
What is America? This may seem like a strange question to ask after reading a book titled The Martian General’s Daughter. But it is the most important question that we who live in the lands today known as the United States of America must answer. Are we an empire, or a nation? If empire, can we avoid the fate Rudyard Kipling accurately foresaw for the Anglo-Saxons? “Far-called, our navies melt away / On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” If nation, can we retrench, shedding the burdensome trappings of empire and regaining our nation, without a descent into chaos? And, whichever we choose, is America, golden America, fated merely to evanesce?
Theodore Judson wrote what may be my favorite work of modern fiction, Fitzpatrick’s War, a retelling of the story of Alexander the Great, set mostly in the twenty-seventh century A.D. Judson seems fascinated by what makes empires rise and fall, and whether this cycle can be escaped; that is the theme both of Fitzpatrick’s War and of this book. Fitzpatrick’s War, published in 2004, has proven eerily prescient, speaking of the chaos of North America in the 2020s and 2030s, and the rebuilding of a new society from the ashes of the old. As does no other book, it haunts me. Unfortunately, it is out of print and extremely expensive, as are many used books today (including this book, though it is available as an e-book, unlike Fitzpatrick’s War). I am, you will be glad to hear, working diligently to try to restore both to print.
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The Martian General’s Daughter is shorter and more modest in its sweep than Fitzpatrick’s War. Despite the title, the plot has very little to do with Mars, and it is not really a work of science fiction. Rather, it is a recasting of the failing Roman Empire, compressing its last few hundred years into a few decades, fractally reflected through a retelling of the actual Year of the Five Emperors, A.D. 193. To be sure, the year here is 2293, not 193, and many different aspects of the later Empire are woven throughout, but all that is really incidental to the overall thrust of Judson’s work.
The book does begin on Mars, where Peter Black, the titular general, an aged straight-arrow military man who has served the Pan-Polarian Empire his entire life, rising in the ranks from non-commissioned officer, is overseeing a mining station on Mars. The Empire consists of all of North America, along with much of the rest of the globe north of the fiftieth parallel, and was apparently the result of some major catastrophe in earlier centuries, although the details are never specified. Technology is advanced—the Pan-Polarians have not only space flight, but beam weapons and atomic-repulsion armor. The Empire’s capital is Mexico City (now called Garden City), and while its soldiers fight wars on the borders against the Persians and the Chinese, the decayed ruling classes cluster at the imperial center, extracting what they can as things fall apart.
For falling apart they are, terminally in 2293, and rapidly in the decade prior covered by the book in flashbacks. Politically, the empire is a chaotic mass of scheming, competing interests. The emperor around whom the book centers, dead by 2293, is an analog of Commodus, one Luke Anthony (although he demands he be called “The Concerned One”). His father, Mathias the Glistening, a worthy philosopher-king, an analog of Marcus Aurelius, knew his son to be insane but nonetheless imposed his rule. Black avoids both politics and, when possible, Garden City, where his wife and two sons, with whom he has a cool relationship, live as part of the upper crust as a result of his being favored by successive emperors, who see in him a reliable, predictable tool. He prefers the frontier, where he is assisted by his amanuensis and only counsellor, his young bastard daughter, Justa, who narrates the book (and is, naturally, the titular daughter). And aside from politics, the Empire is physically falling apart, even faster than politically. Mars is soon left behind, as all the men there flee or die, suffering the same fate as the other extraplanetary outposts of mankind, on Mercury, in the Asteroid Belt, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The high works of the Pan-Polarians are consumed by the “nanomachine plague,” a weapon hatched in a Chinese laboratory, which destroys electrically-energized metal, and is the immediate cause of the collapse.
