Ozymandias and the ends of empires?

Why Elon Musk's form of kakistocratic chaos will not be the end of American empire

ozymandias

Last weekend I challenged my older sons to memorize some Latter-day Saint scripture and poetry with me, a Sunday evening romp that we will likely repeat. They are theater kids who have leads in their upcoming plays, so being off-book is a skill they are eager to develop.

My 16 year old chose Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, so we retreated to our corners to see who could memorize it first. He destroyed me in the head-to-head. Youthful neuroplasticity wins again I guess. I was more proud than frustrated, but plan to scheme my way into victory in our next encounter perhaps by manipulating him into choosing Yeats’s The Second Coming, which I mostly already know by heart. Indeed, I tried to do that on Sunday, but he sensed sabotage and cut his own path.

Shelley’s poem, one of the most famous in English, has a fascinating history itself. The poem began as a challenge between Shelley and a friend, each to write a poem by the same name about a recovered monument to Ramses II, then en route to London from Thebes (Ozymandias is the Greek styling of Ramses). Shelley provides haunting imagery of the “half sunk…shattered visage” of the broken monument scattered in the sands next to the statue’s pedestal, which had insisted to the “Mighty” on a despairing immortality that the sands of time had swept away.

Reading it—trying to memorize it—made me think hard about the turning of empire, just as it had done to the Brits climbing upon their own pedestal of the imperial Victorian century. Timing was propitious. I have aged a year in the last week as I have read each headline about the chaos being unleashed by Elon Musk and his minions. Is there a clearer threat to constitutional democracy since the presidency of James Buchanan? If there is, I do not know it.

And yet I reject Musk as Ozymandias. I do not despair as I look upon his works and I do not yet count the sands of American empire swallowing up our constitutional order.

The lack of despair comes from the mess that is the US Constitution. The peculiar genius of the American order is that it is such an institutional disarray. One scholar called the constitutional structure of foreign policy an “invitation to struggle” between the President and Congress. The Separation of Powers enshrined in the constitutional order makes gridlock and indecision the norm, not the exception. It is a recipe for gridlock, a factor of life that politicians and activists have bemoaned since the 18th century.

I also am not persuaded that even Musk’s most apparently illegal rampages—making invalid contractual promises that he claims cannot be reviewed by courts, “deleting” executive agencies created by Congress—are the end of the game of government. We are in early stages of the next act in a long series of political crises. If we encountered every claim of existential crisis on its face America would not have survived the first passage of power from Washington to Adams in 1797 and certainly not the passage to Jefferson in 1801.

Why the optimism? In part it is because I resist as an ideological matter the certainty that this or that election was the one that truly represents the last, best hope (or peril) for America’s future or that this or that politician truly will be our demise (or salvation). The truth is that I have no idea what the future holds. The convictions I hold are few. Uncertainty is everywhere. We reduce it artificially and at our peril.

That said, I feel as sure as I ever feel that the structure of American institutions, including the incentives for balance that they create, has much more resilience left in it. I hold this view even though Trumpism has evicted conservatism from the Republican Party in any meaningful sense. I don’t think I will ever take seriously again the claim from Republicans that they are conservative, not in the classic, Burkean sense that seemed to motivate so many from the right for so long. I am a student of conservatism. Conservatism is a friend of mine. This, sir, is no conservatism.

I also hold this view even though I regard Elon Musk as a kakistocrat par excellence. His talents, such as they are, are real; his insights into law, politics, policy, institutional design, truth telling, truth seeking, power, and much more are not among them. I would trust my children to evaluate truth claims about the world with substantially more confidence than anything Musk can do. The youngest is five years old. I stand by my statement. The scent of incompetence in the government today comes strongest in his peculiar variety.

I still hold the view that these two together will not destroy America. By almost all historical measures, Trump’s most popular days are behind him, unlikely to ever recover. This will mean that the Republicans in Congress who put party over institution will rediscover their independence as the next election looms. Musk will be, as Politico speculated yesterday, the “albatross” around the 2026 and 2028 elections.

And so we soldier on. My version of this will be ever more engagement as a scholar, teacher, and parent. My citizenship means that I will do more to plunge into the policy-relevant spaces where I have some modicum of expertise and to ring my Senators ragged as a citizen eager to see Congress find its institutional voice once again. My humanity means that I will continue to devote dozens of hours a week to building my community among the Conti-Browns, the Latter-day Saints in Philadelphia, my friends and fellow powerlifting enthusiasts, my Wharton students, my colleagues in financial regulation.

What I won’t do is announce the end of empire. There is indeed a future date by which our descendants will encounter the sands of American empire and interpret the hubristic assurances of our immortality with perspective that we cannot, in the present, muster.

Those days, however, are still far off yet.