It will be a January 20th unlike any other. At midday the new president will be inaugurated. In the evening, the national college football championship will be played. On a single day America will bloom in the full flower of late imperial excess.
It’s been 20 years since Niall Ferguson published Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, a masterful account of “an empire with attention deficit disorder.” He wrote it before Facebook became common, the smartphone ubiquitous, social media contagious and Donald Trump omnipresent.
The emperor returns. His billionaire populism comes this time with a certain acquisitive hunger — for Greenland, for the Panama Canal, for all of Canada. Call it empire-building isolationism.
His command is unchallenged. Republicans have demonstrated their fealty in Congress. Foreign leaders have made their abasement visits to Mar-a-Lago. The titans of tech have paid their tribute and will sit together at the Capitol. Will there be a luxury box?
Alongside Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will be TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Trump was in favour of banning TikTok until he was against it, and the interests of his billionaire backers appear to have been determinative.
The spectacle on Monday ought to provide clarity for the Canadians in attendance, including Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Alberta is not Saudi Arabia, but perhaps the simplest — and cheapest — way to deal with Trump’s tariff threat is to “invest,” Saudi style, $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. The fund makes no returns, but charges hefty fees. It’s possible that foreign powers think that they are buying something else from Trump’s son-in-law.
Republics are meant to elevate virtue; imperial expansion is the consequence of a well-ordered commonweal. Success brings the danger of overreach abroad and dissipation at home. Late imperial decadence sets in when the trappings of success are enjoyed but the sacrifices necessary to sustain them are no longer made. Ideals give way to interests.
Consider the Village People. Their song, YMCA, a 1970s gay anthem, has become Trump’s rally-closing song. Victor Willis, songwriter and singer, announced, as many liberal artists did, that he did not want Trump using his song. Then he changed his mind.
“The financial benefits have been great,” Willis said last month with admirable simplicity. “YMCA is estimated to gross several million dollars since the president-elect’s continued use of the song. … And I thank him for choosing to use my song.”
Would that others could be so direct.
In 2009, Aretha Franklin was the undisputed star of Barack Obama’s first inauguration, singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee. The Village People will be on hand in Washington for Trump’s ancillary celebrations. One does not need Niall Ferguson to demonstrate that decline.
Imperial decline includes circuses, and nowhere is the excess more evident that at the college football championship, to be played Monday night in Atlanta. The Super Bowl is bigger still, but has from the beginning been a vulgar commercial proposition.
College football, as the increasingly inapt adjective indicates, is supposed to have some connection to institutions of culture, education and wisdom. In years past that was covered over by a thick layer of lucrative hypocrisy, but now the hypocrisy is gone.
Players are paid, a bloated playoff system has been installed to generate even more revenue, and it is not unheard of for players to opt out of post-season play to preserve their future earning prospects.
This Monday Notre Dame is playing Ohio State. I was on hand in 2013 when Notre Dame last played for the national championship; they got obliterated by Alabama. It was great fun, but even then degenerate excess drenched the whole affair. The entire enterprise was wholly corrupt, in the worst possible way, meaning that the corruption was completely legal and even lauded. Not unlike Washington.
An empire with attention deficit disorder needs its distractions. Politics has been on the move toward entertainment since before Bill Clinton played the saxophone on late night television in 1992. Professional sports, including college football, is meant to entertain. “Sports entertainment” — which is what professional wrestling is called now — is the dominant cultural context for Trump’s politics. The tech titans in Trump’s front row are world-changing providers of distraction on a civilizational scale.
“They have everything for young men to enjoy,” sing the Village People. “You can hang out with all the boys.”
Billionaire populists are unlikely to bunk in the YMCA. But the sentiment holds, whether in Washington, Mar-a-Lago or at the championship game. The sybaritic class gathers at their clubs — “I’m sure you will find many ways to have a good time” — to celebrate their capacity to excel at ostentatious indulgence. It will be disguised in the language of republican virtue, democratic traditions, athletic achievement, school spirit, even religious conviction.
It will be all that and something more still, or perhaps, better to say, something much less.
National Post