Black is a man who wants nothing more than to die in harness. He has no interest in power, yet for years he is repeatedly recalled to Garden City to either wait or serve, until assigned again to the marches. He serves Luke Anthony even though he knows that the Emperor is a very bad man, a very bad emperor, and could turn on him at any time. The Emperor’s last chamberlain is Cleander, who aims to replace the Emperor and who tries to recruit Black to help him overthrow Luke Anthony. Black refuses, preventing Cleander from killing the Emperor even when he has descended into total madness and secluded himself deep inside the palace, ignoring the world outside. Black represents the last of Pan-Polarian virtue, a combination of humility and power, rare even at the beginning of empires, and a certain sign of final disintegration when it disappears completely. Cleander exclaims that he cannot understand why Black defends the insane and erratic Emperor, and Black responds. “ ‘I understand Mathias lifted me from the ranks,’ said Father. ‘He made me a man my family could be proud to claim. He would want me to serve his son.’ ‘Mathias the Glistening is very dead,’ said Cleander. ‘We owe the dead as much as the living,’ said Father. ‘Perhaps more. We are everything they have left.’ ”
Even in a time of decay, however, it is such men who appeal, both to the masses, who seek a restoration to better times, and to the elites, who hope to manipulate such men to their own advantage. It is the latter who drive the action of this book, which opens with a letter from a man who is father-in-law to Black’s sons, in Garden City, a “fuel factor”—a middleman who has become enormously rich by corruptly selling desperately-needed fuels to the Empire. In other words, he is a commodities speculator. (I imagine most or all of the characters in this book are based on actual Romans, though my history knowledge is not detailed enough to match them all.) The letter announces that, after the rapid death of the two emperors who reign after Luke Anthony is finally assassinated, Black has been elected the new emperor by the joint unanimous acclamation of the soldiery and the people, and should return from the Amur River, in Siberia, the easternmost border of the Empire, to claim his uncontested throne. (Spoilers ahead.)
The fuel factor lies. In reality, as always in such situations, other men also desire ultimate power. The second major contender is a Turk in service of the Empire, Abdul Selin, whose power base is his extended family and the military forces they collectively control. The Pan-Polarians conquered the Turks some 150 years before, and made them satraps of North Africa; we will return to the dilution of Pan-Polarian blood as proximate cause of the Empire’s failure. Justa relates Black’s return to Earth, accompanied by his loyal men, as the nanomachines consume the mining transport pressed into service as an orbital shuttle, forcing Black and his men into escape pods, while “courageous Captain Mbasa rode the ore barge until it exploded like a supernova in the cloudless sky and was strewn across the mountains of southwestern Asia.” He makes his headquarters in Armenia, near Lake Van, and collects an army from among the Eastern forces, all of which he had earlier commanded. (It is no doubt not a coincidence that all of the Asian locations in which action takes place in this book were sites of significant events two-and-a-half thousand years before.)
Selin seizes Garden City and North America, killing many of the elites (including Black’s legitimate family). He crosses the Atlantic, defeats a third pretender in Europe, overruns Istanbul (which apparently had not been given back its correct name), and moves toward western Anatolia, where he expects to defeat Black with his larger army. But through superior tactics and luck, Black unexpectedly defeats Selin’s army near Nicaea, in Bithynia (where Pliny the Younger was governor, once upon a time). Selin barely escapes and flees back to North America, and for a moment, Black contemplates that he really could be Emperor.
But even in the few months since Black returned to Earth, the technology collapse has accelerated. Flying machines, satellite communication, and advanced weapons have all failed. Selin travels back to North America by sail. Black realizes that Selin will rule North America for a time, but not for long, and his reach will not extend outside that continent, because it is no longer physically possible. Therefore, he hatches a new plan, for himself and his polyglot army, few of whom are full-blooded Pan-Polarian, and many of whom have never seen North America and do not speak its languages. “I propose we cross into Europe and begin the world anew. That land was the home to many of your ancestors. The new diseases have depopulated many areas and left the land open for settlement by new pioneers. . . . In Europe, you will be build a new nation and I will grow old. The Empire will pass away, and in a thousand years your descendants will read of it in a language that does not yet exist, and they will wander if these things really were. And even if they think the story of our age is no more real than the tales of Camelot and Troy, those in ages hence will know who among us were villains and those who were loyal to the things they held dear.”
Justa and her father settle in Amsterdam, once again becoming relevant in an age of trade conducted by wind-driven ship. Within a few years, the Empire collapses wholly, under even worse and less competent emperors, analogs of men such as Heliogabalus. The last emperor “had reigned for only two years when the people native to the capital and to Mexico itself sacked the city and renamed it Mexico City.” North America fragments into statelets and anarchy. In her new home, Justa marries a local man, and her father dies peacefully in their garden. The book ends thirty years later, in 2323, with Justa pouring coffee for a Spanish trader, and musing to him about her already semi-legendary father. “General Black was a mixture of good and bad, as all men are. In him the good far outweighed the bad. He was also the last of his kind.”
