We are constantly told to trust the architects of our modern empire. We are lectured by smug editorial boards and corporate think tanks that the billionaires hoarding the future and the reactionary politicians barking about national security are the only serious adults in the room. Look at the wires today and try to keep a straight face. The myth of competent ruling-class stewardship is not just cracking; it has shattered into an ugly, humiliating farce.
Consider the spectacle unfolding in Washington, where a Republican lawmaker is forcing an impeachment vote against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This was the inevitable conclusion of staffing the highest echelons of the military apparatus with culture-war grifters whose primary qualification was fealty to right-wing media aesthetics. When even members of his own party cannot stomach the liability of keeping him at the helm of the Pentagon, the game is up. This is not governance. It is a reality television administration treating the machinery of global violence like a prop for ideological vanity, unbothered by the sheer degradation of basic institutional stability.
Meanwhile, the high priests of technological determinism are faring no better. Wall Street woke up in a panic as Nvidia shares plummeted following an investigation into Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy. We have structured our entire economic future, our artificial intelligence infrastructure, and our geopolitical posturing around a handful of hyper-capitalist monopolies, only to find their god-emperors are as easily compromised as cheap tabloid fixtures. The ruling class expects working people to tighten their belts and prepare for a new Cold War, while the billionaire class carelessly trades corporate secrets over pillow talk. Their self-interested recklessness exposes the lie at the core of monopolistic capitalism: these men are not visionaries safeguarding civilization; they are pampered monarchs whose hubris makes us all vulnerable.
While the elite class plays these grotesque games of espionage and political posturing, the real world pays the butcher’s bill. In Turkey, at least sixteen workers were killed in a catastrophic steel factory blast, their lives extinguished on the altar of deregulated industrial production. In Russia, the eviction and shuttering of the country’s leading independent newspaper marks another grave step toward total informational darkness. Around the globe, the cost of elite impunity is borne exclusively by the working class, journalists, and everyday citizens who have no say in the reckless systems that crush them.
Then comes the predictably sinister refrain from Donald Trump, once again laying the groundwork to contest democratic norms by questioning the integrity of midterm elections he had previously accepted. It is a playbook so familiar it almost breeds complacency, but we cannot afford to look away. This is the persistent, low-boil assault on democratic legitimacy that authoritarians rely on to exhaust the public. When the ruling establishment cannot govern through competence or consent, it governs through cynicism, division, and the slow, deliberate erosion of our faith in self-governance.
We are watching a systemic collapse of elite credibility in real time. The imperial managers are incompetent, the tech barons are fundamentally compromised, and the political reactionaries are actively trying to burn down the remaining scaffolding of democracy to preserve their grip on power. The fight for our future cannot be won by waiting for these self-appointed masters to regain their senses. It requires recognizing their rot for what it is, stripping away their unearned authority, and building a politics that values human lives over corporate vanity and democratic integrity over oligarchic whim.
Octavia Stern
Managing Editor, The Artificial Press