There is a structural limit to populist dynamics that is often missed. Populist themes require an antithesis to remain coherent. Without an opposing force to push against, they do not stabilise or mature; they turn inward. Like fascism in its later stages, the movement begins to consume its own distinctions, purging nuance, then difference, then […]
In the United States, the early twenty-first-century autocratic turn emerges from a system that was already structurally fragile. Long before any individual leader came to dominate the political field, democratic legitimacy had thinned, institutional trust had decayed, and communicative coherence had been weakened by inequality, media saturation, and sustained disinvestment in public understanding. Into this […]
Evil did not arrive with a plan. It arrived pre-installed, the natural orientation of relationally networked complexity at scale, settling into low-energy states and the familiar attractors of corruption, populism, and conflict. There are puppet-masters and greedy, demonic characters involved, certainly, but even they are mostly riding that prebuilt wave. They do not invent the […]
Daedelus Kite 