The Pan-Polarian Empire dies because it has reached its natural end. This is no surprise, of course—every empire that has ever existed has died. For that matter, every polity before those extant at this moment has died, and if it is not conquered from outside, every polity dies in a way similar to the death of an empire, through internal decay followed by dissolution. There is no didacticism in this book, but what Judson portrays with his vivid story is an empire dying for three reasons—the end of virtue, especially of the ruling class; fragility resulting from complexity; and the collapse of Pan-Polarian vigor and will under the pressure of alien migrants, who erode the bonds of trust that characterized the empire at its height. The same three failures characterize every empire at the end. True, each dies a little bit differently and for somewhat varied ancillary reasons. Did the Roman Empire fragment, in part, because its city residents were poisoned by lead water pipes? Perhaps, but the essential causes are always these three, and incidentals are, well, incidentals.
As to the first, this is obvious and does not need further discussion. All history points to the erosion of virtue, meaning adherence to the moral beliefs and hard, self-limiting practices beneficial to the collective that always characterize the early period of any successful society or empire, as the primary internal destructor of nations, civilizations, and empires. Renewal of that virtue, at least without upheaval that makes the polity unrecognizable, has never happened. And the primary driver of failing virtue is wealth, with the caveat that it is rarely when the peak of wealth is reached that an empire crumbles, despite the corrosive effect on virtue. Rather, it is the falling backward, the shrinking of the pie (and the inevitable plugging of the holes with debt and a devalued currency), that accelerates fragmentation.
As to the second, it is well covered by Joseph Tainter in his famous The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complexity, requiring ever-more-baroque and expensive repair to maintain, always results in fragility. Complex societies are less resilient societies. Worse, this effect is today (and in this book) exacerbated by complexity’s handmaiden, technology. High technology, a new thing on the Earth, both gives and takes away. It allows accomplishment and ease, but it also heightens complexity. Moreover, the higher it is, the more likely that catastrophic acceleration of an empire’s end will result from engineered weapons, such as Judson’s nanomachine plague. I have long said that technology will accelerate our own collapse—as we fall, the ground will come up much faster than it did for the Romans. What took their empire hundreds of years will likely take us only a handful, something Judson deftly portrays.
I see no way to avoid this problem; it is what it is. We cannot turn off technology, or the drive to master and extend it. It also seems very likely that technology always exacerbates the decline of virtue, by atomizing society. It is even possible, counterintuitively, that technology may make any future successful polity or empire impossible, by layering the defects of liquid modernity over everyone everywhere, preventing any accumulation of a critical mass of men and women who can form a new virtuous, high-trust society. Along the same lines, The Martian General’s Daughter also implicitly illustrates another concern of mine—that any future society, if our civilizations fall entirely, will forever be unable to reach the heights we reached, much less advance beyond, because we have already stripped from the globe’s surface all sources of energy, as well as metals and minerals, which can be extracted without already having advanced technology. Any successors rebuilding, if they fall low enough first, will likely be unable to make forward progress; think of nineteenth-century America, but forever limited to wood and coal.
As to the third, a constant theme throughout the book, again showing Judson’s prescience, is the effect of mass immigration on the Empire, leading to ethnic dilution of the Pan-Polarians. The feet of clay of all empires has always been such dilution; the Carthaginians, for example, were ultimately defeated by the Romans because they did not breed natives and therefore turned to massive use of unreliable mercenaries. Justa herself more than once remarks on her own swarthiness compared to that of her father, the result of her nameless mother being Syrian. Black’s army is composed of aliens or half-bloods, speaking many different languages. This seems to be the typical end point of decaying empires; it was true not only in Rome, but among the Habsburgs, and it is increasingly true in the American military, though hard statistics are impossible to obtain. But, for example, videos circulate of American enlisted men speaking Mandarin to each other, and the Regime has openly floated the idea of granting rapid citizenship to any alien who will serve the American Empire, given that Americans, for very good reason, have less and less interest in joining the military.
However, the question of mass immigration and empire is much broader than what types of men compose an empire’s military. All of the Pan-Polarian Empire, at least the cities, is overrun with migrants, mostly living off the dole or earning money through small trade and the market in vice. Their presence erodes and ultimately destroys all social cohesion. “Every day on the streets there was some sort of native holiday; there were long processions and the din of trumpets and drums. No one, however, could explain to Father what was being celebrated.” When the crisis comes, the Pan-Polarians, from the highest citizen to the lowest, have nothing left in the tank. They cannot act together, and so they all fall together.
