A political system doesn’t shed its skin and emerge as something new when it flips from “democracy” to “autocracy,” from “left” to “right,” or from “inside” to “outside.” It shifts phase into another register of the same underlying forces—self-interests, fears, incentives, and ambitions. At the core of this self-interest is an essentially empty and insubstantial, insecure, uncertain, paranoid psychological and cultural self. The more hollow and haunted it becomes, the more violently it throws people off, even as they scramble to climb back toward a center that refuses them—because every addition only makes the whole spin faster, tightening the cycle and pushing harder against those who try to hold on. America right now is not undergoing a radical transformation but revealing another face of this continuity. The names change, the clothes change, the rhetoric changes, but the architecture of power remains largely unbroken, and what appears as rupture is better understood as modulation.
What many fail to see is that politics isn’t simply about winning a game of attention, prestige, or control; it is about the ways in which ideology becomes self-reinforcing, trapping whole systems into sustaining the rubrics of belief for their own sake. These rubrics are not inert—they entrap, they repeat, they validate themselves by folding back on their own logic, drawing energy from the very act of persistence. What matters is not the nominal content—whether liberal, conservative, revolutionary, or reactionary—but the structural inhabitation of form itself. Systems continue because circulation itself has primacy; the feedback loop is the logic. Trump and his circle exploit this not by offering substance, but by allowing the loop to accelerate under the cover of spectacle. The danger lies less in what mask power wears than in mistaking the mask for what is real.
At a deeper level, what we are witnessing is not a contest of ideologies but a recursive modulation in the rhythm of political communication. Power amplifies itself through resonance—feedback loops of attention, repetition, and spectacle—creating constructive interference when it converges and destructive interference when it clashes. These patterns do not collapse with a change of regime; they persist as harmonic structures across cycles, entangling minds and cultures alike. The error is in believing there is a clean separation between self and other, when in fact self is a continuum: psychological, cultural, and civilizational at once. Civilization itself is suspended in this loop, accelerating toward thresholds it cannot contain, compounding crises under the illusion that they belong elsewhere, that they are someone else’s to resolve.
Daedelus Kite 