This is the essay in which the series finally sits down with Bill Clinton.

I have avoided going deep on him until now. It has been a deliberate omission. The 1992 essay used him as a supporting character in the Sister Souljah moment. The 1993 essay had him signing off on the Waco assault at the moment his administration decided that if Janet Reno thought it was the right thing to do, she could go ahead. The 1994 essay had him signing the Crime Bill six weeks before losing the House. The 1995 essay had him signing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act five days after the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. He has been in every essay of Act II. He has been the center of none of them.

The reason for the omission is that Clinton is the pivot on which the whole series turns. Every argument the series has been building — the DLC’s Politics of Evasion, the counter-march as continuation, the corporate machinery that could not be politically countered because the political class had been trained to serve it — runs through the man from Hope, Arkansas. To take Clinton seriously as an argumentative subject is to take on the pivot.

1996 was the year the former liberal regime was fully replaced by the neoliberal order we are living in today. The event that announced the replacement was Bill Clinton’s reelection. It was during this campaign that the Democratic Party finished assassinating itself and left the country with what remains, thirty years later, a shell of a political party. There has been no meaningful economic difference between the two American parties since 1996. What has differed is the rhetoric — the Democrats retain the vocabulary of the New Deal and have added an outward embrace of identity politics; the Republicans retain the vocabulary of resentment and have added an outward embrace of Christian nationalism. Underneath the vocabulary, both parties have delivered the same economic policy for thirty years.

I was 11 during the 1996 election campaign. Like in 1992, I went with my mom to vote in my elementary school that was our polling place. As a family, we watched the returns on the network news. My parents, even then and still today, are more philosophical than political. They view both parties as essentially the same — a sentiment shared by a lot of Black baby boomers who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement. As Southerners, they saw what the Democratic Party had been and what it had become. They gave Bill Clinton credit for going on Arsenio Hall’s late-night show and embraced his callback to the New Deal, but they carried an overall skepticism of government power and never forgot that Clinton was a politician first and foremost. This is what makes Clinton difficult, thirty years later, to write about honestly. He was one of the most gifted natural politicians in the country’s history. He was also the man who signed away the New Deal.

The series-level throughline of these essays has been that the 90s — as fun and glorious and amazing as the decade was, and as much as it was America’s golden age of world hegemony — papered over some deep fault lines in American society. The booming economy was weaker than it appeared. It had been hollowed out for a decade and a half through the financialization schemes that ran under Reagan, then Bush the Elder, then Clinton. The expansion of white-collar service jobs as a cornerstone of the middle class came with a price: increased reliance on corporations for healthcare and retirement. The 401(k) replaced the pension. The employer replaced the union. The stock market became the barometer of economic health, in a decade in which the stock market’s rise was built on the backs of the emerging tech boom. The balance between capital and labor tilted decisively in favor of capital. The Democratic Party under Clinton followed.

1996 was the death, at least for the next thirty years, of the broad-based labor movement within the Democratic Party. It has not yet returned.

Two thousand years earlier, a young man from a small Italian town outside Rome executed the same maneuver. He too was gifted. He too was motivated by real convictions about what his country required. He too consolidated executive power at the expense of the Republic while preserving every appearance of the Republic. He too was cheered by the citizens whose political inheritance he was systematically replacing. His name was Gaius Octavius. He would end his career under a different name.

I. Provincial Stock

Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946. His father died in a car accident three months before he was born. He was raised by his mother, Virginia, and after her remarriage in 1950, by his stepfather Roger Clinton, a violent alcoholic who beat both Virginia and Bill’s younger half-brother Roger Jr. In 1962, at fifteen, Bill Clinton legally changed his surname from Blythe to Clinton in an act of stepson loyalty to a man who had abused his family. He knew who Roger Clinton was. He took the name anyway. The teenager understood, better than most adults, that the political and social value of appearing to be a certain kind of person was worth almost any private compromise.

Gaius Octavius was born in Rome on September 23, 63 BC. His father died when he was four and he was raised by his mother, Atia and a step-father who wasn’t mean but didn’t pay much attention to Octavius as he already had children from a previous marriage. Octavius’s father had been a provincial Roman from Velitrae, a small town southeast of Rome. His mother was Julius Caesar’s niece. In 45 BC, Caesar formally adopted Octavius as his son and heir. The boy, then seventeen, was in Illyria completing his military training when Caesar was assassinated on March 15, 44 BC. He received word of the assassination and of his inheritance in the same dispatch.

Neither man was born into political power. Both were provincials whose families had married into distant proximity to it. Both spent their childhoods watching stronger, older men govern with authority they had not yet been permitted to touch. Both learned, early, that political power required careful management of appearance — of what one was seen to be, of what audiences one was seen to serve, of what constituencies one was seen to represent. Both understood by their early twenties that the substance of political power and its appearance are separable, and that the appearance is often more valuable than the substance.

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The young Clinton at Georgetown, at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, at Yale Law School, and at his 1968 return to Arkansas was already the Clinton the country would meet in 1992. He was brilliant, physically striking, exceptionally charming, and gifted at the political skill his 1994 memoir My Life would later describe as listening. He absorbed political information the way other politicians absorbed campaign contributions. Every voter he met told him something. Every conversation he had, he remembered.

The young Octavian at Apollonia, at his arrival in Rome as Caesar’s heir, at his rapid political maneuvering through the Second Triumvirate, was already the Augustus who would rule Rome for 41 years. He was serious, calculating, ruthless when required, and unusually patient. Octavian's political enemies called him the teenage butcher — an insult that stuck to him for the rest of his political career. He absorbed political information the way other Roman politicians absorbed “clientele” networks. Every senator he encountered, he studied. Every constituency in the Roman world — the legions, the plebs, the equestrians, the provincial elites, the senatorial old guard — he learned to speak to in the terms each wanted to hear.

Both were gifted. Both were motivated by real convictions about what their country required. Clinton genuinely believed the Democratic Party had to be modernized to remain electorally viable, and genuinely believed the modernization he was executing would ultimately serve the working-class communities he had grown up in. Augustus genuinely believed the Roman Republic had exhausted its capacity to govern the empire it had accidentally acquired, and genuinely believed the constitutional reforms he was executing would ultimately preserve what could still be preserved of the Republic’s inheritance.

Both were wrong. Or rather, both were right about the diagnosis and wrong about the treatment. And the treatment, executed with a political brilliance neither’s opposition could match, delivered consequences neither had intended.

II. The Consolidation

Octavian did not become Augustus in a single act. His transformation from Caesar’s heir to Rome’s first citizen ran from 44 BC to 27 BC — seventeen years of careful, cumulative consolidation in which no single decision looked like the destruction of the Republic and every decision, taken together, was.

Clinton’s transformation ran on a shorter timeline. From his 1992 election to his 1996 reelection was four years. But the policy consolidation was more concentrated. Between January 1993 and November 1996, Clinton signed the legislative package that would define the American political economy for the next thirty years:

• NAFTA (December 8, 1993). Signed into law by Clinton after Congress had passed it in November on a 234-200 House vote assembled from 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. The trade deal Ross Perot had spent 1992 warning about. The 1993 essay named it as the moment the neoliberal order became bipartisan-elite policy. In the Augustan frame, NAFTA was Octavian’s veteran settlement — a policy that consolidated the executive coalition by making it materially dependent on the executive’s continued sovereignty, at the expense of a constituency (organized labor) that had no political recourse.

• The Crime Bill (September 13, 1994) and AEDPA (April 24, 1996). The two coercive-apparatus consolidations that ran alongside the economic ones — the Crime Bill’s 100,000 new police officers, prison expansion, and death penalty extensions; AEDPA’s habeas restrictions and terrorism-prosecution powers. The 1994 and 1995 essays walked through both in detail. Both were signed by a Democratic president over the objection of the Democratic base. Both preserved the Republic’s forms while replacing the Republic’s substance - think of the Second Triumvirate.

• Welfare Reform: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (August 22, 1996). Ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the New Deal-era federal entitlement that had provided cash assistance to poor families since 1935. Replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a block-grant program with a five-year lifetime limit and work requirements. Three Clinton officials resigned in protest — Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane, Wendell Primus. Clinton signed anyway. TANF has not been adjusted for inflation since 1996. Its real value has since eroded by roughly 50%. Fewer than a quarter of poor families with children receive TANF benefits today, compared to 70% under AFDC.

• The Telecommunications Act (February 8, 1996). The largest media deregulation since the Communications Act of 1934. Removed the caps on how many radio stations a single company could own, deregulated cable television, and prohibited most federal regulation of the emerging internet. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — the legal foundation of the entire modern platform economy — was buried inside it. Signed by Clinton at the Library of Congress on paper and digitally at a computer terminal. Within a decade, roughly 90% of major American media companies were owned by six corporations.

• Fox News launches (October 7, 1996). Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes in January 1996 to build a 24-hour cable news channel. Ailes had spent his career as a Republican media operative — the man who had staged Nixon’s 1968 television campaign, run George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad in 1988, and written a 1970 memo for the Nixon administration titled A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News that laid out a systematic strategy for a partisan broadcast operation. In 1996, with the regulatory path cleared by the Telecommunications Act, Ailes finally got to build it. Fox News would become the top-rated cable news channel in America and the operational core of Republican politics for the next thirty years. State propaganda isn’t always coins and giant flags with your face on it. Augustus funded some of the greatest poets of the age like Virgil who didn’t need to be told what to write - he understood the assignment.

• The Defense of Marriage Act (September 21, 1996). Signed by Clinton at 12:50 in the morning on a Saturday to minimize press coverage. The law defined marriage federally as between one man and one woman, and permitted states to refuse recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states. It was the largest single legislative attack on gay Americans in the modern era, signed by the Democratic president who had run in 1992 as the most gay-friendly candidate in American history - think the Julian Laws of Augustus’s late reign.

Every one of these policies was defensible in its individual context. Every one was signed by a Democratic president over the objection of the Democratic Party’s base. Every one consolidated executive-corporate power at the expense of substantive political constraints while preserving the Republic’s forms. And every one was cheered by a majority of the electorate.

Bill Clinton was not seizing power. He was being handed it by a citizenry that no longer required substantive political outcomes and had learned to accept the forms as sufficient.

This is the Augustan trick. It does not require force. It requires only that the citizens be given the appearance of the Republic while the substance is systematically replaced. If the appearance is convincing enough, the substance can be replaced without anyone ever noticing that the replacement is happening.

By November 5, 1996, the substance had been replaced.

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III. The Settlement

On January 13, 27 BC, Octavian appeared before the Roman Senate and formally resigned all of the extraordinary powers he had accumulated through the previous fifteen years. The Second Triumvirate had ended. Antony was dead. The civil wars were over. Octavian was, he told the senators, retiring to private life. He would resume his role as a citizen among citizens. The Republic could now govern itself.

The Senate — which had been carefully positioned by Octavian’s allies over the preceding months — refused his resignation. They begged him to remain. They offered him a package: continued command of the frontier provinces (which contained most of the legions), the title Augustus (a term of religious veneration — the venerable one), the office of princeps senatus (first among the senators), and a series of consulships that he could accept or decline. He accepted the package. The Republic had been restored, he said. The extraordinary powers of the Triumvirate had been given back. And Augustus was now merely the first citizen of a Republic whose forms he had systematically preserved.

The trick of the settlement was that no single act had ended the Republic. Every act had been legal. Every position Augustus held was one the Senate had voted to give him. Every power he exercised was one the Republic’s forms permitted. The transformation was invisible because it had been perfect. The Republic still met. The consuls were still elected. The tribunes still had their powers. Augustus held no permanent office and refused the title dictator perpetuo that had gotten Caesar killed. He was, by every technical measure, just princeps — the first citizen.

The citizens accepted it. The citizens preferred it. What Tacitus wrote a century later remains the definitive analysis:

“he seduced the army with bounties, the citizenry with grain doles, and everyone with the sweetness of peace. Little by little he rose in stature, drawing to himself the functions of the Senate, of the magistracies, and of the laws. And no one opposed him, since the boldest had died in battle or in the proscriptions, while the rest of the nobility, the more readily they submitted to servitude, the more they were rewarded with wealth and honors.”

On November 5, 1996, Bill Clinton won reelection with 49% of the popular vote, 379 electoral votes, and 31 states plus D.C. He defeated Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points. Ross Perot ran again as the Reform Party candidate and received 8.4% — down substantially from 19% in 1992 but still meaningful. The abandoned constituency Perot had represented was still there. It was waiting.

Clinton’s reelection was, functionally, the Senate settlement of 27 BC. He did not proclaim himself anything. He did not seize power. He accepted the office he had won by campaigning on his opponents’ policies. The Republican Congress was preserved. The Democratic Party’s left flank had been triangulated out of the room. The corporate-donor class was locked into the executive coalition. Fox News had launched four weeks before Election Day and was already beginning to shape the political-media environment. And nobody in a position of political power was permitted to name what had happened, because the forms of the Republic remained perfectly in place.

There was one man in the American intellectual class who saw exactly what had happened and said so, in real time, from a position that made him impossible to dismiss as a partisan critic. His name was Christopher Hitchens. What he said, what happened to him for saying it, and what his arc reveals about what the Republic does to its critics — that is next week’s essay.

The Congress still met. Elections still happened. The Constitution still held. But the political apparatus — the two-party system meant to debate opposing positions until finding compromise — had become an illusion or a distraction. The two parties were now indistinguishable on economic questions while TV pundits debated wedge issues calculated to enrage rather than inform.

Bill Clinton was, by every technical measure, just the first citizen. Just the president.

The substance of American democracy had been replaced. The forms had been preserved. A majority of the country had cheered.

Previous in The 90s series:

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• Annals, Book I, Chapters 1–15 — Tacitus

• No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999) — Christopher Hitchens

• Life of Augustus — Suetonius

• The Roman Revolution (1939) — Ronald Syme

• First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton (1995) — David Maraniss

• Augustus (2006) — Anthony Everitt

• My Life: Bill Clinton (2004) - Bill Clinton

• The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency (1989) - William Galston & Elaine Ciulla Kamarck

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming on the 1990s for something older. Much older.

I’ve been watching the right-wing meltdown around the success of Nolan’s Odyssey. The film’s massive opening — the biggest global launch of Nolan’s career, now past $600 million worldwide and climbing — proves that the majority of the public is fine with multiculturalism, choosing to focus on the story instead of the setting. This frustrates right-wing sensibilities, whose obsession with skin color and ethnicity is rooted in an exclusionary political process that seeks to define cultural power in a very limited way. Note the method: right-wing critics rarely engage the art or the themes embedded in it. They attack the superficial casting decisions instead, which lets them dismiss the work without ever having to wrestle with what it says. Helen of Troy is onscreen for roughly three minutes; the outrage over who plays her ran for months.

MAGA, like right-wing parties of yore, builds its legitimacy on the claim that it represents a downtrodden majority. That partly explains, in my view, Trump staying within the “norms” of presidential power in his first term versus the outright corruption of his second, after winning the popular vote — a plurality just under fifty percent that he and his supporters describe as a landslide, despite it being one of the narrowest margins of victory in modern presidential history. The claim of majority is the license; the reality of the majority keeps contradicting it. What the Odyssey‘s success reveals is exactly the opposite of the “Death of Europe” and “destruction of America” narratives: a cast drawn from many backgrounds but still rooted in the West (Lupita Nyong’o is the Mexican-born daughter of Kenyan parents, educated at Yale) does not turn off the vast majority of Americans, liberal or conservative. The box office was itself an assembly vote, and the demos ostracized the trolls.

This is exactly why art is so dangerous to right-wing regimes, which take the role of censor very seriously. Right-wing governments reliably turn state power against the arts, and under Brendan Carr’s FCC we’re watching the same instinct take institutional form. And it’s worth naming who appointed himself censor-in-chief of Homer: Elon Musk spent months amplifying the backlash, declaring the film doomed and accusing Nolan of desecrating the epic with “DEI lies.” Hold that thought — the same man is about to reappear in this essay wearing a much older costume.

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Regime type as a loyalty technology

The Odyssey skirmish is only the domestic retail version of something much larger. Outside America, in the wider empire, the administration is running the wholesale operation: openly funding right-wing movements from Buenos Aires to Budapest, with billionaire intermediaries bankrolling an ideological project that happens to serve their balance sheets, and a state apparatus turned against the other side’s donors. This play has been run before. The Greeks ran it first, and they wrote down how it ended.

For most of the fifth century BC, the two Greek superpowers exported their constitutions the way modern powers export weapons systems. Athens, having converted the Delian League from an alliance into an empire, required or encouraged democracies among its subject cities. This wasn’t idealism. A democrat in Miletus owed his political existence to Athens; he could be counted on. Sparta ran the mirror image through the Peloponnesian League, propping up narrow oligarchies of property owners who feared their own citizens more than they feared any foreign army. You didn’t need to garrison a city if the faction running it couldn’t survive without you.

Regime type, in other words, became a loyalty technology. Sound familiar? It should. The current administration has abandoned the old bipartisan pretense of exporting democracy in favor of exporting something more specific: its own domestic political agenda. The State Department has reportedly bypassed its normal open-bidding process to steer grants toward anti-immigration movements in Europe and Afrikaner advocacy groups in South Africa. Argentina’s Javier Milei — “my favorite president” — received a multibillion-dollar financial lifeline ahead of his midterms, while Lula’s Brazil got tariffs. The Vice President campaigned for Viktor Orbán. In July, sixty-five countries were summoned to Washington for what officials informally called the “Antifa summit,” the launch of a self-described global offensive against “radical left terrorism.” From South America to Japan, the pattern is the same one Thucydides would recognize: friendly factions get resources, hostile ones get punishment, and every country’s domestic politics becomes a theater in someone else’s war.