We, of course, face all three of these problems. There is little more to say on the first two, so let’s focus on the third. A few weeks ago, the political class of our nation was roiled by arguments centered around the migrants who have similarly flooded America for decades, with vast increases over the past four years. In the past, such arguments have been confined to the Right ghetto, and have had no impact whatsoever on national policy. But in these strange new days, as Donald Trump takes office, having in large part won because of American opposition to this migration, the argument immediately involved the highest levels of power.
Some maintain that America should welcome migrants, the more the better. Their core argument is that it increases GDP, though they cast this aim in sonorous phrases such as “growing America” and “making America #1.” Leaving aside that migrants are a net drain, not a net benefit, on national economic product, those phrases conceal that the real aim of these demands is that the American Empire never contract, never be anything but an empire. With Americans failing to have enough children, if there are no immigrants the empire cannot be maintained—not so much for lack of people, though that as well, but for lack of dynamism, as the society becomes focused around the old (exacerbated by our society also having become dominated by women and their ways, which should never be allowed to influence high politics, another unique modern circumstance very negative for an empire). True, migrants will eventually destroy any empire, but admitting them will probably allow ours to stagger forward for some decades, as it rots from within. If America simply abandoned its imperial ambitions, and a legitimate and competent ruling class focused on rebuilding America, perhaps expanded to include Canada, mass immigration of Morlock-level migrants, which is what we are getting, would immediately lose any claim to necessity.
Thus, those opposed to admitting migrants, whether or not they acknowledge or realize it, are arguing that America should abandon its empire and instead attempt to recapture its existence as a nation. Bound up with this goal is a rejection of the reason America even has an empire, something that only came about recently, after World War II. America is different from past empires in that it has never sought to directly conquer and rule other nations. Thus, for the most part it fails to extract value from other nations in the same way as past empires, although our hegemonic position allows us to engage in economic behavior otherwise impossible. Rather, our empire’s core aim is spreading an ideology. In the early years of our empire, the 1940s and 1950s, this ideology did not seem excessively pernicious, though perhaps even then it was. But today, the American Empire, controlled by our Regime (if Trump cannot break that control), is exclusively devoted to spreading, by any means necessary, globohomo—the aptly-named imperial manifestation of the ideology of the Left, consisting of emancipation from any unchosen bond along with forced egalitarianism.
Thus, unlike past empires, the presence of migrants in America is driven not by conquest and subsequent movement within the empire itself. Rather, the original aim was to admit migrants into the homeland for economic reasons, to drive native wages down and permit the wealthy to become wealthier, a reason which still holds to this day. But this goal dovetails with a second goal that dare not speak its name—the aim of deliberately destroying not only the political influence, but the societies, families, and lives, of heritage Americans outside the ruling class. This is done, and has been done since the 1965 Hart-Celler Act changed immigration policy to prioritize admitting those incompatible with America, in order that the ruling classes, the Regime, may more easily accomplish their ideological goal, and make globohomo truly global. Naturally, this is a short-term strategy that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, but as with all ideologues, our rulers are blinded to this reality. Rejecting further migrants, and removing those already within our borders, is therefore necessarily endorsing the end of American empire, at least as currently constituted.
All this is really dancing around a deeper question, however. Can American continue as an empire even if we wish? The answer is obviously “No.” We show, either in advanced form or nascent form, all the signs of the end of empire. It is possible the ascension of Trump, and decisive action by him, may slow this process and allow a form of imperial stasis for a time; there is almost zero chance imperial decline will be reversed. Even if the will were there, and virtue somehow restored (which would necessarily result in an explosion of children born to actual Americans), the structural hole into which we have dug ourselves, with imperial overreach, massive corruption, and debt, dictates that our empire will end, and likely soon.
If the American empire is necessarily coming to an end, can we avoid the fate of the Pan-Polarians? Probably not, but there has always been something unique about the United States. After all, we are gifted with North America, uniquely self-sufficient and defensible. No external actor threatens us, or has ever threatened us. None is likely to, or at least no such threat is perceptible. Could we choose to become a nation again, to return to the American social organization of, say, the early twentieth century? This need not mean the end of High America; a nation can accomplish as much as an empire, perhaps more—including going to Mars.
There is some slight historical precedent for such a thing. A few weeks ago, there was an interesting colloquy on X, between techno-optimist Balaji Srinivasan and entrepreneur Nate Fischer, centering around immigration, but also touching on larger issues. Srinivasan highlighted the choice between empire and nation, and pointed out that the Russians had, in the fall of Communism, traded an empire for a regained nation, although at the cost of tremendous suffering for two decades. He suggested that a similar path might be followed by America, resulting in some interesting analysis (hobbled, as always on X, by the transitory and short-form nature of discussion). This occasioned thoughts from Fischer, tied to discussions he has had with others, such as the pseudonymous Kruptos, about the question of downscaling an empire. I will not repeat the discussion here, but it is worth reading.
