Caesarship of a fake empire

Trump and Biden are not the septuagenarian leaders of rival political factions; they are entertainment brands, symptoms rather than causes of our protracted decline, as incapable whether in or out of high office of meaningfully altering the underlying structures of American life as they are of expressing themselves in well-formed English sentences.

The basic organizing principle of our society is not self-government, but the amoral facilitation of any activity that increases the price of stock in publicly traded corporations …

… America as we know it and experience it is possible only because of our broadly shared commitment to refusing to think about anything.

… We do not examine or debate things in this country. We click and emote while algorithms decide which brand of shampoo our preferred objects of feigned outrage suggest we are most likely to purchase. Thus what we saw on Tuesday: two men pretending to hate each other because each one is seeking an office that only nominally exists: the caesarship of a fake empire.

Matthew Walther, The caesarship of a fake empire

October 2, 2020


Previous:Wisdom of Repugnance redux
Next:Worth a read