What ideological patronage does to a republic

Thucydides’ most chilling pages are not about battles. They’re about Corcyra (present day Corfu), a mid-sized island democracy where, in 427 BC, democrats and oligarchs massacred each other in waves while Athenian and Spartan fleets hovered offshore, each local faction inviting in its foreign patron against its own neighbors. His diagnosis: when every domestic dispute comes with a superpower attached, losing an election stops being losing an election. It becomes your faction’s patron losing a proxy war — and so nobody accepts losing.

By feeding faction abroad, America manufactures the unstable world that justifies its own security state — and the tax dollars flowing to the contractors who police it. External ideological patronage radicalizes local politics. That is the mechanism, and it operates today on every continent where MAGA-aligned money and endorsements now flow.

The Persian checkbook

But the Peloponnesian War wasn’t decided by Athens or Sparta. It was decided by Persia — and here the story splits into two figures worth keeping separate, because both have modern heirs.

The first is Tissaphernes, the calculating satrap who, coached by the exiled Athenian Alcibiades, paid the Spartans just enough to keep fighting and never enough to win. His goal wasn’t Spartan victory; it was Greek exhaustion. He was the patron who profits from the conflict itself. Today our profiteers are our news media — everything from large news organizations to news influencers on social media. Their arena is where our political combat happens, and they monetize our destructive engagement.

The second is Cyrus the Younger: a prince with vast personal wealth who went all-in on one side, forming a personal alliance with the Spartan commander Lysander and funding the fleet that won the war at Aegospotami. Here’s what matters: Cyrus did not love oligarchy. He was buying capacity for his own project — Greek soldiers for his coming bid to seize the Persian throne. The ideology was instrumental. The funding built a personal machine.

Elon Musk, the rocket-and-social-media magnate and faux Homer critic from a few paragraphs ago, financed a political movement, was rewarded with a chainsaw and a government department, used it to demolish USAID — the institutional machinery that had funded civil society abroad for decades, clearing the field for the new ideologically vetted grants — and then discovered, as Cyrus’s heirs always do, that he and the king have divergent interests.

The enemy within the walls

Yet the most precise ancient parallel to our billionaire class isn’t Persian at all. It’s Athenian.

The oligarchic coups that struck Athens in 411 and 404 BC were not imposed purely from outside. They were engineered by wealthy Athenians organized in hetaireiai — aristocratic clubs that despised the democracy that taxed them to pay for the fleet and empowered the rowers who manned it. Foreign fleets and foreign gold gave them their opening, but the appetite was homegrown. Thucydides describes men who preferred losing the war to preserving a democracy they would have to keep paying for. Lysander’s Persian-funded fleet and the Athenian oligarchs’ resentment needed each other; neither alone could have pulled the democracy down.

That is the frame I’d offer for the tech-right alliance now consolidating: not foreign subversion, but domestic oligarchs who have concluded that democracy is an unprofitable line item — and who, unlike their ancient predecessors, can offer the state something the Thirty Tyrants could only dream of. The Thirty needed informers and a Spartan garrison to hold Athens. A modern fusion of government and technology capital gets surveillance contracts, payment-rail chokepoints, and ownership of the public square itself. The Greeks would have understood the incentives instantly. The capacity is new.

An Oligarchs’ War stays a contest only while both sides have oligarchs. What distinguishes this moment is that one faction is using state power — the Justice Department pushing investigations of the Open Society Foundations, the ActBlue probe that conspicuously spared its Republican counterpart, an FBI mission center working with the IRS to investigate nonprofits — to criminalize the other side’s funding network entirely. Meanwhile its own patrons collect contracts, none of the terrorism accusations have produced a conviction, and it’s all dressed in the language of restoring order.

How it ended

So here is the coda, and it’s the reason to write this down now rather than in ten years. Everyone in that victorious triangle lost within a generation. The Athenian oligarchs (the Thirty Tyrants, installed by Sparta after Athens fell) were so brutal, and so obviously a foreign imposition, that Athenian democrats retook the city within a year; democracy was restored by 403. Cyrus died at Cunaxa chasing his throne. Lysander’s client regimes collapsed and he fell in a minor battle. Sparta’s hegemony proved so rapacious that it drove its own former allies into Persia’s arms — and in 386, the Persian king, having bankrolled the entire ruin, simply dictated peace terms to all the exhausted Greeks. The financier of last resort ended up owning the settlement.

Client regimes without local legitimacy are expensive to hold and radioactive to touch. Oligarchs and the strongmen they fund reliably discover their interests diverge the moment there’s no shared enemy. And somewhere outside the whole quarrel, a patient rival autocracy is watching two open societies’ factions tear at each other, calibrating its support, and waiting to collect.

The MAGA-Tech right can’t get past the Odyssey‘s casting to reach its themes — which is fitting, because the theme is a clever, much-wandering man surviving powers far larger than himself, and making it home. You can’t go far in shallow water.

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• History of the Peloponnesian War (the Landmark edition, ed. Strassler) — Thucydides

• The Peloponnesian War — Donald Kagan

• Autocracy, Inc. — Anne Applebaum

• War for Eternity — Benjamin Teitelbaum

• Dark Money — Jane Mayer

• Odyssey: The Greek Myths Reimagined — Stephen Fry

1995 is an interesting year. The halfway mark of the decade and my tenth year of existence. There’s been a surge of think pieces recently about Gen Z’s nostalgia for the 1990s, most of it linked to a strong anti-tech desire and an analog mindset.

Oddly enough, when I think of the 90s, what comes to mind first is silence.

That’s not to say the gangster rap, punk, and grunge weren’t loud — or that the fights, riots, protests, and counter-protests weren’t some kind of chaotic clash of spiritual dissonances. The chatter was there. But you could escape it. My universe was no bigger than the network of my friends’ houses in my neighborhood, and my window to the world was the AMC cinema in the Willowbrook Mall, where I spent a good chunk of my childhood.

For Black Americans, 1995 was a pivotal year for how the narrative of the Black experience would play out. On one side, the OJ Simpson trial. On the other, the ignition of the East Coast–West Coast rivalry in hip hop — which proved wildly successful at selling albums and rebranding Black America as an other within the context of American society.

I use rebranding deliberately. The theme coming out of the 1960s Civil Rights era had been integration. That theme held in our culture throughout the 80s — look at the progression of the Rocky movies, the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, 48 Hours, The Cosby Show (I know, now cringe). But the actions of our government told a different story. Look at the militarization of the police under the guise of the drug war, and the disparity between Black and white drug offenders. The East–West Coast division — which was entirely made up — became a “metanarrative” that represented Black people. Debates around ghetto culture, the pull-up-your-pants movement, and the publication of The Bell Curve the year before all fed into an identitarian politics of us versus them.

This was the America that formed my identity — one I still grapple with today, as a Black American or an American who is Black. Is an identity a shared history or a shared experience? Who defines what history, or what experience, counts?

The liberal order that preceded 1994 emphasized the nation — the full integration of society, through a generous welfare state built to bring equality of opportunity to all citizens. That project required a large bureaucracy to enforce norms on society. The neoliberal order that replaced it emphasizes the state — its full monopoly on violence, the erosion of civil liberties under the narrative of national security, and the embrace of corporate and state power in building both a kleptocracy and a surveillance apparatus fed information through law enforcement and private enterprise. We are watching, in this current administration, the inevitable endpoint of the neoliberal order.

The liberal order seeks to use the state to expand the definition of the nation. The neoliberal order wants the state to restrict who is an American. This concentrates power. And it rewards those willing to overlook criminal activity in return for emotional validation.

In 83 BC, the Roman dictator Sulla — you’ll remember him from earlier essays in this series — marched on Rome for a second and much bloodier time. Once, he held a session of the Senate in the Temple of Bellona just outside the city. While the senators discussed his proposed legislation, they could hear the screams of thousands of people as Sulla’s soldiers put them to the sword. Plutarch reports that Sulla told the frightened politicians not to worry about the noise. It was just some criminals being punished on his orders.

I thought about that quote last year when the Trump administration announced it was expanding the definition of terrorism to include anti-capitalist and anti-American beliefs. What better way to protect your looting than to lock up anyone questioning it, and strip them of their rights as Americans?

1995 laid the groundwork.

I. The List

In November 82 BC, after his victory at the Colline Gate outside Rome, Sulla installed himself as dictator legibus faciendis et rei publicae constituendae — dictator for making laws and reconstituting the Republic. There was no time limit on the office. He then issued the first proscription in Roman history.

The mechanics were public and administrative. Sulla posted white boards in the Forum, listing the names of his enemies. Anyone whose name appeared was declared hostis publicus — public enemy. Their property was confiscated. Their sons and grandsons were barred from public office. Any citizen could kill any proscribed person, anywhere in Italy, and collect a reward from the state. Slaves who killed their masters received their freedom. The reward was two silver talents — roughly the annual income of a substantial estate.

The lists grew. The first day named 80 senators. Within a week, another 220 senators had been added. Then 1,600 equestrians. Then anyone whose property Sulla’s supporters wanted. Then anyone with a personal enemy who could get their name posted. Contemporary estimates put the dead between 4,700 and 9,000 free Roman citizens. Whole senatorial families were extinguished. The head of Cinna’s son-in-law — a seventeen-year-old named Marius the Younger — was displayed on the Rostra.

What Sulla established was not that his side had won. Sides had won in Roman politics before. What Sulla established was that the political enemy could be turned into a list. The list was administrative, not judicial. It did not require conviction of a crime. It required only that Sulla, or someone Sulla authorized, decide the name belonged. And once the name was on the list, killing the person was not a crime — it was a civic duty, rewarded by the state.

Political violence had been an event in Roman history for centuries. Sulla made it a category.

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The tool outlived him. The subsequent proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC — the ones that killed Cicero — worked from Sulla’s template exactly. Cicero, who had watched the proscriptions as a teenager, would be killed by one of his own within forty years. The imperial-era proscriptions of Nero and Domitian ran on the same template. The list had become an heirloom.

Once the tool exists, everyone learns to use it.

This is what arrived in America in 1995.

II. April 19

At 9:02 a.m. on Wednesday, April 19, 1995, a Ryder truck loaded with approximately 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroyed one-third of the building. It killed 168 people, injured close to 700, and damaged or destroyed 324 other buildings. Nineteen of the dead were children in the America’s Kids Day Care Center on the second floor.

It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in United States history.

Timothy McVeigh was 26 years old. A decorated Gulf War veteran, Bronze Star recipient, and Turner Diaries obsessive — the 1978 white-supremacist novel in which a white nationalist destroys an FBI building in Washington with a truck bomb. He had visited Waco during the 1993 siege, selling Don’t Tread on Me bumper stickers from the trunk of his car. He had watched the fire on television. The 1994 essay closed with him planted as what would refuse to be absorbed. That was not a rhetorical move. It was a chronology. He was on his way.

He chose April 19 for two reasons. It was the second anniversary of the Waco fire. It was also the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which had started the American Revolution. Vengeance for Waco. Revolutionary rebirth on Concord Bridge. He was writing his own proscription of the federal government, on the anniversary of what he believed had been the federal government’s proscription of the Branch Davidians two years earlier.

He was not a lone wolf. Terry Nichols was his co-conspirator, connected through the Michigan Militia that had been founded April 29, 1994 — a year and ten days after the Waco fire. Michael Fortier, another Army friend, knew the plot in advance and did not warn authorities. Fortier’s wife Lori knew too. Kathleen Belew’s Bringing the War Home (2018) makes the point definitively: the Oklahoma City bombing was the outgrowth of decades of activism by the white-power movement. Not an aberration. A culmination.

McVeigh was arrested within 90 minutes of the explosion — pulled over on Interstate 35 for driving without a license plate. He was executed on June 11, 2001, three months before September 11. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton five days after the first anniversary of the bombing, expanded federal habeas restrictions, deportation power, and material-support-for-terrorism prosecutions. It was the largest expansion of federal counterterrorism law since the founding.

Sulla’s proscription lived on white boards in the Forum. Washington’s counter-proscription of McVeigh’s world lived in a 300-page federal statute. Different technologies. Same tool. The state’s chief instrument for managing the abandoned constituency had been formalized. Rome managed its enemies by listing their names. Washington managed its enemies by criminalizing their politics.

The paramilitary movement was dismantled for a decade. Then 9/11 happened. Federal resources were redirected. The movement reorganized. Thirty years later, on March 25, 2023 — during the 30th anniversary period of Waco — Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign in Waco, Texas. He opened the rally with a version of The Star-Spangled Banner sung by the J6 Prison Choir, a group of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 attack. He did not name the Waco siege. The venue was the message.

Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown (2023) states the arc plainly: In the thirty years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a president who reflected the bomber’s values.

III. Elsewhere

Two other proscriptions ran in 1995. Both produced successions the way Sulla’s had.

In July, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić overran the town of Srebrenica, a United Nations–declared safe area under the nominal protection of a Dutch peacekeeping battalion. The peacekeepers did not intervene. They handed Bosniak refugees over to Mladić’s forces at the gates of their own base. Over the next ten days, Serb forces systematically executed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. As of 2025, more than 1,000 victims remain missing. NATO finally launched Operation Deliberate Force on August 30. The Dayton Accords were signed on December 14. They ended the war. They also ratified the ethnic division the massacre had created — a constitutional freezing that left Bosnia unable to govern itself for thirty years. As of 2025, the Serb republic is threatening secession. The lesson of Srebrenica for the neoliberal international order was not that the will to prevent existed. It was that the will to administer the aftermath did.

On November 4, at approximately 9:30 p.m. Israel time, Yitzhak Rabin — the Israeli prime minister and 1994 Nobel Peace laureate — was shot twice in the back at close range as he descended the stairs of Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square. He was leaving a peace rally attended by roughly 300,000 people. The shooter was Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli law student, religious nationalist, and member of the radical settler movement. Rabin died on the operating table 40 minutes later. Amir’s assassination was the endpoint of a two-year campaign of increasingly violent right-wing rhetoric against Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords. Amir said he had acted alone. He said he did not regret it. He said his only regret was that he had not also killed Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Amir’s proscription worked. Peres lost the May 1996 election to Benjamin Netanyahu — who had spoken at the anti-Rabin rallies — by less than one percent. Netanyahu has governed Israel with two brief interruptions for the thirty years since. The peace process died with Rabin.

Amir was 25 when he shot Rabin. McVeigh was 26 when he detonated the Ryder truck. Both men understood themselves to be protecting their nation from its own government. Both cited religious or quasi-religious frameworks for their violence. Both saw their political programs mainstream within a generation. Amir’s proscription installed Netanyahu, who has governed Israel for thirty years. McVeigh’s proscription trained the audience that elected Trump. Both proscriptions of 1995 have produced their own successions — at the highest levels of the states their perpetrators believed they were saving.

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IV. The Rebranding

Meanwhile, the country was watching OJ.

On October 3, 1995, at 10:07 a.m. Pacific time, a Los Angeles jury acquitted OJ Simpson of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. An estimated 100 to 150 million Americans watched the verdict live — the largest television audience for any single event in American history to that point. Reactions split along racial lines in what became the year’s canonical image: Black Americans cheering in workplaces and student unions; white Americans stunned into silence. The country’s racial fracture was rendered visible in real time.

The verdict landed exactly midway through the year’s proscription arc. Five months and fifteen days after Oklahoma City. Ten weeks after Srebrenica. Six weeks after NATO began bombing. Thirty-two days before Rabin was shot. Sixteen hundred hours of cable coverage. Book contracts for every principal. The trial was covered as if it were the only thing happening.

Thirteen days after the verdict, Louis Farrakhan organized what became, at the time, the largest civic gathering in American history. Between 400,000 and 837,000 Black men gathered at the National Mall on October 16 for a day of speeches on personal responsibility, family, community, and political power. The Million Man March was structurally the counter-argument to the OJ verdict’s racial narrative — a demonstration of Black political and moral organization that could not be reduced to a celebrity trial’s binary reactions. It was also, in the coverage it received, dwarfed by the trial’s residual attention.

That autumn, another rebranding project was accelerating. Tupac Shakur had been serving 1.5–4.5 years for sexual assault at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. His album Me Against the World, released March 14 while he was still incarcerated, had debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 — making him the first artist to have a number-one album while in prison. On October 12, Suge Knight, the head of Death Row Records, posted $1.4 million bail for Tupac’s release. In exchange, Tupac signed a three-album deal with Death Row. He walked out of prison directly into the East–West Coast rivalry that Death Row (West Coast) and Bad Boy Records (East Coast) had been building for months.

Biggie Smalls’s Ready to Die, released September 1994 on Bad Boy, had gone platinum in the summer of 1995. Both labels had commercial reasons to encourage a rivalry between their artists that could be sold as authentic. Sean Combs (Bad Boy) and Suge Knight (Death Row) were competing for the same market. The East–West narrative — entirely made up, but wildly profitable — moved albums by the tens of millions between 1994 and 1996.

It also produced two dead artists. Tupac shot to death in a Las Vegas drive-by on September 13, 1996. Biggie shot to death in a Los Angeles drive-by on March 9, 1997. Both under thirty. Both killed in cars, in cities they’d been marketed as fighting over. Both murdered in the exact register their labels had sold them as living in.

