. He makes risky bets against current market conditions and wins. But the Regime can still contain him. Musk shows the limits of agency under the current order. His Mars fixation is platonic. It is almost as out there as a purely religious motivation and works on him like one. He’s reorganizing industries in a way that meaningfully contributes to space industrialization, but the scale of his ambitions is orders of magnitude greater than anything he will be capable of doing personally. Interplanetary civilization, Mars colonization. It’s theoretically possible. But the energy it’s going to take to do that exceeds the surplus output of any state actor in the current geopolitical arena, let alone a private actor. Consolidating the labor and resources of Earth is a prerequisite.

¶Under the Regime, the Mars dream is just escapism. The flight to Mars as a civilizational project emerges precisely when fixing Earth feels politically impossible. We do not yet have a coherent civilization on the only planet we currently occupy. Proposing to extend to another planet, when we don’t have the means to follow through on it, is another way of refusing the call to action.

¶That there’s the will to do it anyway is a sign of the coming era. Postmodernity is exhausted. Ambitions are exceeding what its institutional carriers can work with. The Hypermodern Age is approaching.

¶This is not a prediction. The hypermodern world is coming whether or not we become its civilizational carrier. China is doing the operation. Other parts of the world are starting to experiment with it. Private actors are forcing it into existence. The technologies that will define the next century, AI, biotechnology, advanced materials, fusion, space industrialization, are arriving on a timeline shorter than the Regime could ever adapt to. It hasn’t even finished adapting to the technologies of yesteryear. There are offices in the country that still operate on paper files and copying machines from the 70s. A new order must emerge in America. The window isn’t going to be open forever. The failure to act following World War II set an expiration date. Either America solves her identity crisis soon or we become spectators for a future built by others.

¶It’s been debated for as long as this country has been around who gets to be an American. We say everyone should be an American. Because at this point, why not? It’s the logical conclusion of everything that we’ve built and the only productive answer to the situation we’re presently in. We’re already the imperial center of a diverse globe-spanning civilization. We might as well own it.

¶Universalism is liberalism’s principle zero. Everything else liberalism claims, liberty, equality before law, the rights of the individual, is an application of universality. Without universality, rights are only privileges of station, which is what they were before, and where they’re headed back to under the Regime, which preaches subjectivity while practicing a confused hypocritical universalism. Universality was proven to be a fiction, a particular in disguise, a Western bourgeois liberal interest, and everyone drew the wrong inference: that universalism was therefore impossible, so either perform it cynically or drop it for your preferred particular. We’ve always had the option right there to just make it real: to build a real, particular universalism. This is the only logical conclusion to the postmodern paradigm that isn’t stepping backwards.

¶Every objection to building a universal order from within the liberal tradition comes from within liberalism’s betrayal of itself. The paleoconservative who argues for retreat is arguing against universality. The moderate liberal who argues for intervention over integration is arguing for tiered liberalism – against universality. “Everyone should be an American” is the only logically consistent application of “all men are created equal” once the technological conditions for universal participation exist.

¶To be American is to be rich. To be American is to be powerful. It’s to be beautiful. It’s to be industrious. Positive. Outgoing. Educated. Adventurous. To say yes to life. To say an American is anything other than an aspirational ideal at this point is just descriptively false. Every other theory has been proven false in fact.

¶It is no wonder that the world wants to be American. Who wouldn’t? We say let them. We say if the world wants to be American, America should come to them. There is always more work to do. More mountains to climb. Anyone who embraces the aspiration of America: we can find a job for you.

¶That is the strength of Functional Representation. Everyone has a function they can fulfill within the productive order. If there is someone who wants to work, but can’t, that is not a personal failure, but a failure of the system. The Regime built a society that’s cannibalizing itself. They’ve regulated us into the illusion of scarcity: that more workers means more competition for finite resources and opportunities. With a system that can adapt, more labor means more production means more abundance.

¶Unlike the federal system, where representation gets diluted by geography, and expansion creates superlinear administrative burden, our system can be designed to scale from the beginning. This is what hosting the hypermodern age means. Designing for scale so we can build at scale.

¶The American city can once again be a place where public life is possible. We surrendered it to parking lots and arterials, to zoning codes that forbid the things that the human animal actually needs, to a half century of architectural cowardice that produced buildings that are an affront to even the idea of taste. Meanwhile the cities the Chinese are building, and the Gulf is building, and parts of the developing world are building mock our surrender. The bullet train. The fifteen-minute city. The skyline drawn with intention. Arcology. Terraforming. Megastructures. None of this is technically beyond us. None of this is economically beyond us. We have the capital. We have the labor. We have the engineering. All we’re missing is someone to wipe their ass with the Constitution, flush it down the toilet of history, and finally put the good people of America back to work.

¶That is the American Eschaton. This is the moment we stop lying to ourselves about what we are. The moment we realize what we were always becoming. Our destiny is to be the vessel for history’s completion. This is what the entire liberal project has been building toward. A world where human dignity is equal, universal, and without border. An end to the millennia of local power struggles. The gathering of a global civilization into one productive order to build the beautiful world of the future humanity has dreamed of for so long.

¶We will make the future real again. We will show a numb generation how to believe in tomorrow, and in themselves, no matter what tomorrow brings.

¶That’s the mission. That’s the Popular Party.