Sleepy Summer
World systems, power, and time.
It seemed like New Year’s Eve was just yesterday, and now we are mere months away from another year-ending holiday spree. I haven’t written about politics since Juneteenth, and then only to share some films that captured the brutality of American slavery. In the months since, as the Earth heats up in its unrelenting way, I have mostly been reading.
I have been sitting with two large questions and refusing to answer either one too quickly. The first is about world-systems: whether the last five centuries are best understood not through the personalities of kings and presidents but through the slow accumulation of capital, moving from the Medicis to Wall Street like water finding its level. The second is about power itself, what it is, where it lives, whether it operates most forcefully when it is seen or when it is invisible. I am reading the people who built these frameworks alongside the people who tore them down, and I will be honest with you: I have not decided who is right. That is the point. I am trying to earn a conclusion rather than borrow one.
It’s a good time to develop the mind and soul, because our civic conversation predictably will not. I’ll admit it’s hard for me to comment on the news cycle, and maybe that’s the residue of someone who once lived inside it for a living and got burned by the exposure. Most political pundits are habitually wrong and paid to be so. They are also allergic to structural critiques, the kind that might call into question the whole enterprise of poll-chasing and electioneering. If we are living in an age of democratic drift, and the people have shown themselves susceptible to it, then the stakes are no longer a single party’s victory or one hopeful week of polling. The real story is structural decay, and structural decay does not fit on a chyron. It cannot be sold as a timely take, because its timescale is not the news cycle’s. It is the century’s.
That is what the long view offers, and what I keep returning to it for. The breaking-news framing asks what happened today and demands that you feel astonished by it. The generational framing asks a quieter question, like what has been happening all along, slowly enough that no single day could contain it? A pundit sees a shocking week. A historian sees the same failure rehearsed across decades, wearing a new face each time. Neither is wrong, exactly, but only one of them is trying to explain the pattern rather than react to the noise.
So I’ll keep reading and keep offering these thoughts as the days grow longer and then shorter. Another year comes and goes, and the same failures repeat. But life can be measured in decades and generations as well as in months, and learning to study time that way is the quiet pleasure of the social sciences. Time keeps its own grip on things, and it still produces more questions than answers. I am in no hurry to pretend otherwise.
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