The absorption machine the 1994 essay named — the corporate machinery that had metabolized Cobain in thirty months — was, by 1995, no longer content to absorb the counter-culture. It had started killing the artists it had produced. Life imitating the art the labels had sold as authentic. The 1991 essay’s Boyz n the Hood argument, the 1993 essay’s Doggystyle commercialization, and the 1994 essay’s Cobain absorption were arriving at their darkest chapter. The culture was now producing the murder as content.

Tupac and Biggie’s rivalry was 1995’s cultural proscription. Different medium. Same tool. The list took the form of diss tracks on generation-defining albums.

Sometimes it is set to a beat.

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V. The Infrastructure

While the proscriptions ran, the digital infrastructure that would host the next thirty years of their propagation was being made ubiquitous.

Amazon opened for online business on July 16, 1995, as an online bookseller. eBay launched over Labor Day weekend as AuctionWeb. Windows 95 shipped on August 24 with a launch campaign — Microsoft paid $12 million for the rights to Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones — that was the largest software product launch in history to that point. The Start button appeared in tens of millions of American homes within eighteen months. Toy Story premiered November 22 — the first fully computer-animated feature film. And the World Trade Organization had been established January 1 as the formal successor to GATT. NAFTA’s global counterpart entered institutional existence in the same year.

The tools the 1993 essay named as released and the 1994 essay named as operationalized as counter-march platforms were now, in 1995, being made everyday. The infrastructure that would host the militia forums, the Alex Jones audience, the 2016 election, and the January 6 organizing was being assembled at consumer scale in the same year McVeigh detonated his truck. The list was going digital. Nobody yet knew what that would mean.

The platforms did not cause the proscription. By the year’s end, they were everywhere the proscription needed to travel.

The Roman Republic continued for forty years after Sulla’s proscription. The forms held. Sulla himself resigned his dictatorship in 79 BC and retired to write his memoirs at his villa in Puteoli. He died the next year. What he left behind was not a stable settlement. It was a stable tool. Any subsequent political actor with an army and a grievance could now proscribe. Pompey and Crassus did. Caesar and Antony would. The Second Triumvirate killed Cicero. The imperial era’s proscriptions of political rivals ran on the same template Sulla had posted in the Forum in 82 BC.

The list had become an heirloom.

The American 1995 has been running the same play. McVeigh’s proscription of the federal government became, in thirty years, the presidential-campaign kickoff at the site of the event he had been avenging. Srebrenica’s proscription of the Bosniak population became a peace agreement that ratified the ethnic division the proscription had created. Rabin’s proscription became Netanyahu’s political architecture. Tupac and Biggie’s proscription of each other — marketed for the profit of their labels — became a cautionary genre their successors have spent thirty years writing inside.

The neoliberal state described in the opening — the one that emphasizes its monopoly on violence rather than the nation’s integration — was, in 1995, learning what the state actually did. It did not prevent the proscriptions. It managed them. It converted their aftermath into policy: AEDPA, Dayton, Netanyahu’s coalitions, the endless post-Rabin peace processes that no longer had Rabin, the corporate music division that could sell you an artist’s murder as its next album. The surveillance apparatus has grown fat, fed by law enforcement and private enterprise. The endpoint that this administration represents was, in 1995, laying its own foundation.

Sulla told the Senate not to worry about the noise. It was just some criminals being punished on his orders.

Thirty years later, the noise has not stopped. It has become the medium of the political conversation. The screams outside the Temple of Bellona have moved online. They follow us / we take them everywhere now — from our offices to our bathrooms, buzzing in our pockets or glued to our hands. And just as the senators learned two thousand years ago: it’s better not to flinch.

Previous in The 90s series:

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• Life of Sulla, Chapters 30–36 — Plutarch

• The Civil Wars, Book I, Chapters 81–107 — Appian

• Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023) — Jeffrey Toobin

• Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018) — Kathleen Belew

• Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (1997) — David Rohde

• Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (2015) — Dan Ephron

• The Killing of Tupac Shakur (1997) and The Murder of Biggie Smalls (2000) — Cathy Scott

The White Bronco. Man, I was so pissed.

I distinctly remember being home from school on the afternoon of June 17, 1994, watching Tiny Toon Adventures while my mom figured out dinner. That’s when the show cut. Local news took the feed. All I was shown was a stretch of Los Angeles freeway where a white Bronco was crawling — creeping, really, thirty miles an hour, twenty patrol cars behind it. OJ Simpson wasn’t to me what he had been to millions of Americans: a sports icon, a symbol of a post-racial society. He wasn’t Black. He was OJ. For me, he was Detective Nordberg from the Naked Gun movies. Naked Gun 33⅓ had been in theaters that March. He was the funny cop who fell down a lot. Why was the news ruining my afterschool cartoons? For him? For Nordberg?!?

1994 was the year we saw exactly how the new norms would look.

Last week’s essay described 1993 as America’s version of Sulla’s first march on Rome — the moment the lines that hold a system together were revealed to be sustained by consensus rather than law. This essay looks at the second march a year later. Not Sulla’s second march. That comes later. The second march of 1994 was Marius’s — the counter-strike by Sulla’s chief rival, framed at the time as an opposition and executed, in fact, as a continuation.

There’s a tendency today to try to map our two-party system onto the two main factions of Roman politics: the optimates (Republicans), who wanted power vested in a group of elite families, and the populares (Democrats), who claimed to represent the interests of the people. Caesar came from the latter camp. Cicero was a pillar of the former. The comparison is convenient and mostly wrong.

Roman political factions were not parties in the modern sense. They were loose associations of overlapping interests and relationships — patronage networks, marriage alliances, business partnerships, the men one had campaigned with in Gaul or Bithynia. American politics is organized around a two-party system, but American elites are the same loose association: lobbyists, donors, fundraisers, think tanks; country clubs, alumni associations, gated communities. The parties are the marketing. The elite is the elite.

Marius’s return to Rome in 87 BC was framed by generations of historians as a counter-march — the populares answering the optimates, the man of the people avenging his humiliation by the aristocratic Sulla. Read closer to the ground, it looks different. Marius did not reverse Sulla’s project. He continued it, under his own name, using the same tools. Newt Gingrich, in 1994, walked up the steps of the U.S. Capitol and unfurled a document that was framed by the political press as a counter-march against Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. Read closer to the ground, it also looks different. Gingrich pursued the same supply-side economics as Clinton. He was an enthusiastic supporter of NAFTA. His procedural instincts consolidated power in exactly the direction Clinton’s had. What arrived in November 1994 was not a Republican counter-march against a Democratic administration. It was the second installment of a thirty-year march toward the concentration of power in a small network of elites — running under a different brand.

The counter-march is the continuation.

I. What Was Being Broken

Before the essay can name what 1994 broke, it has to name what had held.

The post-war American order was a fusion. On the economic side, the New Deal regime — banking regulation, labor rights, the social insurance apparatus, the progressive income tax — had held since Roosevelt. On the moral side, the civil rights order that Kennedy and Johnson eventually delivered was itself an international project as much as a domestic one. Jim Crow was Soviet propaganda material throughout the 1950s. American diplomats in the newly independent African states of the early 1960s could not defend segregation to leaders who had just decolonized. Kennedy pushed civil rights partly because the Cold War required a United States that was defensible in the Global South. When Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, becoming the youngest laureate the prize had ever named, the honor was as much a recognition of American racial progress by the international community as it was a recognition of King. The Nobel was the world telling America that it had noticed. Civil rights advanced partly because it had an international audience.

These two orders — the New Deal economic settlement and the civil rights international project — were fused as a stalwart against communism. They were understood as the two halves of a single American liberalism. The Democratic Party of Roosevelt through Johnson was the party of both.

By 1994, the fusion was ending. The Reagan deregulation of the 1980s had unwound significant parts of the New Deal regulatory architecture — the savings and loan crisis of 1989 was one of the bills that came due, though a smaller one than what was still coming. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) had spent 1985 through 1992 arguing that the Democratic Party had to abandon its base to survive. NAFTA, formally signed by Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993, and effective as of January 1, 1994, was the formal announcement of what had already been happening for a decade: the Democratic Party had exited the New Deal order, and the neoliberal order had become bipartisan-elite policy.

The Cold War’s end had removed the pressure that had made civil rights internationally legible in the first place. There was no longer a Soviet propaganda apparatus to notice American treatment of its Black citizens. The international audience that had disciplined Kennedy’s civil rights politics was gone. What remained was the domestic politics of race, which the DLC had spent a decade demonstrating could be managed — with a Souljah moment here, a Rector execution there — but no longer required to be addressed.

Something else had held for fifty years. In 1994 it stopped holding. The essay you are reading is about what came next.

II. Marius Continues Sulla

In 88 BC, Sulla marched on Rome. In 87 BC, his old commander Marius marched back — not to reverse what Sulla had done, but to run its machinery under a different name.

What followed made Sulla’s first march look restrained. Marius ordered a proscription — public lists of political enemies whose murder was state-sanctioned. His guards killed anyone who failed to return his greeting on the street. The former consul Gnaeus Octavius was murdered on the Rostra. The heads of the dead were displayed publicly. Appian, writing generations later, was still shocked: for five days and five nights, the killing did not stop. Marius, having achieved his seventh consulship, died two weeks into it. Cinna, Marius’s partner, held Rome for four years afterward.

Sulla and Marius were rivals in rhetoric. Their tools were identical. Their political innovation — that armies could march on Rome, that public lists of enemies could be killed, that senatorial commands could be taken by force — was continuous. Marius did not defeat Sulla’s project. He extended it. What he established in 87 BC was not that the populares could beat the optimates. It was that Sulla’s methods now worked for anyone who wanted to use them. The proscriptions Marius invented would be perfected by Sulla when he returned in 83 BC and marched a second time. The forms of the Republic remained. The substance was replaced. And what replaced it was a class of political operators, factional in name and continuous in fact, who would spend the next forty years marching on Rome under different banners while running the same machine.

Now come to 1994.

Six weeks before the midterms, on September 27, Gingrich unfurled the Contract with America on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Six weeks later, Republicans took 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats, flipping both chambers and ending forty years of Democratic House control. It was the largest midterm swing in half a century.

The Contract was framed by the political press as a counter-march. In substantive terms, it was a continuation. Gingrich pursued the same supply-side economics as Clinton. He was an enthusiastic supporter of NAFTA. His fiscal politics were essentially Reagan’s, executed with more procedural aggression. The vocabulary was different but the underlying political project was continuous with the DLC project the 1992 essay traced.

Since entering Congress in 1979, Gingrich had been building a counter-institution to the Democratic congressional establishment. In the late 1980s, his political action committee, GOPAC, began distributing audio cassettes to Republican candidates around the country. The tapes taught a specific vocabulary. Magnet words — opportunity, freedom, liberty, truth, courage, reform — were to describe Republican initiatives. Wedge words — corrupt, decay, sick, traitors, pathetic, permissive — were to describe Democrats. A young pollster named Frank Luntz would later refine the technique. The tapes taught an entire generation of Republican politicians a shared vocabulary designed not to describe reality but to weaponize it.

The 1989 essay called this Surkov’s political technology when Vladislav Surkov perfected it for Putin’s Russia. Gingrich’s America would find its full expression in talk radio, in the newly commercial cable news of the mid-90s, in the internet within a decade, in Fox News from 1996 on, and eventually in the Trump administration’s flood-the-zone doctrine that the 1989 essay traced back to Moscow. Gingrich and Surkov had never met as far as I know, but they had built the same tool in different alphabets.

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But the tools were only part of the project. Gingrich also consolidated power within a small elite — the speaker, the speaker’s chosen leadership, the committee chairs — tightening control over which bills made it out of committee and turning the People’s House into a rubber stamp of leadership and its donors. This has had the effect of weakening the power of Congress in favor of the imperial presidency. The president as the focal point for the party becomes de facto leader of Congress without a check on his power when his own party is in power. Combined with the unitary executive theory currently traveling through the Supreme Court, you have a situation where an executive can openly use the levers of power to enrich himself and his inner circle without fear of reprisal.

The 1994 election was the first in American history in which a nationally coordinated partisan message, refined through years of vocabulary discipline and delivered through non-official channels, reached every voter in every district simultaneously. Tip O’Neill’s dictum had been all politics is local. Gingrich nationalized 435 House races and turned every one of them into a referendum on Bill Clinton. It worked. Every subsequent American election has run on the same infrastructure.

Marius framed his march as an answer to Sulla. It was the same march. Gingrich framed his revolution as an answer to Clinton. It was the same revolution.

The counter-march is the continuation. The tools are the tools. The elite is the elite.

III. The Bill

Six weeks before the election that would end his House majority, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It was the largest crime bill in American history. Its provisions delivered on the DLC promises: 100,000 additional police officers funded through the COPS program, a federal Assault Weapons Ban (with a ten-year sunset, expired 2004 and never renewed), expansion of the federal death penalty to 60 offenses, truth-in-sentencing incentives to force states to make prisoners serve 85% of their time, $9.7 billion for prison construction, the Violence Against Women Act as a genuine advance, federal three-strikes for violent felonies, and the elimination of Pell Grants for prisoners. The Congressional Black Caucus split roughly in half.

Here is the structural diagnosis. Since 1980, the American state had been giving up regulatory power over capital — through Reagan’s deregulation, through the erosion of banking rules, through the trade agreements that culminated in NAFTA. The Crime Bill announced what would replace it. The regulatory power the state was ceding over capital, it was consolidating over labor. More police, more prisons, more prosecutions, expanded death penalty. The neoliberal state was not, as the caricature has it, a small state. It was a state that had reduced its power over the wealthy and expanded its power over the poor, and had done so simultaneously, through the same political coalition, in the same twelve-month window. The Crime Bill and NAFTA are the two halves of a single 1994 argument about what the American state now existed to do.

Sulla’s proscriptions were the political-violence version of the same argument. The Crime Bill was the policy version. Both were the state’s chief instrument for managing the abandoned constituency. Rome managed its abandoned Italians by listing their political leaders and killing them. Washington managed its abandoned working class by listing offenses and imprisoning them. Different currencies. Same transaction.

Six weeks after Clinton signed the Crime Bill, the Democrats lost the House. The DLC’s promise — that moving right on crime and welfare would save the Democratic Party — was disproven the same year it was executed at scale.

But losing the House was not losing the argument. Gingrich supported the Crime Bill. It had passed with substantial Republican support in both chambers. The Contract with America and the Crime Bill were the same march. They were the elite consolidation running on both parties’ letterheads. Marius and Sulla, once you looked closely, had been running the same machine. So had Gingrich and Clinton.

Twenty-two years later, in November 2016, the settlement Clinton signed would follow his wife into a general election and would be one of the reasons she lost it. Hillary Clinton, running against the last remaining populist counter-march, would be tarnished with the results of her husband’s presidency — shackled as an elite by a bill she had personally advocated for. The counter-march that began in 1994, and that has been running in installments ever since, would collect that particular payment in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

IV. A Small Voice from the Empire

The Zapatistas timed their uprising to the exact minute NAFTA took effect. At midnight on January 1, 1994, three thousand indigenous soldiers of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional seized four Mexican cities and declared war on the government of Mexico. Their spokesperson, a masked mestizo philosophy professor operating under the name Subcomandante Marcos, called NAFTA a death sentence for indigenous peoples. The timing was deliberate. Twelve days of urban combat followed. Over one hundred died. The Mexican Army pushed the EZLN back into the Lacandón Jungle. A ceasefire was reached on January 12.

The military effect was marginal. The political effect was enormous, and it turned on one specific detail. The Mexican state moved immediately to suppress news of the uprising through control of Mexican radio and television. The Zapatistas’ allies bypassed the state media completely by uploading handwritten communiqués from Marcos to the newly public World Wide Web — released to the world just eight months earlier. International solidarity networks in North America and Europe circulated Zapatista communiqués within hours of them being written in the jungle. The internet’s first major global political use was the Zapatistas’ bypass of Mexican state censorship. The tool released in April 1993 was operationalized as a counter-march platform by January 1994. Alex Jones would do the same thing for the American right within a decade. The Zapatistas got there first.

Then, over the next fifteen years, the Zapatistas were slowly contained. The Mexican military built a permanent occupation of Chiapas. The San Andrés Accords, signed in 1996, were watered down before ratification. The land reform the uprising demanded never came. The Zapatistas remain in the jungle. What they demonstrated was that the tools of counter-march were now globally available. What they also demonstrated was that the neoliberal order had the patience and resources to absorb even the most militant challenge, provided the challenger did not threaten the underlying economic settlement.

V. The Culture That Was Absorbed

The political counter-marches of 1994 were elite continuations dressed as opposition. The cultural counter-marches were real. But by the end of the year, they had been absorbed by the same corporate machinery that had produced the conditions for them.

Cobain. On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. His body was found on April 8 by an electrician. He was twenty-seven years old.

The voice of the disaffected generation that the 1991 essay had built its argument around was gone at the exact moment the corporate absorption of alternative culture that the 1993 essay had described was complete. Nirvana had sold twenty-five million albums. Grunge was on billboards. Flannel was at the Gap. The Lollapalooza mechanism had operationalized. Cobain’s suicide note included the line from Neil Young — it’s better to burn out than to fade away — that the note has been remembered by. In April 1994, from Cobain, it landed as autobiography.

His absence became its own commodity within a year. Courtney Love read his suicide note aloud to a crowd of thousands in a Seattle park on April 10. MTV played the tape. The corporation that could not absorb him alive absorbed his death.

