We’re watching an administrative coup unfold in real time. Call it what you like, competitive autocracy, illiberal democracy, techno-authoritarianism, patrimonial state, First Galactic Empire come home to eat its makers, this is world-historical bad, end of the Pax Americana, its repressed terms & disjected others unleashed.
If it were it up to me, our world would be small egalitarian communes, each developing its own inner science & making such tools as subsistence requires, each at a cautious distance from the others, permitting & inviting trade in the goods that make this, let’s just say it, hard life, worth living & sometimes a joy to. The bow that so moves me in Japanese public life as diplomatic axiom. Now you know me.
So. No fan of empire. Have always sided with the Rebel Alliance. You too, I assume. But now it’s on its way out, the American Imperium, I can see the good it did, anchoring a fraternity of democracies, extending soft power around the globe. Witness the demolition of USAID occurring in real time in a digisphere that really is too much with us. Getting & spending we lay waste our powers.
A caul of illusion has been torn from my eyes. Liberal democracy, those rights & freedoms, in the sweep of history they’re the exception, not the rule. Even at the best of times, some folks are granted them freely, others have to fight for them, bitterly. And this is not the best of times.
What does #resistance look like at this moment? I’ve signed petitions, written to my reps, disinvested from corporate bodies performing anticipatory obedience with balletic ease, had beers with Democrats Abroad, scheduled recurring small donations to groups advocating for migrants & trans folk & Zen peacemaking & practice, and committed with less than perfect followthrough to withdrawing my attention & business from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon. What else? What works? Boycott? General strike? Divert sums owed the IRS to beleaguered NGOs & university departments? What can we draw from the repertoire of the roshis of civil disobedience who achieved independence for India & civil rights law in America? Do we need a Ghandi, an MLK, or in a time when charisma belongs to the con man, can we do it dispersedly?
And will I, if my one country invades my other, take up arms? I bawled when I killed a mouse my cat only half had. Can’t see myself killing a person – killing a world. Maybe my little cottage up north can be refuge for women & men brave in other ways than I. Meanwhile I read & watch counterfactual fictions, Plot Against America, Man in the High Castle, Civil War & try my hand at same. Here’s one, the last piece I’ll write for Occam’s Aftershave, prospectively dated 2028, the earliest it might see a public or private shelf.
9 March 2028
Last year Articles of Impeachment fell short by three votes. Republican senators who voted to convict have enlisted Academi (né Blackwater) mercenaries to guard their families 24/7. Key cabinet positions, Defence, Commerce, Agriculture, have been arrogated to the Presidency. Elon the Ketamine Jester is halfway to Mars.
Talk-show historians describe the Republican Party as a cult of personality with patrilineal followthrough. Comparison to the People’s Republic of North Korea is the common socmed cliché. Tiktok has resumed operations & benefits from lucrative government contracts. The Democratic Party has split along ideological fault lines. Armed secessionist movements in restive west coast & northeastern states have given President Vance, who assumed power last year upon Donald Trump’s full incapacitation by an assassin’s bullet – late-night comics vie for the best riff on the term “vegetative state” – a pretext for suspending civil liberties & postponing federal elections, even as Trump’s children vie for the Republican nomination.
Among our new entertainments are cagematches between AI-generated corporate avatars of competing socmed algorithms. Hesitant to gather in streets patrolled by federal troops – the Posse Comitatus Act has been invalidated by the Supreme Court, the extent of whose financial enmeshment with the ruling family has only been properly understood since last year’s exposé in the Washington Post, awarded a Pulitzer on the day the paper published its final issue, a gesture whose poignancy was lost on no one – opponents of the regime gather in virtual spaces established by Meta offshoot Maté to cheer progressive factions on to victory over TelegramX8Chan. Bluesky always wins. In WWII the Japanese Imperial government encouraged citizens to dedicate their leisure time to haiku about cherry blossoms. Detention camps bloom in the desert.
In Canada, the newly formed People’s Party, a separatist entity formed by disaffected holdouts from the Liberal–Conservative merger, holds 23 seats in Parliament & is negotiating a Pacte avec le Diable with the Bloc Québecois.
NATO has reformed its Charter to eject the United States & Hungary. Serbia has been admitted. France & Britain extended their nuclear umbrellas to all European Union nations in 2026 upon the latter’s return to the EU on terms compared unfavourably in the tabloid press, which against all expectations continues to thrive, to those of the Versailles Treaty. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, & possibly Japan & Colombia – policies of strategic ambiguity are the norm – have the Bomb.
A climate change feedback loop is releasing vast sinks of carbon stored in northern tundras, laying waste arable land in equatorial & sub-equatorial regions & prompting speculation in diplomatic backrooms that Canada, enjoying robust population growth thanks to an influx of climate refugees & the opening of swaths of land to newly bioengineered supercrops, will be a global power in two decades.
With Canada’s admission to the European Union the world has cohered into four spheres of influence – United States, European Union, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation – inviting comparison to the nineteenth-century world of Great Powers. Nations of the Global South play these actors against each other as best they can. More align with China than with others due to China’s skilful projection of soft power. International organizations such as the WTO & IPCC have not survived American withdrawal. All but the second listed above are authoritarian regimes with democratic facades that fool no one but are sustained for the injury they inflict on constructs of objective or intersubjective truth. Masha Gessen has taken the lead in close-reading the post-truth world.
The European Union remains committed to representative democracy but is under assault from within by neo-fascist movements that harness popular discontent over immigration, a fraying social safety net & draconian pollution controls. Petrol is €15 a litre. Execution by firing squad is making a comeback. Ukraine is a rump state centred on the city of Lviv, prey to an AI-driven disinformation campaign & slipping in spite of the best efforts of its elites into the Russian sphere of influence. Vladimir Putin was embalmed last month in rosewater. Historical mocudramas set in the early Roman Empire continue to gain in popularity.
The Art of Compost 