The key question, obviously, is what a nation is. Many commentators on the Right have, as part of the recent brouhaha over immigration, ably addressed this question, and I will not attempt a separate complete analysis here. We can reject out of hand, however, the idea that the American nation is purely propositional, that anyone who wants to be an American can be an American. This myth has been propagated for decades by a coalition of dubious characters, including a ruling class desirous of destroying the cohesion of heritage America, individuals and groups fearful of nationalism and its effect on their international political goals, and stupid so-called conservatives afraid of being called names, such as that ur-Judas of the Right, William F. Buckley. We can similarly reject that Americans are anyone born here, despite the mis-reading of our Constitution that has, very destructively, given us so-called birthright citizenship, the ending of which must be a priority for Trump if his administration is to succeed.
Rather, a nation is a people with a common history, culture (meaning, ultimately, language, customs, and religion), and, yes, ethnicity, or at least domination by a single ethnic group. Some admixture in the latter is acceptable without destruction, and a strong culture has always absorbed some outsiders. The key word there is “absorbed”; any outsider must conform to the culture, and never be permitted to demand the culture conform to him. By this definition, America still is a nation, but it is encrusted, as a long-journey ship is with barnacles, with the detritus of empire. Can our nation then be extracted from the empire which it birthed, when that empire ends?
It could not without great turmoil and cost. But let’s explore, as a thought experiment, how it could be done. All this is a pipe dream, very unlikely to happen (although certainly events of similar magnitude have indeed happened many times in history, including all throughout the twentieth century). It could not be done within the current American political frame, certainly, which is a pseudo-democratic, really Left-oligarchic, frame. It could only be done by a leader given the authority of a Caesar, and with the popular support of a Caesar.
First, he would strip all power from “Americans” who oppose necessary action, or who have acted against the interests of America in recent decades—a process I shorten to “confiscation, lustration, and rustication.” Thus, every cent of wealth of George Soros (and his heirs), Nancy Pelosi, Dan Crenshaw, Michael Bloomberg, and innumerable other wealthy and powerful people would be seized (and distributed to supporters of the new order). Those same people would be permanently forced from political life and made to live in seclusion (although quite a few would be tried and judged for their crimes first). In other words, he would crush potential centers of opposition.
Second, he would end the American empire, which could be done simply enough by an exercise of will. He would summarily close every overseas American military base and remove all our soldiers from outside our actual possessions. He would end all our involvement in any foreign war or dispute. America would cease making any demands on other nations, including that they act in any particular way in their external relations, and even more in their internal relations, which are zero concern of ours. His only demand would be that they not directly attack us or our citizens.
Third, he would expel the vast majority of those in our country deemed not be Americans, except if it were decided by heritage Americans that the presence of a small percentage of such people, determined on a case-by-case basis, benefitted Americans. Naturally, this would require a definition of “American,” a tricky business. But a good place to start would be that anyone who, or whose ancestors, received citizenship after 1965 would be examined for compatibility with America, and have his citizenship stripped if found to be incompatible, based on his actions in this country. Many might be allowed to continue living here we decide they benefit America; others would be returned to their country of origin, or their ancestors’ country of origin, either by incentive or by force.
These three steps would be the only political steps necessary to place America on the path to, possibly, becoming a nation again (though changes outside of politics would also be necessary, most of all some type of religious revival, both to renew virtue and to bind the citizenry together). The dislocations caused by this process would be immense, and almost certainly involve violence. But they would both be completely survivable, and effective. To reach this point, some crisis of great magnitude would first be necessary to shake up our political system—economic collapse, actual pandemic, asteroid strike, or some such. This seems unlikely, but that is merely normalcy bias. History teaches us that sooner or later some such crisis will arrive, and everything will be determined by the response, and most of all by the actions of great men, good or bad, who then emerge from the mist.
No matter what we do, however, someday there will no longer be an American empire, and there will no longer be an America. That much is certain. A betting man would say both events will happen sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, thinking now about what comes next may make passing through tomorrow’s bottleneck easier, and may make what comes thereafter better. Maybe even great, if we play our cards right.
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