Clerks. Kevin Smith was twenty-three years old and owed twenty-seven thousand dollars on credit cards when Clerks premiered at Sundance in January 1994. He had shot the film in the Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey, where he actually worked. The film was black and white. It featured no violence. It featured Dante Hicks who wasn’t even supposed to be here today, his best friend Randal at the video store, and a series of talky, mundane conversations about Star Wars, about hockey, about the personal geometry of oral sex.

Clerks was the true counter-march of 1994. The people the political class was talking about when it referred to cops and criminals mostly worked at convenience stores and did not enter either category. Their lives were tedious, funny, and largely inaccessible to the political imagination of both parties. The most important political fact about them — that they were being priced out of the middle-class contract their parents had been sold — was invisible to Gingrich’s Contract, invisible to the Crime Bill, invisible to NAFTA. Kevin Smith put them on screen, in black and white, on twenty-seven thousand dollars, because nobody else was going to. The convenience-store worker, in 1994, was the specific American whose economic settlement had just been broken and whose political voice had been managed out of the negotiation. He was the person the Zapatistas were fighting for. He was the person the State Department was not asking about. He was, in 1994, watching Clerks and laughing, and going back to work in the morning.

At Sundance, Miramax bought the film for $227,000. Harvey and Bob Weinstein distributed it nationally in October. It grossed $3.2 million. Kevin Smith became a Miramax director. Jay and Silent Bob became a franchise. Within a decade, Smith was making studio films, hosting podcasts, and selling merchandise. The convenience-store worker had been rendered visible for approximately eighteen months. Then he became content. Then he became IP.

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Pulp Fiction premiered at Cannes in May 1994 and won the Palme d’Or. It opened in the United States on October 14, five days before Clerks. Miramax distributed it too. Quentin Tarantino had made it for eight million dollars. It grossed over 213 million worldwide.

Pulp Fiction was not a counter-march at all. It was the cultural complement to the neoliberal order. Its violence — the accidental shooting of Marvin, the overdose scene, the boxing-match killing, the gimp — was stylized, referential, and beautiful. The film treated violence as an aesthetic problem, as material to be composed and arranged the way a painter arranges a still life. Its music, dialogue, and structure were built to make bad men fascinating and their crimes narratively pleasurable. The film asked the audience to believe that the way out of American violence was to recognize its beauty.

Tarantino built a hyperreal cinema of stylized violence in the same fall the political class passed the largest crime bill in American history — an expansion of prisons, police, and executions delivered at the exact moment American culture was learning to consume violence as an aesthetic pleasure. The state’s expansion of literal violence and Hollywood’s expansion of stylized violence ran as parallel projects, in the same calendar quarter, from opposite ends of Washington’s political culture. Neither project referenced the other. Both were fed by the same underlying condition.

Miramax distributed both films. The studio’s brand became the studio that supports independent voices while the distributor was, in fact, functioning as the absorption mechanism itself. Disney had bought Miramax in 1993. The independent films that mattered in 1994 had been distributed by a subsidiary of the world’s largest entertainment corporation.

By the end of 1994, three cultural counter-marches had been staged. Cobain was dead and being sold. Smith was under contract. Tarantino was the year’s most celebrated auteur, distributed by a subsidiary of Disney. All three had been absorbed within eighteen months. The machinery they had built — the independent studio inside the major studio system — was permanent. Every subsequent counter-cultural movement of the next thirty years would move through some version of it. Alt-country. Indie rock. Mumblecore. Podcasts. Substack. The counter-march become the product.

The Roman Republic continued for forty years after Marius and Cinna marched on Rome. The forms held. The substance kept eroding. Each installment of political violence made the next installment more available, until Caesar’s Rubicon in 49 BC was, by the standards of the previous four decades, an ordinary Tuesday. Rome had spent forty years training itself to accept that the impossible was routine. By the time the Republic actually fell, it had been dead for a generation. The funeral just hadn’t been scheduled.

The American version has been running the same play. The neoliberal settlement that formalized itself in 1994 has spent thirty years absorbing every counter-march it produced. The 2008 financial crisis was the working-class bill on the NAFTA-and-globalization consensus. Occupy Wall Street was absorbed into Bernie Sanders’ primary run. The Tea Party was absorbed into the Trump administration. Black Lives Matter was absorbed into corporate diversity training. Even MAGA has been substantially absorbed — the actual policy of the second Trump administration is closer to Gingrich’s Contract than to any populist program the movement was built on. None of it required 1994. It required the second march. Marius did not end the Republic. He established that the machinery Sulla built could be run by anyone. Once he established that, everyone ran it.

The political class in 1994 signed the Crime Bill, signed the Contract, ratified NAFTA, and refused to name Rwanda. Each was defensible in its own narrow terms. Together they were the elite consolidation of the 1980s continuing under new management. Kurt Cobain saw it. Kevin Smith drew it in black and white for twenty-seven thousand dollars. The Zapatistas fought it with fax machines and jungle communiqués.

What the political class did not understand, and what most of it still does not understand, is that the machinery it was running had a bill built into it. The essay you read next week is what happens when the bill starts arriving from people who cannot be absorbed. Not because they are incorruptible — Timothy McVeigh took no principled stand — but because they choose to detonate before they can be sold.

Waco’s second anniversary. April 19, 1995. On the road from 1994.

We saw the settlement and called it centrism. We saw the counter-march and called it a revolution. We saw the culture and called it entertainment.

After the death of Cobain, a generation looked in the mirror and didn’t know what to call the phantom looking back. The absorption machine had learned to sell us versions of ourselves — the grunge that was our anger returned to us as GAP flannel; the convenience store that was our labor returned to us as content; the counter-culture that was our voice returned to us as brand messaging.

What looked back from the mirror was ourselves rendered as product, and the rendering was so seamless that we no longer knew which side of the glass we were on.

We just didn’t know yet that was the point.

Previous in The 90s series:

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• The Civil Wars, Book I, Chapters 55–80 — Appian

• Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (2020) — Julian Zelizer

• Locking Up Our Own (2017) — James Forman Jr.

• The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (2018) — Steve Kornacki

• Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (2004) — Peter Biskind

Last Wednesday, Folarin Balogun stepped on an ankle in a World Cup match and drew a red card. Let’s stipulate up front: there was no intent, and it was a bad call besides. No foul was given in real time; the video officials summoned the referee to the monitor and showed him the contact in slow motion, despite FIFA’s own VAR protocol saying reviews of an offense’s intensity should run at normal speed. Slow motion makes everything look like a war crime. If FIFA had a functioning appeals process, Balogun would have won it on the merits.

That’s precisely what makes what happened next so clarifying. Under FIFA’s disciplinary code, a red card means an automatic one-game suspension. No appeal. No discretion. FIFA itself said the call was final.

Then the machinery of the United States government went to work.

Not just a phone call — though Trump made one, ringing Gianni Infantino to ask about the ruling. The Commerce Secretary helped recruit lawyers. The executive director of the White House Task Force for the World Cup — an Andrew Giuliani, if the name rings a bell — coordinated with U.S. Soccer officials as they built and presented a formal case to FIFA. A cabinet department, a presidential task force, and outside counsel, mobilized over one player’s one-game ban. By Sunday, FIFA had discovered Article 27 of its own code — a clause allowing its judicial body to “suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure” — and converted Balogun’s ban into a year of probation. He plays tonight against Belgium. The last time a red-carded player suited up for the next World Cup match was Garrincha in 1962. Tomorrow morning, Trump lands in Ankara for the NATO summit, where Belgium — the country that hosts NATO headquarters — will join 31 other allies in affirming an “ironclad commitment” to collective defense.

Ironclad. Like a red card.

The oldest trick in the Republic

The outrage machine wants you to believe something sacred was violated this weekend: that sport is supposed to sit above politics, and Trump dragged it down into the mud.

But sport has never sat above politics. It has always been politics conducted at a volume everyone can hear.

The Romans didn’t even pretend otherwise. In the Republic, the games were campaign expenditures — ambitious politicians bankrupted themselves staging spectacles because a magistracy was the return on investment. Caesar went into legendary debt putting on gladiatorial shows on his way up the ladder. When the Republic died, the emperors nationalized the product: the games became a monopoly of the imperial house, the arena the one venue where the ruler and the ruled looked each other in the eye. And when Nero entered the Olympic chariot race in 67 AD, crashed, and failed to finish, the judges crowned him champion anyway. They understood something the modern sports fan forgets: the rules of the game are always subordinate to the power that sanctions the game.

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The apolitical stadium is a twentieth-century marketing fiction — useful for selling broadcast rights, never true. Berlin 1936, the boycotted Olympics of the Cold War, sportswashing petrostates: the fiction has been dying in public for a century. What happened Sunday didn’t kill it. It just stopped the funeral music.

Did FIFA ever have credibility to lose?

Here’s the uncomfortable question underneath the UEFA statement: impartial according to whom?

This is the organization of the Qatar vote, of indicted executives marched out of Zurich hotels, of a disciplinary code that turns out to contain a discretion clause — activated within days of a hegemon’s legal team arriving with a brief. This is the FIFA whose president handed Trump an invented “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw and $15,000 in Club World Cup tickets before that. Gianni Infantino did not bend to power this weekend. Bending to power is Infantino’s entire governing philosophy — he has simply been better at choosing which power to bend toward than his critics would like.

FIFA was never an impartial arbiter that got corrupted. It is a patronage network that occasionally issues rulings. Article 27 doesn’t say the fix is in; it says discretion exists — and discretion, in a patronage system, flows in one direction. The emperor never has to demand the verdict. The judges already know.

The metaphor everyone in Ankara understands

Which brings us to UEFA’s language. FIFA “crossed a red line.” The decision was “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” When rules lose their certainty, “the integrity of the game is at stake.”

Swap “game” for “alliance” and you have the anonymous quote of every European diplomat of the past eighteen months. That’s why this small story is a big story: the Balogun reversal is the rules-based order in miniature, played out in four days with a scoreboard. A written code. A hegemon’s interagency effort. An institution locating its own flexibility. An aggrieved member state told, in effect, that its legitimate requests will not receive a response.

And note the form the pressure took. Not a decree — a case. Lawyers, evidence, a formal appeal through the institution’s own channels. This is how empires prefer to work: Rome rarely tore up a treaty when it could reinterpret one, rarely overruled a client court when it could staff the argument in front of it. The apparatus lends the outcome a procedural costume. FIFA gets to say an independent body reviewed new evidence; Washington gets to say nobody demanded anything. Everyone observes the forms. The forms observe the power.

The victimization European institutions feel — UEFA this week, NATO capitals every week — is not really shock that power bends rules. Power has always bent rules; the Romans built an empire on the honest version of that proposition. The shock is legibility. The old arrangement required the hegemon to pretend the rules bound everyone equally, and the pretending was the point — it’s what let smaller members tell themselves they were partners rather than clients. Trump’s innovation is refusing the pretense. The task force is named in the press, the officials confirm their roles, the “injustice” gets celebrated on social media before kickoff. The clientela is visible now — org chart and all.

So Belgium’s federation protests, and Belgium’s prime minister flies to Ankara to sign a communiqué. UEFA rages, and Infantino prepares to hand Trump the trophy at the final on July 19. Mark Rutte, for his part, is running the Infantino playbook with different props — flattery instead of peace prizes, summit choreography instead of stadium seats. It may even work. It worked for FIFA, if working means the games go on.

Rome kept the games going for four hundred years after the Republic died. Nobody in the stands mistook them for neutral. That may be where we’re headed: spectacles everyone still watches, run by institutions nobody still believes.

Tonight the whistle blows in Seattle. Tomorrow the gavel falls in Ankara. Same tournament.

Two days apart, in February 1993, on opposite sides of the country, two lines were crossed that had held for the entire post-war period.

On Friday the twenty-sixth, at 12:17 in the afternoon, a Ryder truck packed with 1,200 pounds of urea-nitrate exploded in the parking garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Six people died. The bomber’s intent had been to topple one tower into the other. The physics didn’t cooperate. The intent would return, in the hands of the same family — the bomber’s uncle was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — on a Tuesday morning in September eight years later.

Two days after, on Sunday the twenty-eighth, more than seventy agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to serve a search warrant on a religious compound near Waco, Texas, run by a thirty-three-year-old man named David Koresh. The raid had been tipped off. The occupants were armed and waiting. Four agents and six Davidians died in the opening firefight. What followed was fifty-one days of cable-news siege, a final assault on April 19 that punched holes in the compound with tanks and deposited four hundred canisters of CS tear gas, and a fire that engulfed the wooden buildings and killed seventy-six people, twenty-five of them children.

Two lines. Two demonstrations. Both of them, until the last week of February 1993, had been sustained not by law but by consensus — the tacit agreement that certain things were not done here. After 1993, they had both been done. The world, as the Hamilton song goes, was turned upside down. I can’t think of a better weekend to release this article than the Fourth of July on the 250th birthday of America. When America overthrew the British we created a new norm, a new political consensus that has held in some form or another as the foundation all other norms rest.

1993 is the world that I grew up in. 1993 marks the true beginning of the 90s and of the “normality” that would define everyday life until March of 2020. What I mean by normality is the collection of norms that became the standard for the next three decades. It’s in this year that Clinton becomes president, Spielberg achieves one of the greatest directorial feats of all time, Letterman jumpstarts CBS late night, the FBI raids Waco, Snoop Dogg releases Doggystyle cementing gangsta rap in the mainstream musical scene, and CERN releases the World Wide Web. Yeah, 1993 was a turning point that not only set in motion the next era of American life but seeded the problems we’re grappling with in the post-COVID era.

The world became smaller, the hatreds became more vitriolic, and the debates over America’s place in the world and what it means to be an American became more intense. While all this was happening, I was an eight-year-old kid coming into my own identity. This was my first experience with overt racism — and the experience of being othered formed the first layer of my emotional defense system. I would be able to spot the pattern going forward.

I do not remember the first Trade Center bombing all that well. It was a news story, but the conventional wisdom to a boy like me in Texas was that’s a New York problem — why would anyone live there. Nobody I knew talked about it. It was, in the coverage of the year and in the political mind of the country, a police story that had been solved. A crater in a garage. Six dead. Case closed. The line that had actually been crossed was invisible to almost everyone who watched. That essay will come. We will meet Ramzi Yousef and the men who read his failure as a lesson and returned to finish the job. For now, in 1993, note only that the line had been crossed, and that almost no one saw it.

Two thousand years earlier, in the year 88 BC, another republic had a moment like this, and its lesson took forty years to arrive in full — just as it has for us.

I. Sulla

In 88 BC, a Roman general named Lucius Cornelius Sulla did something no Roman had ever done. He marched his own legions on the city of Rome.

Sulla was fifty years old, a decorated aristocrat, and — as of that year — one of the two consuls. The Senate had awarded him the eastern command, the war against Mithridates of Pontus, which promised money and glory in equal measure. His old commander Marius, the populist outsider who had won the Jugurthine War thirty years earlier, was now sixty-eight and hungry for a final campaign. Marius pushed a law transferring the command from Sulla to himself. It passed. Three thousand armed supporters made sure it passed.

This kind of thing had been done before, on paper. A senatorial command reassigned by popular legislation was, in theory, within the legal range. The theory had never been tested when the general involved could and would say no. Sulla, camped in Campania with the six legions he had been assembling to ship east, said no. He gathered his officers and told them the Republic had been seized by demagogues and that they would now march on Rome to restore proper order. Most of his officers left the camp appalled. His legionaries stayed. They were Marian-reform soldiers, landless men whose only patrimony was their commander’s success. Their loyalty was personal rather than civic. They followed him.

Six legions moved on Rome. The city had no defenses against its own armies. The pomerium — the sacred boundary that had held since the founding — was not a wall. It was a religious idea. Sulla crossed it. There was brief street fighting. Marius and Sulpicius fled the city. Sulla did three things in quick succession: he declared his political opponents public enemies and stripped them of citizenship and legal protection; he killed Marius’s co-conspirator, the consul Sulpicius Rufus, who by Roman religious law was sacrosanct and could not be touched; and he reorganized the constitution to consolidate senatorial control over the assemblies. Then he left for the eastern war as if nothing had happened. The whole episode lasted weeks.

The precedent lasted forty years.

Within four years, with Sulla away in the east, Marius and his ally Cinna marched on Rome themselves and undid Sulla’s reorganization with massacres of Sulla’s supporters. Five years after that, Sulla returned from the east and marched on Rome a second time, installing himself as dictator — the first in a century, and with no time limit on the office.

The proscriptions of 82 BC followed: public lists of political enemies whose murder was state-sanctioned. Thousands died. The constitutional forms Sulla restored lasted barely a decade before being unwound by Pompey and Crassus, the men he had led during his second march on Rome. By the time Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, the precedent had been running on momentum for forty years. His crossing was, by the standard of the previous four decades, not the shock the schoolbooks make it. It was the fourth or fifth time the same line had been crossed.

What Sulla had discovered — and what every Roman general after him acted on — was that traditions and norms are sustained by political consensus. Once the consensus broke, the idea could not enforce itself. The line Roman armies do not enter Rome required only one general to disprove it before it became Roman armies enter Rome when their commander needs them to. The Republic continued to exist in the form it had before 88 BC. Its substance had been replaced by a politics in which the question was no longer whether armies marched on Rome but which armies, when.

The lines that hold a system together are not made of steel. They are made of agreement. Agreements that go untested for long enough start to look like the natural order. The first disproof is the entire game.

II. The First March at Home

The Waco siege began as a botched federal raid and ended, fifty-one days later, as the most consequential government operation of the decade for the American right.

The raid was supposed to be a surprise. It wasn’t. A local reporter tipped off by an ATF source had asked directions from a postal worker who turned out to be Koresh’s brother-in-law. The Davidians heard the helicopters coming and were armed and positioned. The opening firefight killed four agents and six Davidians. The ATF withdrew. The FBI took over. And the siege that followed was broadcast, in more or less continuous cable-news coverage, for fifty-one days.

CNN, which the Gulf War had taught the country how to watch, now taught the country how to watch its own government besiege a religious community of American citizens on American soil. Tanks parked in the fields. Loudspeakers blared psychological-warfare sound tapes through the night. Negotiators went in circles. Nearly nine hundred federal agents surrounded the compound. Cable crews surrounded the agents. The country watched.

On April 19, at six in the morning, the FBI began the final assault. Two specially equipped tanks punched holes in the walls of the compound and deposited four hundred canisters of CS gas over six hours. Just after noon, the wooden buildings caught fire in three places simultaneously. Nine people escaped. Seventy-six died inside — including twenty-five children. Some had been shot; the FBI maintains none of its agents fired live rounds that day. The cause of the fire remains contested. A 1999 revelation that some of the CS canisters had been incendiary — a fact concealed for six years — was, in the framing of the American right, the confirmation of what they had suspected from the beginning: that the federal government had murdered eighty American citizens on live television, including a majority of the compound’s children, and then lied about it.

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Attorney General Janet Reno, eleven weeks into the job, took public responsibility. Bill Clinton, when asked, said he had told her that if she thought it was the right thing to do, she could go ahead. The press treated the outcome as a tragedy of religious extremism. A 1999 CBS poll would find that sixty-two percent of Americans believed the government had covered up its failings at Waco.

The American right registered something different. What it registered was that the federal government was willing to deploy tanks and tear gas against citizens on American soil, on television, for fifty-one days, ending in the deaths of twenty-five children. The militia movement, which had been a marginal undercurrent through the late 1980s, exploded within months. The Michigan Militia was founded on April 29, 1994 — one year and ten days after the fire. Montana Freemen, Aryan Republican Army, patriot formations across the Mountain West and the South, all dated their political births to Mount Carmel. A Gulf War veteran and Bronze Star recipient named Timothy McVeigh drove to Waco during the siege, sold Don’t Tread on Me bumper stickers from the trunk of his car, and watched the fire on the news. On the second anniversary of the fire — April 19, 1995 — he detonated a 4,800-pound truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children in the building’s daycare.

A nineteen-year-old radio host in Austin named Alex Jones launched his broadcasting career on Waco. His 1998 documentary America: Wake Up or Waco built the audience that would become Infowars. The conspiracy decade you first met in the 1991 essay — JFK giving the mode its mainstream license — found its first major operating event here. Stone’s film had been an argument. Waco was a photograph. Trust no one, the argument said. This is what happens when you do, the photograph replied.

Before April 19, 1993, the line the federal government does not deploy military force against American citizens on American soil was sustained by political consensus, not by law. The federal government had the equipment and the legal authority to do it for years. The consensus that it would not was the only thing that had held. Once it did — once the country watched it happen for two months and the dust settled with twenty-five dead children — the line moved. The 1996 expansion of the surplus-equipment program that armed police departments with Cold War castoffs. The 2001 Patriot Act. The post-9/11 surveillance architecture. The militarization that ICE and the modern Border Patrol run on. All of it sits on top of a line that was last visible in 1992 and that fell at Mount Carmel in 1993. The political class spent the next thirty years building an apparatus that Waco had certified as available.

The apparatus, in time, would find its work.

III. The Mirror

Sulla’s parallel runs both ways.

His march established that the army built to fight Rome’s foreign enemies could be turned inward on the city itself. The Trade Center bombing established the inverse: that the foreign world Rome had been managing could reach back into the city it thought was walled off. The Republic had believed itself to be a secure interior inside a managed exterior. After 1993, it was neither.

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Both halves of the precedent — the security state turning inward at Waco, and the foreign world reaching back at the World Trade Center — were demonstrated in the same fortnight of February 1993. Fifteen days. Two proofs. One year. The country registered neither as what they were. The story of what the second proof meant, and of the FBI agent who spent the next eight years trying to make his superiors read it, belongs to a later essay in this series.

For now, note only the shape. Two lines, both held by consensus, both crossed in the same two weeks. One of them at the center of the world’s most powerful economy. The other on a plain outside Waco, Texas.

The Republic had not lost the ability to hold its lines. It had lost the belief that the lines were structural.

IV. The Tools Being Released

While the country was missing what had been proven, the world was already changing.

The political class was assembling the post-Cold War order in Washington. The culture was releasing the tools that would eventually take it apart.

On April 30, eleven days after Mount Carmel burned, Tim Berners-Lee’s team at CERN placed the World Wide Web in the public domain. Free to use, free to build on, no licensing fees, no royalties. The infrastructure that would host the Alex Jones audience, the militia networks, and every subsequent decade of American political media life was released to the world eleven days after the FBI’s final assault at Waco. Nobody in Washington noticed. It ran on nine servers.

On June 11, Steven Spielberg released Jurassic Park. The CGI dinosaurs were the technical breakthrough of the year — the first time a photographic-quality synthetic image had appeared on a major American screen. Before Jurassic Park, film audiences could trust that what they saw had existed in front of a camera. After, they couldn’t. The Gulf War, three years earlier, had taught the country to consume mediated reality. Jurassic Park taught Hollywood how to build reality from scratch. The lineage runs through every VFX-driven film of the next thirty years, through the deepfakes, into the generative-AI moment we are living in now. If Waco was the last major American event to be documented in analog, Jurassic Park was the first cultural product to be built in the format of what came after.

On August 30, David Letterman moved from NBC to CBS and inaugurated the late-night wars. The political interview began to shift from Meet the Press deference to Letterman-style ironic distance. The seriousness of political television started eroding here — a cultural drift that would eventually make a reality-TV host in the Oval Office not just possible but inevitable.

On November 23, Snoop Doggy Dogg released Doggystyle. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The genre that in the 1991 essay had been the Black cultural narrative white America consumed was now the dominant American musical product, sold from Death Row Records to suburban malls at scale. The absorption first met at Lollapalooza had operationalized. The corporate music division had learned to hear what it was buying — and how to sell it back.

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Four tools. Four platforms. Each one released in the same year the political class was building the order those tools would eventually dismantle. Nobody in Washington paid attention to any of them. That is the pattern of the year in miniature: the lines that mattered were being moved, the tools that would exploit the movement were being released, and the political class was focused elsewhere.

On what it was building.

V. What the Political Class Was Building

Bill Clinton was inaugurated on January 20. The DLC operating system we traced last week went online in real time — the New Democrat brand, the triangulation instinct, the calculated centrist gesture. The first-year policy record is a mix of managed inclusion and elite consensus victories: don’t ask, don’t tell on gays in the military (a settlement of the same structural type as the Sister Souljah moment); the collapse of the Hillary Clinton healthcare initiative under industry pressure; and NAFTA, signed December 8, effective the following January.

NAFTA passed the House 234 to 200 with 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats voting yes — a working majority assembled across party lines, against the majority of Clinton’s own House caucus. This is the deal Ross Perot had spent 1992 warning about. Perot’s constituency had lost the election in November 1992; they lost the policy fight in November 1993. The roots of the 2016 election are visible in the House vote tally.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the year offered two photographs of how post-Cold War transitions could go. Czechoslovakia dissolved peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia — the Velvet Divorce, mutual agreement, no war. On the same continent, in the same year, Yugoslavia continued the war of dissolution the 1991 essay opened with. Vukovar had fallen fifteen months earlier. Sarajevo was under siege. Bosnia was becoming a byword for what post-Cold War Europe could produce when negotiation failed. Two ways for a state of similar age and complexity to end, side by side. On November 1, the Maastricht Treaty entered legal force. The European Union came into existence. The Western project doubled down on integration in the year Eastern Europe kept discovering what disintegration cost.

On September 13, on the White House lawn, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands. The Oslo Accords. The first agreement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to establish Palestinian self-government. It would not survive Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli ultranationalist in November 1995. In the meantime, the political class produced its most photogenic image of the post-Cold War order’s promise. The image was a lie in the sense that the structural forces against it were already winning. The handshake itself was real.

On December 2, Pablo Escobar was shot dead on a Medellín rooftop by a Colombian Search Bloc team operating with reported CIA and DEA support and the informal cooperation of Los Pepes. The killing was the post-Cold War security apparatus finding its next job. Cold War techniques of joint operations and morally compromised local partners got rebranded as drug war and — soon — counterterrorism. The infrastructure was the same. The targets were different. The line between war and law enforcement, already blurred at Waco, was further dissolved.

Each individual event of the year was defensible in its own narrow terms. The cumulative gesture was a republic learning, almost without registering it, that the agreements that had held it together were optional.

The Roman Republic did not end at Sulla’s first march. It continued, in the same forms, for forty years. What ended in 88 BC was the belief that the pomerium was permanent. Everything after was a slow adjustment of the political class to a world in which the sacred boundary had turned out to be a suggestion.

The Cold War consensus did not end in 1993. What ended, in the same fortnight of February, was the belief that certain lines were structural. Waco proved that the federal apparatus would deploy military force against American citizens for as long as the operational logic required. The Trade Center bombing proved that the foreign world could reach into the American interior without a state sponsor to make it legible. Both proofs went largely unregistered. The country continued to believe the lines were where they had always been.

Sulla’s precedent arrived in installments. Marius and Cinna’s march in 87 BC. Sulla’s return in 83 BC. Pompey’s wars against the remaining Marians in the seventies. Caesar’s Rubicon in 49 BC. Each installment made the next one more available. Each one was received as an emergency by the political class and as a routine option by the generals.

1993’s installments will arrive on the same schedule. Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 — two years to the day. The second Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 — eight years and seven months. The financial crisis of 2008 as the working-class bill on the NAFTA-and-globalization consensus that passed Congress in November 1993. The 2016 election as the political consequence of the Perot constituency the elite had spent twenty-four years ignoring. Each installment was received by the political class as a shock. Each one had been written into the precedent set in 1993 and forgotten in 1994.

The political class in 1993 thought it was building the post-Cold War order. It was. What it had actually built, and what it had certified as available, was the apparatus and the platforms that would do the next job. The apparatus, in time, would find its work. The platforms already had theirs.

We saw the crater in the garage and called it a police case. We saw the fire at Mount Carmel and called it a tragedy. We saw the handshake on the lawn and called it peace.

We just didn't know yet what — or who — we'd made normal.

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The 90s series:

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• Life of Sulla — Plutarch

• The Civil Wars, Book I — Appian

• Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage (2023) — Jeff Guinn

• The New American Militarism (2005) — Andrew Bacevich

• The Power of Nightmares (documentary) — Adam Curtis

Imperial Fiction is built on the idea that America’s story is an empire story — grand, violent, and deliberately misremembered. With the country’s 250th anniversary approaching, I decided to take a week off from those imperial stories. I wasn’t going to write at all — but a family trip changed that. What we found inspired me to reflect on our past, our myths, and how both get woven into the story we call America.

I’ve been in Montauk with my family for a few days. My father and sister have been researching our family history, and we’ve discovered a surprising, until recently unknown, connection to this place.

Long Island conjures a lot of images, especially for New Yorkers: the bridge-and-tunnel commuters who work in the city but would never raise kids here; the Hamptons set immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby — the ultimate American story about deception, reinvention, and class. From the remains of the Gilded Age to Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill, there’s something for history lovers. The Battle of Long Island was a significant defeat for George Washington, and during British occupation, locals risked their lives running spy networks to weaken the crown’s position.

Montauk specifically can feel magical. It’s atmospheric — roaring waves and sea spray mist woven into an effervescent village. The Montauk Project — a body of regional folklore — inspired Stranger Things, and during my early years in Manhattan, one of the stranger tabloid stories was the Montauk Monster, which sparked conspiracy theories about government experiments on the eastern tip of the island.

But there’s also a lot of death that surrounds Montauk. The waters are rich with fish and marine life, and they’re also dangerous — frequent storms, frequent shipwrecks. The lighthouse at the tip of the island has a monument listing the names of those lost at sea. My great-grandfather is one of those names. A Black fisherman from Virginia, he was killed in the Hurricane of 1938 when my grandfather was only 12.

My father didn’t know about the monument — or that his grandfather had drowned off the coast of Montauk. My grandfather never talked about it, and it was only after he passed in 2025 that my dad started digging. He Googled his father’s name — which happens to be his own name, and his grandfather’s name — and found it connected to the lighthouse. After more research, he confirmed it was his grandfather. My grandfather never knew what happened to his father. He never will.

It’s a bittersweet story. An American story — rich with a history we too often refuse to tell, to our great detriment. As conservative states like my home state of Texas move to downplay or erase the harder parts of our past, I’m grateful my father decided to look into the harder parts of ours. I now have a connection to a wonderful place, one that roots this Texan in his adopted state of New York.

I’ve never felt more American. I’ve never felt more at home.

I learned about 1992 from Sublime’s song “April 29, 1992,” off their 1996 album Sublime. It was one of my favorite songs on one of my favorite albums, and it fueled my fascination with recent history. You have to remember — for a lot of millennials, our first political awakenings happened against the backdrop of Gen X rebellion. With “class” being papered over as a product of “Marxist thinking,” the jobless recession was never framed as what it was: a class war against low- and middle-income households.

The rapid deregulation of the Reagan years had inflated a real-estate bubble that, like 2008 on a smaller scale, eventually popped. American workers started to face competition as the new geopolitical landscape gave capital fresh markets abroad to exploit. Meanwhile, businesses used the recession to restructure — leveraging new technology to do more with fewer workers, eliminating middle-income and manufacturing jobs in the process. The leaner companies that emerged would fuel the economic boom of the late 90s, but that boom was years away. In June 1992, unemployment hit 7.8%. The recovery was already underway. It just had no jobs in it.

On April 29, 1992, at 3:15 in the afternoon, a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of nearly all charges in the beating of Rodney King. The beating had been filmed. The tape had been broadcast around the world. For thirteen months — the entire span of the trial — the country had been looking at the same eighty-one seconds of footage.

The verdict made denial possible again.

It was not the system failing to see. It was the system declaring that what everyone had seen did not count. The jury — eleven white, one Asian, no Black members — had spent two weeks deciding what the country had spent a year watching. They decided not. This is the precise gesture that triggers a Social War: not the original injury, but the official refusal to recognize the injury after the injury has been documented.

By nightfall, Los Angeles was on fire.

I was seven and didn’t know a damn thing was happening. We lived in Houston, in a white suburb that mostly did not look at the news. It was a different reality — or more honestly, a different channel. I, like most Americans, could change the channel or turn the show off altogether. A lot of us did. The year’s top movies would be Aladdin, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Batman Returns — a kingdom in ancient Arabia, a kid’s dreamlike adventure through a city built on illusions, and a stylized world of superheroes and villains. Whether we knew it or not, Americans were checking out. The nightmare of the Cold War was over and the dream of the American empire was beginning — but not for all.

I. We Built This

What burned for six days was an invoice.

Decades of government and banking redlining had concentrated poverty into specific neighborhoods. Deindustrialization had stripped those neighborhoods of work. A war on drugs had militarized the police while doing nothing about the desperation that fed the drug trade. Capital and jobs flowed out of the city; people kept flowing in; no investment came to meet them. The fire’s geography told the story — the resentment that fell on Korean-owned businesses revealed a community caught between a white power structure that did not see it and an immigrant merchant class that, structurally, occupied the rung above it.

By the time the smoke cleared, sixty-three were dead, more than two thousand injured, more than twelve thousand arrested. About eleven hundred buildings destroyed. A billion dollars in damage. The California National Guard, the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry, and the Marines from Camp Pendleton were on American streets — the largest federal military deployment in a major American city since the 1960s. Daryl Gates, the LAPD chief who had built the conditions for the rebellion, had effectively absented himself during the first hours, at a long-scheduled fundraiser in Brentwood.

The coverage preferred the simpler word: senseless. The fire was not senseless. It had a sentence it was trying to say.

We built this. Why don’t the rules apply to us?

It is the oldest question an empire’s second-class citizens can ask, and in 91 BC the Italian allies asked it with swords. They had fought Rome’s wars for generations. They had bled in the legions, paid the levies, supplied the manpower that turned a city-state into a Mediterranean power. They had everything except citizenship. The vote. Standing. When the reformer Marcus Livius Drusus tried to give it to them and was assassinated in his own home, the allies stopped asking. They revolted. They even minted their own coins — an alternative Italy stamped with the Italian bull goring the Roman wolf.

Rome won the Social War after a hard-fought campaign against former allies who had served in its legions for years. Then, because it had to, it granted citizenship anyway — but on its own terms, structured to minimize what the newly included could actually do with it. The new citizens were registered into a small number of voting tribes so that their numerical weight in elections was muted. The form of inclusion was real. The substance was managed.

The distinction is the whole story of 1992. And of what came after.

II. The Year Two Outsiders Ran

The 1992 election was an anti-incumbent eruption the official memory now mostly forgets.

George H. W. Bush, riding 89% approval the year before, was at 40 and falling by spring. His own party had nearly broken him in February: Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge took 37% of the New Hampshire vote, a humiliation for a sitting president. The Democratic primary was a slow grind through scandal — Gennifer Flowers, the draft letter, the New Hampshire near-death and Comeback Kid recovery. The country was hostile to its political class in a way the political class did not seem to register.

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Into the hostility walked Ross Perot. On February 20, on Larry King Live, the Texas billionaire told the host he would run for president if supporters got him on the ballot in all fifty states. That was the announcement — and the entire infrastructure of an early-1990s populist insurgency: a billionaire on a cable talk show, appealing directly to an audience over the heads of every political institution. Within four months he was leading both Bush and Clinton in some polls.

What Perot promised was unconventional. Deficit reduction, treated as the moral failure of the political class. Opposition to NAFTA — the “giant sucking sound” line in the October debate, the prediction that the trade deal would suck American manufacturing jobs to Mexico. (Both Bush and Clinton supported NAFTA.) Anti-establishment: term limits, ending congressional perks, a blanket rejection of Washington as a corrupted system. All three were positions neither major party could fully adopt without losing its donor and interest-group coalitions. Perot’s eventual 19% — the strongest third-party showing since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 — was the country saying we want all three things and you are giving us none of them.

He drew roughly equally from Democrats and Republicans. What he actually built was the cable-news populist playbook that Pat Buchanan refined in 1996, that Trump weaponized in 2016, and that has dominated Republican presidential politics ever since. The Reform Party he founded in 1995 produced Jesse Ventura. The party Donald Trump considered running with in 2000 was Perot’s. The line is not metaphorical.

The other outsider was Bill Clinton, and he was an outsider on purpose.

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I am solidly a millennial. Born in 1985, my formative years were forged during the 1990s. However, as the youngest cousin on my mother’s side — with an older sister born in the early 80s and two older cousins born in the mid-70s — I had a lot of Gen X influences. In 1991 I was six, and my cousin Lynne (love you Lynne!) snuck me my first cassette tape: NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (1988), on sale because the group had just released their second studio album, Niggaz4Life. At six and growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, I had no idea what a “nigga” was — and unsurprisingly, a lot of my white friends did. Gangsta rap would go on to play an interesting role in forming my identity later in life, as I wrestled between being a Black American versus an American who is Black.

1991 was a turning point in American culture and laid the groundwork for our political culture for the next thirty years. Gen X is defined by those who were born between 1965 and 1980. By 1991, older Xers were starting to have an influence on American culture in profound ways. In Seattle, a record had begun to climb the charts that no major label had expected to. Nevermind, the second album by a Pacific Northwest trio called Nirvana, had been released on September 24. By the end of October, Smells Like Teen Spirit was in heavy rotation on MTV. By the second week of January, the album would dethrone Michael Jackson from the top of the Billboard 200. NBC News, looking back a decade later, would describe its arrival with a metaphor the Gulf War had taught everyone how to use: it had hit, they wrote, like a smart bomb.

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Smells Like Teen Spirit was written by Kurt Cobain (born in 1967), who became the voice of a cynical, disaffected generation. As kids and teenagers, Gen X had witnessed the recession of the early 80s, the breakdown of unions, and the necessity of a dual-income home, which meant less time with their parents — this is where the term latchkey kid comes from, as many Gen Xers returned home from school to an empty house. They were also the first generation to grow up post-Civil Rights Act and the dismantling of Jim Crow, with many being forcibly bused to different schools to promote integration. Most importantly, Gen X had watched the idealism of the 60s and 70s morph into the consumerist culture of the 80s. That last point cannot be overstated, because it was the backlash to this culture that produced some of the most consequential art of the 90s — and the powers that had tried to censor that culture pivoted to a new tactic: co-opt and sell out.

That same fall, on a continent that had just been promised history’s end, a different scene was running.

In Vukovar, in eastern Croatia, two months into an artillery siege, the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb paramilitaries were reducing a Baroque town to rubble in the heaviest urban combat Europe had seen since the fall of Berlin. Roughly three thousand people would die before the city surrendered on November 18. When it did, the non-Serb population would be expelled in what the world would shortly learn to call ethnic cleansing. These two events were not, as the cultural histories of the era will tell you, parallel tracks. They were the same year telling on itself. A continent on which history was supposed to have ended was producing, in the same autumn, its worst civilian massacre since 1945 and its loudest sustained scream of disillusionment from a generation that was supposed to inherit the peace.

Two thousand years earlier, in the seventy-fourth year after the destruction of Carthage, another republic had its first year like this.

I. Tiberius

In 133 BC, a thirty-year-old aristocrat named Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus stood for the office of tribune of the plebs. He was the grandson of Scipio Africanus the Elder — the man who had beaten Hannibal — and the brother-in-law of Scipio Aemilianus, the man who had finished Carthage. He came from the closest thing republican Rome had to royalty. He had also been educated by Greek philosophers.

That last detail is the one the textbooks underplay. Tiberius’s tutor was Blossius of Cumae, an Italian Stoic. His rhetorical instructor was Diophanes of Mytilene, a Greek orator who had fled to Rome from his own city’s political turmoil. The reform program Tiberius would push through the tribune’s office was suffused with Greek concepts — distributive justice from Stoic ethics, the citizen-soldier ideal from Athenian and Spartan models, the populist mechanics of the Greek demagogues. He was, in his own way, the first American: a young man with old money and a foreign education trying to take the country apart and put it back together according to ideas the elders considered alien.

The bill itself was straightforward. The wars that had built Roman power — Carthage, Greece, Spain — had also produced a flood of slaves and a concentration of land. Vast slave-worked plantations had displaced the small Roman farmer who had always been the legion’s backbone. The citizen-soldier was vanishing into urban poverty. Tiberius proposed a cap on individual holdings of public land and the redistribution of the surplus in family-sized plots to the displaced.

The Senate’s response was not legal argument. It was, in the literal sense, a riot. On election day in 133 BC, a mob of senators led by Tiberius’s own cousin attacked the assembly on the steps of the Capitol. Tiberius was beaten to death with a piece of broken bench. His body was thrown into the Tiber. It was the first political murder in Rome in nearly four centuries.

What is worth slowing down for is why Scipio Nasica’s mob did it. Tiberius’s politics terrified them — the redistribution, the procedural innovations, the second-term campaign — but what they were really killing was a cultural infection. The Greek tutors. The Stoic justifications. The foreign rhetoric. Cato the Elder had warned for thirty years that Greek learning would destroy Rome. By 133 BC, Greek learning had produced its first Roman politician trying to legislate on its principles. The senators on the Capitol steps that day were not just murdering a man. They were trying to murder a generation.

They failed.

This is what 1991 was for America. Not the murder. The other parts.

II. The Triumph and Its Photographs

By every official measure, 1991 was the apex of American victory.

The Soviet Union dissolved on Christmas Day. The hammer and sickle came down over the Kremlin and was not replaced. The hardliner coup of August had collapsed in three days when Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament and the army refused to fire. By the Belovezha Accords of December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus had agreed the union no longer existed. December 25 was the formal funeral. The world’s other superpower simply ceased to exist.

Earlier that month, the European Community had reached agreement at Maastricht on the treaty that would create the European Union. The Western project doubled down on integration in the precise season Eastern Europe was discovering it could not hold together at all.

And then there was Vukovar.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The scandal isn’t that the Trump family is building a resort in Albania. The scandal is that nobody is pretending anymore that the presidency and the portfolio are separate things. Ivanka and Jared don’t need to hide the conflict of interest because the conflict of interest is the business model. What previous administrations conducted through intermediaries and plausible deniability, this one conducts through press releases and groundbreaking ceremonies. The Roman Senate had a word for this. They called it the cursus honorum in reverse — not using office to build reputation, but using reputation, built from office, to build wealth. The difference is that Rome at least had the decency to make it illegal first.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

The details of the Albanian resort project are less important than the architecture they reveal. Jared Kushner’s investment firm, backed by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — funds that received their capital infusions in the immediate aftermath of Kushner’s White House tenure managing Middle Eastern policy — is now developing luxury real estate in Albania, a small NATO ally whose government has every conceivable incentive to accommodate a project bearing the extended Trump family’s imprimatur. The Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, has been among the more enthusiastic European leaders in cultivating the Trump relationship. The resort is not incidental to that relationship. It is the relationship, made concrete and profitable.

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The broader Trump family investment map is the story that the Albanian resort item should be read as a data point within, not a standalone controversy. Donald Trump Jr.’s ventures across the Gulf. Eric Trump’s real estate licensing deals in markets where American policy has direct leverage. The $TRUMP memecoin dinner that converted presidential access into a literal auction item with a published price. The pattern is not corruption in the traditional sense — the suitcase of cash, the offshore account, the hidden transaction. It is something more architecturally interesting and more constitutionally dangerous: the open conversion of sovereign power into family equity, conducted without disguise, normalized through repetition, and insulated from consequence by a political coalition that has decided the transgression is acceptable because the team is winning.

The Roman parallel is not Nero’s excess or Caligula’s madness — those are the wrong register entirely. The correct parallel is the late Republican practice of provincial governorship as wealth extraction. When Cicero prosecuted Verres for looting Sicily, the charge was not that Verres had done something unprecedented. It was that he had done something universal — the conversion of Roman public office into private accumulation — with a brazenness that made the system’s underlying logic too visible to ignore. What Kushner and the Trump family are doing is Verrine in structure and post-Verrine in audacity: they have watched the prosecution happen to others and concluded that the prosecution is the anomaly, not the behavior. They are right. Nobody is coming to prosecute them. Cicero is not in the building.

The Albanian dimension has a specific geopolitical texture worth unpacking. Albania is a NATO member with unresolved tensions with Serbia, complicated relationships with Kosovo’s independence status, and a government that has been navigating EU accession negotiations with mixed results. American diplomatic engagement with Tirana carries real weight in all of those files. A Kushner resort project in that context is not simply a real estate deal — it is a signal to the Albanian government about the terms of American attention, and a signal to every other small NATO ally about how the current administration’s relational economy actually works. You don’t need a formal quid pro quo. You need a pattern legible enough that every relevant government can read it without being told.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

New York’s financial and legal infrastructure is where the money moves before it becomes a resort on the Albanian Riviera. The sovereign wealth fund capital that backs Kushner’s investment vehicle — the $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund being the most documented — flows through New York-based financial institutions, legal structures, and compliance architectures that have spent the post-2016 era developing elaborate frameworks for managing exactly this kind of politically exposed capital. The bankers, the lawyers, the compliance officers, and the private equity intermediaries who touch this money are New York professionals operating in a regulatory environment that technically requires them to assess and document the political exposure risks of their clients. The question of whether that assessment is being conducted rigorously or performatively is a New York financial regulatory question with a New York answer.

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America kicked off the last decade of the 20th century with one last good war. The first Gulf War was the country’s first audition as the leader of the “new world order.” From 1945 to 1989, America had shared top billing with the USSR; the world stage for four decades had been organized around the two great rivals. The 90s gave America a chance at a solo career — with new challenges that would be minuscule compared to the work of preventing all-out nuclear war. In 1990 we were John McClane without Hans Gruber, Luke without Darth Vader. The audition was about to begin.

At 2:30 in the morning of January 17, 1991, three American reporters lay on the floor of a Baghdad hotel room and talked, by telephone, to the world.

The hotel was the Al-Rasheed. The room was 906. The reporters were Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett, and they were broadcasting through a special phone line CNN had strung from the building to Amman, Jordan — the only working channel out of the city, because coalition bombing had just destroyed Baghdad’s central telephone exchange. Cruise missiles struck the buildings around them. Anti-aircraft fire lit the sky over their balcony. Watching it, Shaw spoke into the receiver and told the listening world that it felt like the center of hell.

It was the first live coverage of a war in human history. For the moment it was only audio — the texture, those old enough to listen still remember, of a radio broadcast, compared at the time to Edward R. Murrow during the Blitz. The pictures would come. The cable news network that had been a curiosity in 1990 was, by the end of that night, the way Americans now watched the world.

I was five. Like millions of American kids, I watched the war on television. I remember the green of the night-vision cameras, the cross-hair videos of munitions finding their targets, the briefings from sand-colored officers with pointers and laser lines. Every now and then the war interrupted my cartoons. I played with Operation Desert Storm GI Joes. I played make-believe with my friends, ambushing Iraqi tanks — Toyota minivans — rolling down our suburban streets. The war was on after dinner. It looked, to a child, the way the video games we had just been given for Christmas looked: clean, geometric, distant. Nobody who watched it knew they were learning something. But they were. We all were.

That is what best exemplifies the 90s. A decade of safety glass, where the American public was isolated — or so we thought — from the political decay of the world.

To see what that night really was, you have to leave 1991 for a moment and go to another war fought far away — in North Africa, two thousand years earlier — when another republic learned something about itself it had not expected to learn.

I. The City for Sale

The Jugurthine War began as the kind of war that should have been over in a season.

Numidia, a North African kingdom long allied with Rome, fell after its king’s death to three joint heirs — two sons and a nephew named Jugurtha. The nephew had served in the Roman army under Scipio Aemilianus and spent his youth studying exactly how Roman politics worked. He killed his cousins. He took the throne. And in 112 BC, in the city of Cirta, he ordered a massacre that included a number of Roman and Italian businessmen who had taken refuge there.

The machinations of client-kings are one thing so long as they don’t disrupt the business of empire. The Cirta massacre was an atrocity too public to ignore. Rome had been quietly accommodating Jugurtha for years — he had been, by all accounts, generous — but Roman blood in the streets of an African city was a story the Senate could not bury. War was declared.

What followed was the slowest, most embarrassing, most morally compromised war Rome had fought in a generation. Commanders accepted Numidian bribes and signed humiliating peace deals. Jugurtha himself was summoned to Rome under safe-conduct, where, in his own famously reported judgment, he found a city for sale — and ripe for destruction, if it ever found a buyer. He bribed the tribunes to block any inquiry into senatorial corruption. He arranged the murder of a rival claimant inside the city itself, and walked out un-indicted.

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Decades after Jugurtha was eventually strangled in a Roman prison, a disgraced ex-politician named Sallust sat down to write the war’s history. He did not write a war book. He wrote a forensic study of his own country. The Jugurthine War, he argued, was the moment Rome had revealed itself: not a republic that occasionally produced corrupt men, but a republic that had become a market. Omnia Romae venalia esse — Everything in Rome has its price. Including, it turned out, the prosecution of its own foreign wars.

This is what Sallust understood, and what we are about to need: a far-off war, fought against an obvious villain, can be a mirror. Not a window. A mirror. The story it tells is about who is doing the looking.

II. The Good War

The Gulf War was, by every conventional measure, the war America got right.

Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. George H. W. Bush — still at the peak of the diplomatic powers that had landed the Soviet collapse — assembled a coalition of thirty-five nations under United Nations cover, secured Saudi basing, won congressional authorization, and built the moral architecture for war the way an architect builds a load-bearing arch. There was a clear villain. There was a clear coalition. There was a clear, limited objective: restore Kuwait. There was a defined exit.

After a five-week air campaign and a hundred-hour ground war, Iraqi forces were ejected from Kuwait, and Bush stopped short of Baghdad. A discipline his son would not inherit.

The Powell Doctrine — overwhelming force, defined goals, an exit — was its operational creed. The Pentagon briefings, run with the affable command of General Norman Schwarzkopf, were its public face. The president’s approval rating hit 89%. There was a victory parade. Roughly 150 American troops were killed in action.

This is the story that lives in the older Americans who remember the war. And it is true. The war was, in its diplomatic engineering, a genuine triumph for the elder Bush.

But there was a second story, and you had to know where to look for it.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Washington isn’t watching Colombia’s election. It’s managing it. Abelardo de la Espriella reaching the runoff isn’t a democratic outcome that happens to align with American interests — it is the American interest, dressed in Colombian clothes and running on Colombian ballots. The question this election actually poses is not left versus right. It is whether the new American model for South America — Milei’s Argentina as the template, Rubio as the architect — can be franchised southward before the continent decides it has seen this movie before. It has. The last time it ended badly for everyone, including Washington.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

Abelardo de la Espriella is a name most Americans cannot place, which is precisely how Washington prefers it. A right-wing Colombian attorney and political figure now heading toward a runoff against a left-leaning candidate in a country that has been governed by Gustavo Petro’s progressive coalition, de la Espriella represents something specific in the current American hemispheric imagination: the viable alternative, the electable right, the candidate who can make the Rubio doctrine look like democratic preference rather than imperial management.

Petro’s Colombia has been a persistent irritant to Washington’s South American vision. His government has maintained diplomatic relations with Venezuela, pursued independent drug policy negotiations, challenged the terms of American-backed trade arrangements, and most pointedly declined to perform the kind of reflexive pro-American alignment that the current State Department treats as the baseline expectation for a recipient of American security assistance. He is not a radical by regional standards. He is a social democrat who won a legitimate election and governed accordingly. What makes him intolerable to Washington is not his ideology in the abstract — it is his demonstrated willingness to treat Colombian sovereignty as a real rather than ceremonial concept.

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The runoff framing matters enormously and is being almost entirely ignored in American coverage. This is not a binary choice between democratic stability and leftist chaos — the frame that will dominate cable coverage if it gets covered at all. It is a choice between two legitimate political tendencies in a country that has been conducting a genuine democratic conversation about its own future for decades, interrupted periodically by American-backed interventions that reset that conversation on terms more favorable to Washington. The Roman parallel is not subtle here. This is the late Republican pattern of managing allied elections — not through direct fraud, which is crude and leaves evidence, but through the more elegant mechanism of financing, endorsing, and amplifying the preferred candidate while constructing a narrative in which his victory represents the will of the people and his opponent’s victory represents an existential threat to regional stability. The Senate didn’t need to rig Roman allied elections. It just needed to make the right candidate the obvious choice.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Marco Rubio did not fly to New Delhi to repair a relationship. He flew to New Delhi to perform one. The India-US partnership has not soured — it has clarified. What Washington is discovering, with considerable discomfort, is that India never signed up for the alliance America thought it was building. New Delhi has always been playing a different game, on a longer timeline, with a strategic patience that makes American foreign policy look like a series of panicked improvisations. Rubio’s rescue mission is the latest American attempt to convince a partner that doesn’t need convincing and isn’t interested in being managed.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

The friction points are real and they are multiplying. Trade disputes over tariffs, digital services taxes, and market access have accumulated without resolution. The Pannun assassination plot — an alleged Indian government operation targeting a Sikh-American activist on US soil — has never been fully addressed at the diplomatic level despite producing a federal indictment. Immigration enforcement actions against Indian nationals, including high-profile deportation flights that New Delhi received as a public humiliation, created domestic political pressure on Modi that no amount of bilateral warmth can easily absorb. Rubio’s visit is an attempt to clear enough of this brush to keep the strategic partnership functional while the larger picture — American anxiety about China, Indian ambivalence about choosing sides — remains unresolved.

The framing in Washington is that India is a critical Quad partner whose drift must be arrested before Beijing fills the vacuum. That framing is flattering to American strategic self-importance and almost entirely wrong about how New Delhi sees the situation. India is not drifting. It is executing a doctrine that Washington has misread as improvisation for seventy years running.

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To understand why Rubio came back with less than he brought, you have to go to Bandung in 1955. That is where India didn’t just adopt non-alignment — it convened it. Nehru didn’t stumble into a neutral posture between Washington and Moscow. He organized twenty-nine newly decolonized nations in Indonesia and built an explicit intellectual architecture for why great power binary choice was a trap — a mechanism through which imperial competition conscripts smaller powers into conflicts that serve the empire’s interests at the periphery’s expense. The Bandung Conference was not a diplomatic footnote. It was a founding document for how the postcolonial world intended to survive the Cold War with sovereignty intact. India wrote it.

What Modi calls multi-alignment is Bandung with a larger GDP, a seat at the G20, and a nuclear arsenal. The operational logic is identical to what Nehru articulated seven decades ago: extract maximum value from great power competition without being subordinated to any single pole of it. India trades with China, buys weapons from Russia, courts American investment, and declines every invitation to convert strategic cordiality into formal alignment. This is not contradiction. It is not ingratitude. It is the most consistent foreign policy doctrine of any major power in the postwar era — and it has never been secret. Washington has simply kept expecting it to change.

The Roman parallel is the relationship between Rome and Parthia in the late Republic — two powers that needed each other economically and feared each other strategically, conducting an endless series of diplomatic missions that both sides understood were performances of engagement rather than genuine subordination. Parthia never became a Roman client state. It remained a peer competitor that Rome had to manage rather than command. Every Roman general who rode east believing he could convert Parthian cordiality into Roman loyalty came back with less than he arrived with. The mistake was not tactical. It was categorical: Rome kept assuming that Parthian cooperation meant Parthian deference. It never did. Rubio rode east carrying the same assumption. New Delhi received him the same way Ctesiphon received Rome’s envoys — with hospitality, with the performance of partnership, and without the one thing Washington actually came for.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

The Indian-American community in New York — one of the largest, wealthiest, and most politically organized diaspora communities in the country — is the domestic pressure point that makes this diplomatic story a local one. The community is not monolithic. The fault lines run along religion, region, generation, and increasingly along the specific question of how much distance to maintain from the Modi government’s Hindu nationalist politics. The Pannun case cuts directly through those fault lines: for Sikh-Americans in the tri-state area, a federal allegation that India ordered an assassination on American soil is an existential security question. For Hindu nationalist-aligned Indian-Americans, it is an inconvenient distraction from a bilateral relationship they have invested in politically and financially.

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For seventeen days in the spring of 146 BC, Carthage burned.

It did not fall the way cities fall in the movies — one decisive breach, a flag raised, credits. It fell street by street, house by house, the defenders fighting from rooftops while Roman soldiers worked through the lower city with fire. When it was over, the survivors — perhaps fifty thousand of them, out of a population that had numbered in the hundreds of thousands — were sold into slavery. The site was formally cursed. Rome’s only true rival, the enemy that had haunted three generations and once put Hannibal at the gates, simply ceased to exist.

There is a moment from those seventeen days that the rest of this series is really about. The general who ordered the destruction, Scipio Aemilianus, stood watching the city burn — and wept. Not from guilt. His friend and tutor, the historian Polybius, was standing beside him and recorded it. Scipio turned to him and quoted Homer: a day will come when sacred Troy shall perish. He was not mourning Carthage. He was mourning Rome. Because he understood something the cheering soldiers behind him did not — that a republic with no enemy left to fear has nothing left to discipline its appetites. The victory, he saw, was the beginning of the end.

And then there was silence. The kind of silence a great power has never heard before: the silence of having no one left to fear.

That silence is the subject of this essay. Because America heard it too, on a November night in 1989, and mistook it for the sound of winning.

I was four when the Berlin Wall came down. I remember watching it on TV — that is, I think I do. My memory of the age is much like that of the media: analogue. Whether I remember the news reports or was only told I watched with my family, whether the memory is real or assembled years later in a history class, I can’t fully say. But I remember the cultural shift. It wasn’t as if I felt the impact of Germany becoming whole again in my corner of the Houston suburbs. But there was a feeling of invincibility that even a kid could sense. The world belonged to America. We had the army, the money, the technology, the will to be great — and we had it all from the comfort of our two-story, air-conditioned homes.

I. Carthago Delenda Est

The Third Punic War is the strangest of Rome’s great wars, because by the time it was fought, Rome had already won.

Carthage had been beaten in 201 BC. Stripped of its navy, its empire, its capacity to make war without Rome’s permission, it spent the next half-century as a defanged trading city — prosperous, yes, but no threat. And that prosperity was precisely the problem. Cato the Elder, the great moralist of the Senate, took to ending every speech he gave, on any subject — roads, taxes, the price of grain — with the same six words. Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed.

It was not a strategic argument. It was a psychological one. Rome could not tolerate the existence of a rival, even a harmless one. So Rome manufactured a war: it backed Carthage into a defensive conflict with a Roman client, declared the defense a treaty violation, and issued demands designed to be refused — culminating in the order that the Carthaginians abandon their city and resettle inland. They refused. Rome got its war, and its destruction, and its silence.

Here is the part the triumphalists never quote. The Romans themselves came to see 146 BC not as their finest hour but as the beginning of their unraveling. The historian Sallust, writing in the wreckage of the next century, diagnosed it precisely: as long as Rome feared Carthage, Romans behaved. They kept faith, they restrained their appetites, they held together. The Latin term was metus hostilis — the fear of the enemy. Remove the enemy, and you remove the discipline. Within thirteen years of Scipio’s destruction of Carthage came the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, the first political blood in the Forum, and the long slide that ends with a man crossing a river in 49 BC. When the enemy is no longer foreign, he becomes domestic.

(One thing to set straight, because you’ve heard it: Rome did not sow Carthage’s fields with salt. That detail appears in no ancient source — it’s a nineteenth-century embellishment. The destruction was real and total. The salt is a myth. Hold onto that. It matters more than it should.)

The victory was the wound. Rome just couldn’t feel it yet.

II. The Man Who Wouldn’t Dance

On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came open, and the most powerful man on earth declined to celebrate.

George H. W. Bush was urged, that week, to go to Berlin, to stand at the Wall, to seize the moment. He refused. Pressed by reporters on why he seemed so restrained at the greatest American triumph in forty years, he gave an answer that has aged into something almost unrecognizable: I’m not going to dance on the Wall.

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Bush, a one-term president, has had his legacy rehabilitated long after losing to Bill Clinton in 1992 — in part through the natural comparison to his eldest son, George W., who launched the disastrous Iraq War and whose deregulatory economic instincts helped inflate the deficit and set the stage for the 2008 financial crash. But the deeper reason came into view only later: the father’s quiet genius in supervising the collapse of an empire. He understood, in a way his critics did not, that a humiliated superpower with thousands of nuclear warheads was the single most dangerous object in the world, and that the job was not to gloat but to land the plane.

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I love being a 90s kid. Born at the midpoint of the 80s, I got to experience an America at the end of history, without rival in the global order. At home, the economy ran one of the longest expansions on record — some 28 million new jobs, more than 80% of them paying above the median, unemployment falling from 5.4% at the start of the decade to 3.8% by the spring of 2000. The culture ran just as hot: cable and satellite, the personal computer, the compact disc, a flood of new voices and genres across movies, music, even sports.

Despite all this — or maybe because of it — the Nineties were the last decade of the Pax Americana. The apex, right before the decline we’re living through now.

To understand that decline, start somewhere unexpected.

There is a moment, recorded by the historian Polybius, that the rest of this series is really about.

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It is 146 BC. Carthage — Rome’s only true rival, the enemy that had haunted three generations — is burning. Scipio Aemilianus, the general who ordered it, stands watching the city fall. And he weeps. Not from guilt. From foresight. He turns to Polybius and quotes Homer: a day will come when sacred Troy shall perish. He is not mourning Carthage. He is mourning Rome. Because he understands something the cheering soldiers behind him do not: a republic with no enemy left to fear has nothing left to discipline its appetites. The victory is the beginning of the end.

I think about Scipio’s tears every time I see a documentary about the 1990s.

We are living through the apex of Nineties nostalgia. The decade is being remembered as a golden hour — the peace dividend, the long boom, the end of history, the last good time before the towers fell and the timeline went strange. The clothes are back. The music is back. The aesthetic is everywhere. And the story we tell ourselves is the story Scipio’s soldiers were telling: we won, and winning was good, and the good times were the reward.

This series is an argument with that story.

Because the 1990s were not the calm before the fall. They were the fall — the slow, comfortable, well-lit version of it, the part you only recognize in retrospect. The decade that began with the Berlin Wall coming down and ended with a contested election and a clear September morning was not an interlude between histories. It was a republic discovering, the way Rome discovered after Carthage, that the most dangerous thing that can happen to a great power is to run out of rivals.

That is the wager of this project: that the years 1989 to 2001 map, with uncomfortable precision, onto the last decades of the Roman Republic — the stretch between the destruction of Carthage and the crossing of the Rubicon, when Rome was richer, safer, and more powerful than it had ever been, and was quietly, triumphantly, coming apart.

I’ve built the series in three acts, because the story has three movements.

The Illusion (1989–1992) is the golden hour itself — the triumphalism, the faraway clean wars, the certainty that history had a direction and we were standing at its end. It is also where the first crack appears, the way the first crack in Rome appeared not during a defeat but at the height of confidence.

The Consolidation (1993–1997) is the part nobody narrates at the time: the slow normalization of the unthinkable. The lines that get crossed and survived. The backlash that calls itself restoration. The discovery that the enemy is no longer across the sea but in the next county. This is Rome’s stretch from Sulla’s first march to the backroom where three men divided a republic and called it consensus.

The Reckoning (1998–2001) is the bill coming due — the trial that was never about the crime, the party at the edge, the election the machinery couldn’t resolve, and finally the morning that functioned, like the Rubicon, less as a catastrophe than as a permission slip. The event that ends an era is rarely the event everyone remembers. It’s the response.

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Each week, one year. One year, one Roman rhyme. Not because history repeats — it doesn’t — but because it keeps a beat, and the beat of a confident republic losing itself is one of the most legible rhythms we have.

Rome is the master key here, not because America is Rome, but because Rome is the longest, best-documented case study we have of the specific thing the Nineties were doing: a free people enjoying the fruits of total victory while the institutions that made the victory possible quietly stopped working. The Romans had a word for the years after Carthage. They didn’t call it decline. They called it the good times. So did we.

Scipio watched his enemy burn and understood it as a prophecy. The Nineties watched the same fire and called it the end of history.

This series is about the difference.

Pull up a chair. We’re starting in 1989.

📚 Imperial Reading Shelf

• The Histories — Polybius (for the scene at Carthage, and for the cyclical theory of decline (anacyclosis) that haunts this whole project)

• The Jugurthine War & Catiline’s Conspiracy — Sallust (the great chronicler of a republic for sale; our companion through the back half of the series)

• “The End of History?” (1989) — Francis Fukuyama (read it against Scipio. The two theses of victory, separated by two thousand years)

• SPQR — Mary Beard (the modern map of the territory we’ll be crossing)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Russia is not winning. Russia is performing winning — and the audience is not Kyiv, not Brussels, not Washington. The audience is Moscow. What is being read in the West as military escalation is better understood as domestic theater for a Russian public that has been told for three years that a three-day operation is proceeding according to plan. The escalation is real. The strength it signals is not. Empires that are actually winning don’t need to announce it this loudly.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

The latest round of Russian strikes — deeper, broader, more visually dramatic than the operational pattern of recent months — is generating the predictable Western response cycle: alarm, emergency sessions, calls for accelerated weapons deliveries, think-piece debates about escalation thresholds. This cycle is itself a Russian strategic product. Moscow has learned, across three years of this war, that the escalation announcement is a weapon independent of the military operation it accompanies. The fear of escalation has done more to constrain Western support for Ukraine than any battlefield result Russia has actually achieved.

Strip the performance away and look at the ledger. Russia has lost more tanks than it had in active service before the invasion began — over 3,000 confirmed destroyed or captured against a prewar active inventory that didn’t reach that number. Equipment losses are running between 2:1 and 5:1 in Ukraine’s favor depending on the category. Total casualties are approaching one million, with an estimated 250,000 dead — numbers that would have ended a democratic government’s war and are straining even an authoritarian one’s recruitment mathematics. By early 2025, the Soviet-era storage reserves that had been quietly replenishing frontline losses were themselves running low. The arsenal that looked inexhaustible in 2022 has a bottom, and the bottom is getting closer.

This is the context in which the escalation is happening. Not from strength finding its stride — from a military machine that has consumed a generation of equipment and manpower to achieve territorial gains that, measured against the original operational plan, represent a profound strategic failure being rebranded in real time. The renewed intensity is the rebranding. The strikes are the press release.

The Roman parallel is not Cannae, where Carthage genuinely broke Rome in the field. It is the later Punic War dynamic — Hannibal in Italy, tactically brilliant, strategically stranded, winning battles while losing the war because the system he was fighting was more durable than any single engagement could resolve. Hannibal spent fifteen years in Italy. He never took Rome. He went home. Russia can still escalate. It demonstrably can. What it cannot do is convert escalation into the outcome that justifies the cost — and three years of evidence have not changed that equation. What changes is the domestic narrative, which is the actual target of the current offensive surge.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

New York’s Ukrainian community — concentrated in the East Village, Brighton Beach’s Ukrainian corridor, and the broader tri-state diaspora network that has expanded significantly since 2022 — is living this escalation in a register that the geopolitical coverage doesn’t capture. These are people with family in the strike zones, watching the same footage the think-tankers are analyzing and drawing entirely different conclusions because the abstraction isn’t available to them. The community’s political organizing, its fundraising infrastructure, its relationship with elected officials from both parties — all of it is being recalibrated in real time against the question of whether American support is structurally reliable or contingently political.

The financial dimension is less covered and more consequential. New York remains the center of the sanctions architecture that is the West’s primary non-military instrument against Moscow. The Russian oligarch asset freeze, the secondary sanctions pressure on financial institutions doing business with sanctioned entities, the enforcement actions that occasionally surface in the Southern District — all of this runs through New York’s legal and financial infrastructure. Renewed Russian escalation creates pressure to either tighten that architecture further or acknowledge that it has reached the limits of its deterrent effect. Either outcome has implications for the financial institutions, the law firms, and the compliance apparatus that has built an entire practice area around Russian sanctions enforcement since 2022.

WHY IT MIGHT BE OVERLOOKED

The coverage failure is structural and predictable. Western military analysts are trained to read escalation as capability signal — more strikes means more capacity means more danger. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that consistently flatters Russian strategic communication. Moscow has spent three years teaching Western media to amplify its escalation announcements, and Western media has been an enthusiastic student.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Ebola story is being covered as a budget story. It is not a budget story. It is a decision about which lives the empire considers worth defending — and the answer, made visible by DOGE’s cuts to global health infrastructure, is the same answer Rome gave when it stopped maintaining the grain routes to its African provinces. Not malice. Indifference. Which is worse, because indifference doesn’t reverse itself when the bodies start arriving.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

Aid workers on the ground in the current outbreak zone are saying clearly what the official readouts are burying: the early warning systems, the logistics networks, the trained response personnel, and the supply chains that make containment possible in the first seventy-two hours of an Ebola emergence were degraded or eliminated by DOGE cuts to USAID and CDC global programs. This is not a hypothetical risk assessment. This is workers describing, in real time, the specific capabilities that are no longer available to them and the specific gaps those absences create in a response protocol where hours determine whether an outbreak becomes an epidemic.

The framing that will dominate coverage — if this gets covered seriously — is fiscal: did the cuts save money, and was the saving worth the risk? That is the wrong question and it is being asked in bad faith by people who understand that cost-benefit framing allows indefinite deferral of moral accountability. The correct question is structural: what does it mean that the United States built the global health infrastructure that makes Ebola containment possible, then dismantled it during an active outbreak, and what does that tell us about how the current administration understands America’s relationship to the world it spent eighty years organizing?

The Roman parallel is Antonine Plague management under Marcus Aurelius — specifically the moment when the imperial logistics network that had been moving physicians, medicines, and grain across the empire began contracting under fiscal and military pressure, and the provinces that had been integrated into Roman supply chains discovered that integration had been a dependency, not a partnership. The plague didn’t kill Rome. The withdrawal of the infrastructure that had managed it did something more insidious: it demonstrated to the provinces that Roman protection was conditional, revocable, and ultimately self-interested. Trust, once withdrawn at that scale, does not return when the emergency passes. What DOGE has done to American global health credibility is not recoverable with a supplemental appropriation. The network took decades to build. The relationships that made it function — the local health workers, the regional governments, the NGO infrastructure that operated in American-adjacent political space because American-adjacent was safer than the alternative — those relationships are being repriced right now in real time.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

New York’s public health infrastructure has a direct and underappreciated dependency on the federal global health architecture that DOGE is dismantling. The city’s ability to identify, isolate, and respond to an emerging infectious disease threat arriving through JFK — one of the busiest international entry points in the world, with direct flights from outbreak-adjacent regions — rests on an early warning system that is upstream from anything the city health department controls. CDC’s global disease detection programs, USAID’s field epidemiology networks, the WHO coordination mechanisms that American funding has historically underwritten — these are the systems that give New York’s public health apparatus the lead time it needs to activate a response before a case becomes a cluster.

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Editor’s note: This piece was drafted before the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s April 29th ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down a majority-Black congressional map in the most significant blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a generation, have fully materialized. Within days of the decision, Mississippi called a special legislative session to dismantle its only majority-Black district, and Louisiana and Alabama moved to delay their primaries to redraw their maps before November’s midterms. The Virginia Supreme Court followed on May 8th by nullifying a voter-approved redistricting referendum that would have given Democrats four additional congressional seats. The architecture described below is not a warning about what might happen. It is a description of what is happening now.

Voting is war without weapons, and in America the battlefields are congressional districts. It’s easy to get caught up in the back and forth of the redistricting wars — the maps drawn and redrawn, the litigation that stretches across decades, the emergency injunctions that arrive too late to change the election they were filed over. Ever since the Republican Party launched its systematic gerrymandering project to lock in control of the House, there has been a mad dash of map-drawing designed to dilute the power of voters by redrawing the terrain beneath their feet — especially the districts born out of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Instead of voters choosing their politicians, politicians are choosing their voters.

What we are witnessing is something the high republican era of Rome would have recognized immediately. Caesar’s civil war was the endpoint of a long fracture within the aristocracy — one faction that appealed to the people (populares) and one that stressed reverence for the senate (optimates). Both sides were fully committed to the exploitative machinery of empire, just as today both parties remain captive to corporate and commercial interests. What differs is the base of support. Where Republicans were once the party of the country club — Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, the Chamber of Commerce — the realignment of the past twenty years has sent coastal elites and urban professionals toward the Democratic Party, and working-class voters toward a Republican coalition now dominated by tech oligarchs and authoritarian populism.

At the center of the legal architecture that makes this coalition’s minority rule possible is a man who has been building it for forty years. John Roberts is not a political operative. He is something more disciplined and more dangerous — and he revealed his hand when he felt it necessary to publicly chastise citizens for criticizing the court’s recent rulings, rulings that have systematically reduced the power of the American voter. This is happening at a moment of unusual cross-partisan opposition to the growing oligarchy. Roberts’ agenda, pursued through case after case across four decades, is coherent and specific: protect the architecture of elite power from the encroachment of democratic majorities.

Rome didn’t pretend. The Roman Republic was the most sophisticated system of institutionalized popular control in the ancient world, and its architects were clear-eyed about what they were building. Citizens voted. Votes were counted. Laws were passed, magistrates elected, wars declared, men executed — all through formal civic process. The Republic lasted nearly five centuries. It was also, from the beginning, a machine designed to ensure that the people who mattered most would always win.

What’s happening in the federal courts right now is the construction of something very similar. The forms of democracy will remain. The outcomes are being pre-determined. The architecture is the point.

I. How You Count Is Who You Count

To understand the Roman voting system you have to understand that Rome didn’t really have voters. It had units.

The primary assembly for the most consequential decisions — electing consuls, declaring war, trying capital cases — was the Comitia Centuriata, the centuriate assembly. Citizens didn’t vote as individuals. They voted as members of a centuria, a notional military unit that had nothing to do with actual military service and everything to do with property. The census, conducted every five years, didn’t just count Romans — it sorted them. Your property determined your class. Your class determined your century. Your century cast one vote.

The math was brazen. Roman citizens were divided into five property classes plus the capite censi — literally “counted by head,” those who owned nothing assessable. The wealthiest class, Class I, controlled 98 of the assembly’s 193 centuries. Since a majority required 97 votes, the richest Romans could carry any question before the lower classes were even called to vote. In practice, voting often stopped before it reached Class III. The capite censi — the landless poor who constituted the majority of Rome’s free population — were crammed into five centuries. Five votes out of 193.

This wasn’t corruption. It was the design.

The tribal assemblies — the Comitia Tributa and the Concilium Plebis — operated through a different mechanism with the same result. Rome’s citizens were distributed across 35 tribes: 31 rural, 4 urban. Each tribe cast one vote. The four urban tribes held the bulk of Rome’s actual population — the craftsmen, the urban poor, the recently freed. The 31 rural tribes were thinly populated by the possessores, the landed class whose farms and estates spread across the Italian countryside. The freedman who received citizenship was, almost without exception, assigned to one of the four urban tribes, diluting his vote into an already-overloaded pool. Rural landowners had an 8-to-1 structural advantage regardless of how many people actually lived in Rome.

One vote per tribe. Thirty-one rural votes. Four urban votes. Majority to the countryside.

Both systems operated simultaneously, applying their skew across different domains of civic life. The centuriate assembly handled the high-stakes questions. The tribal assemblies handled legislation and lower magistrates. Together they formed an interlocking architecture that made elite dominance self-reinforcing across every meaningful dimension of Roman political life.

What the Roman system built, in other words, was a polity in which the poor were many and their votes were few — not through fraud or violence, but through the design of the institutions themselves. You could participate fully in Roman civic life, follow every rule, cast every available vote, and still find that the system had already decided the question before you opened your mouth.

II. REDMAP and the Centuriate Assembly Come to Wisconsin

The American analogue to the centuriate assembly didn’t arrive in a single dramatic moment. It was built quietly, over a decade, by people who understood that controlling the machinery of representation was more durable than winning any individual election.

In 2010, the Republican State Leadership Committee launched the Redistricting Majority Project — REDMAP. The strategy was precise: target state legislative races in states scheduled for post-census redistricting. Win the state houses. Control the maps. Lock in congressional majorities for a decade regardless of what the national electorate did.

It worked. Republicans drew congressional maps in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin that produced durable supermajorities from electorates that were roughly evenly split. In 2012, Democratic candidates for the House received 1.4 million more votes than Republican candidates nationally. Republicans retained a 33-seat majority. The votes were there. The districts had been drawn to make them irrelevant.

This is the operational meaning of politicians choose their voters. It is not metaphor. In Wisconsin, Republican mapmakers were so precise that they produced a metric — now infamous in redistricting litigation — called the “efficiency gap,” a measure of how many votes are “wasted” by being packed into unwinnable districts or spread too thin across unwinnable ones. The 2011 Wisconsin maps produced an efficiency gap that would have been nearly impossible to achieve by accident. It was engineered.

The Roman possessores didn’t need to cheat inside the tribal system. The tribal system was built to favor them. REDMAP’s architects didn’t need to fraudulently count votes. The district system, once properly drawn, would count them correctly and still deliver the desired outcome. The mechanism is different. The logic is identical.

III. John Roberts Has Been Doing This Since Reagan

Roberts clerked for William Rehnquist, worked in the Reagan Department of Justice, and served in the White House Counsel’s office. In that period he wrote memos arguing that the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement was federal overreach, that the proper remedy for racial discrimination in voting was litigation after the fact, and that Section 2 of the VRA was being interpreted too expansively by the courts. These weren’t the views of a young lawyer trying to please his principals. He has been consistent on every point for forty years.

His theory is coherent, if you accept its premises. Roberts believes the Civil Rights-era federal supervision regime — particularly the preclearance requirement that forced certain states to get Justice Department approval before changing their voting laws — represents a structural anomaly in the constitutional design. The 15th Amendment, in his reading, is self-executing. States are sovereign. Federal supervision of state electoral law is an affront to federalism that the emergency conditions of 1965 may have briefly justified but that cannot be made permanent. The war is over. The emergency is past. The guardrails can come down.

What that theory produces in practice is a sustained doctrinal campaign to remove federal oversight of state electoral architecture — not through frontal assault but through attrition, chipping away at the statutory and constitutional foundations case by case until the structure collapses.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013): Roberts’ majority opinion struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act — the coverage formula that determined which states required preclearance. The formula was based on “decades-old data,” he wrote, that no longer reflected “current conditions.” The logic: discrimination had been so successfully addressed that the tools used to address it were no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a voter ID law it had been enjoined from implementing. North Carolina followed with a package of voting restrictions a federal court later found had targeted African American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The infrastructure for those laws had been pre-staged, waiting for the guardrails to come down.

Rucho v. Common Cause (2019): Roberts held that federal courts have no authority to adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering. This is the Rubicon — not a weakening of the standard, not a tightening of the evidentiary bar, but a complete removal of the federal judiciary as a check on the practice. Partisan gerrymandering is a political question, the opinion held, beyond the competence of courts to resolve. The REDMAP maps, and every map like them, were now immune from federal challenge. The decision threw the question to state courts and state legislatures — the same institutions that drew the maps in the first place.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021): The Court substantially narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the very provision Roberts had criticized in his Reagan-era memos. The majority held that Arizona could restrict out-of-precinct voting and ban ballot collection without violating the VRA, establishing a new balancing test that made discriminatory-effect claims dramatically harder to win.

These are not three separate decisions. They are three movements in a single composition, written by the same hand, in pursuit of the same architectural goal: to remove federal oversight of state electoral design and return the management of American democracy to the states that spent a century trying to make it not work.

Roberts didn’t build this for Trump. He built it because he believes in it. That’s what makes it durable.

IV. The Capture — and Who Gets Silenced

The Roberts project doesn’t exist in isolation. It serves a political coalition whose character has changed dramatically in the past decade, and whose interests now make that architecture existential.

The Republican Party of 2025 is a coalition of legacy capital, technology oligarchs, and authoritarian populism held together by a figure whose relationship to any fixed ideological program is opportunistic at best. What unites Trump, Musk, Thiel, and the institutional Republican Party is an interest in a state that is simultaneously powerful in its deployment against enemies and weak in its capacity to regulate accumulation. That interest requires insulation from democratic accountability. A party that represents a consistent minority of the American electorate — Republicans have won the presidential popular vote twice in the last thirty-six years — can only govern durably if the translation mechanism between votes and power is sufficiently distorted. Gerrymandered House maps. A Senate that gives Wyoming the same representation as California. An Electoral College that has twice delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser. A Supreme Court packed with movement constitutionalists who have spent decades building the legal rationale for removing electoral guardrails.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a coalition with aligned interests executing a long-term strategy. The Romans would have recognized it immediately. The optimates — the conservative senatorial faction of the late Republic — used their control of existing institutions not to govern better but to prevent the structural reforms that would have diluted their power. When the Gracchi proposed land redistribution and Italian enfranchisement, the threat the optimates responded to was not mob rule. It was arithmetic. If the Italian allies received full citizenship and were distributed across all 35 tribes, the rural tribe advantage — the structural guarantee of elite dominance — evaporated. Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death on the Capitoline with furniture from the senate house. His brother followed.

The Roberts Court cannot do that. But Rucho is the legal equivalent of making sure the furniture stays in senatorial hands.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The story being told is a trade war thaw. The story actually happening is a court in motion. Trump didn’t go to China to negotiate tariffs — he went to China because Beijing invited him, and an emperor accepts an invitation from a rival power when his position at home is weak enough that the foreign pageantry is worth more than the diplomatic concession it represents. The business leaders in the delegation are not dealmakers. They are props. And Pete Hegseth standing next to Xi Jinping is not American strength projected abroad. It is American confusion made visible.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

Read the delegation list before you read the communiqué. When a sitting American president travels to a rival capital accompanied by private sector executives and a defense secretary whose primary qualification is television, the trip is not a negotiation. It is a performance — and the audience is domestic, not Chinese. Trump’s approval numbers are underwater. The tariff regime he built has produced inflation without leverage. The coalition that elected him is beginning to price in the gap between the rhetoric and the results. A Beijing summit, with the cameras and the handshakes and the suggestion of deals being made at the highest level, is the oldest political technology available: the foreign stage as domestic theater.

Beijing knows this and is playing it with the precision of a power that has been managing barbarian courts for two thousand years. China is not making concessions — it is making images. Xi receives Trump at a moment when American credibility in the Middle East is in active negotiation, when Iran is at the table partly because Beijing helped put it there, and when Russia remains diplomatically isolated enough that China’s Eurasian positioning looks like the only viable alternative architecture to the post-1945 order. The Iran angle is the one being systematically underplayed. China’s role in brokering or enabling the Iranian negotiating position gives Beijing something Washington needs. That is not a trade war. That is a tribute relationship, with the tribute flowing in the direction American political culture is not prepared to acknowledge.

The Roman parallel is Diocletian’s court receiving Persian ambassadors — not because Rome was weak, but because the performance of imperial equality was useful to both sides while concealing a shift in the actual balance. The Sassanid Empire never defeated Rome militarily. It simply outlasted Rome’s ability to project coherent power across multiple frontiers simultaneously. China is not trying to defeat America. It is waiting for America to exhaust itself managing its own internal contradictions, and scheduling summits at moments of maximum American distraction is how you help that process along while maintaining plausible diplomatic cordiality.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

America has always sold the dream. Now it’s selling the deed. The gold visa program isn’t immigration policy — it’s privatization of citizenship, and the price point is the tell. A million dollars doesn’t buy you America. It buys you access to America, on terms that were previously reserved for people who were born into it or spent decades earning it. What Rome called the end of the Republic, we’re calling an investment opportunity.

THE GLOBAL EVENT

The Trump administration’s expansion of the golden visa framework — a million-dollar entry point for global elites seeking residency, accelerated pathways, and the political access that follows — is being covered as immigration news. It is not immigration news. It is constitutional news, and almost no one is saying so.

What is being constructed, quietly and in plain sight, is a two-track citizenship architecture. Track one: the existing system, which requires time, documentation, labor history, family ties, and years of bureaucratic exposure for people who arrive with nothing but intention. Track two: a cash window, available to anyone globally with seven figures liquid, that bypasses the queue entirely and arrives pre-loaded with the social capital that comes from writing a check that size. The policy doesn’t create inequality — it prices it. It takes the informal advantage that wealth has always conferred on immigration outcomes and converts it into an explicit product offering. That is a meaningful institutional escalation.

The Roman parallel Jonathan specified is exactly right, and the precise historical moment is the late Republic’s infusion of Eastern and provincial money into the Roman senatorial class. As Rome’s empire expanded, the old patrician gatekeeping eroded not through revolution but through purchase. Provincial strongmen, eastern merchant dynasties, and Hellenistic elites bought their way into Roman civic life — sometimes literally purchasing citizenship, sometimes through the more elegant mechanism of financing the campaigns of indebted senators. The result was not the fall of Rome. It was something subtler and more durable: the dilution of the civic identity that had made Roman institutions self-reinforcing. The form survived. The content hollowed out. What replaced it was a class of people who held Roman citizenship as an asset rather than an inheritance — people for whom the Republic was a vehicle, not a home.

HOW IT REACHES NEW YORK

New York is where this lands first and hardest, because New York is where the money goes. The immediate investment flows are legible: real estate, private equity, family office structures, and the financial services infrastructure that manages all of the above. A million-dollar visa minimum is not a ceiling — it is a floor. The actual capital that follows these individuals into the American economy operates at orders of magnitude above the entry price. For a city already running a two-tier housing market, the arrival of a new class of ultra-high-net-worth residents with legal status incentives to park capital in American assets is not a neutral event. It is accelerant.

The financial crimes and worker protection dimensions are where the story gets genuinely underreported. The compliance architecture around golden visa investment vehicles — EB-5 regional centers, LLC structures, real estate development partnerships — has a well-documented history of fraud, money laundering, and labor violation. The expansion of the program without a corresponding expansion of enforcement capacity is not an oversight. It is a policy choice. For the immigrant worker — the contractor, the building service employee, the hospitality worker — who exists on track one of the citizenship system and whose labor is frequently the underlying asset that makes the golden visa investment perform, the program represents a specific and unacknowledged insult: their presence is subject to maximum scrutiny while the capital their labor services arrives with a welcome mat. That tension will not stay abstract. It will surface in organizing drives, in wage disputes, and eventually in politics.

WHY IT MIGHT BE OVERLOOKED

The coverage frame is almost entirely wrong. Mainstream outlets are treating this as a story about who gets in — debating the merits of wealth-based immigration selection versus skills-based or family-based systems. That is a real debate and it is a distraction from the more important argument, which is about what citizenship is.

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