How Will Future Historians Describe Our Fake Bible Verses & the Rest of Marx Brothers-Level Governance?: Thing Worth Noting
“Morning Joe” Does the SecDef Hegseth sacred Quentin Tarantino thing properly, and I reflect on what insights we can derive from it…
Revisiting Peter Hegseth from Thursday: This is the appropriate format for the modern post-literate age:
<https://youtu.be/n9u_LlJOpYg?si=OPGZzd5KNH3MjLn6&t=126>
Well done, Morning Joe!
Well, I suppose that that this “Ezekiel 25:17” from Trump acolyte cabinet member Peter Hegseth is both worse and better than “Straits of Vermouth” from Trump acolyte cabinet member Scott Bessent. But it is worth noting that we have gone far beyond chaos-monkey-land now: this is Marx Brothers quality governance:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT-sy0aLg> <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-trump-tanakhthat-is-the-law-the> <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>
I was going to write “words fail me”. However, it turns out they do not:
If you ran the Julio-Claudian Roman imperial dynasty in its decline as a cable show, gave Nero a Twitter account, and let Petronius buy the Praetorian Guard’s IT department, you would get something like the United States in 2026.
How will some future Suetonius—call him “Suetonius II: This Time It’s Digital”—going to explain to his readers the state of our current American “governance”? A daily farce of performative cruelty, ostentatious ignorance, and improvisational authoritarianism conducted on live television and whatever replaces the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Take Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars off the shelf and skim the chapters on Claudius and Nero. I at least am struck by how much both the public and the inner workings of the Roman imperial court fell like a grotesque parody of rule: a place where institutions existed, in some sense, and where decisions were indeed made, but always under the shadow of one man’s obsessions, one family’s feuds, and one faction’s hysterical fear that if they are not on top they will be devoured. Now the empire as a whole functions: the grain ships arrive, the aquaducts flow, the army guards and maneuvers, taxes are collected, local élites obey the provincial governors. But at the top—things are very weird and very dangerous indeed.
Our own moment, I think, is going to look, to future historians, like an American attempt to run a 21st–century hyperpower as if it were a cable-television version of that same imperial court, with Fox News and FaceBook algorithms playing the role of the Praetorian Guard, and Elon Musk playing a truly bizarre role as a TechnoPetronius.
Suetonius tries. Suetonius, after all, does not just say: “Nero was crazy, lol.” He catalogs, meticulously, what he believes to have been the case about the habits of mind and the structures of power that made Nero’s madness politically consequential: the flatterers, the fear, the court rituals that redefined reality for everyone who wanted to keep their head attached to their neck. Our future chronicler will ask: what systems of media, patronage, and partisan identity made it possible—indeed, made it natural—for a large chunk of the American elite to treat a Tarantino monologue as sacred scripture ,and a reality–television demagogue as God’s anointed messiah?
They will point, I think, to at least three overlapping features of our moment.
Te hollowing-out of institutional seriousness. Claudius was, to Suetonius, the learned fool: a man who had read all the books but could not translate his learning into stable governance, who oscillated between pedantic fussiness and pathetic credulity. Contemporary cabinet secretaries, judges, columnists, and university presidents who still know how things ought to work find themselves presiding over institutions whose formal procedures remain intact, but whose substantive authority has been eaten away by a political movement that treats every norm as an obstacle to loyalty and every constraint as an affront to sovereignty.
The emergence of a Nero-like politics of spectacle: governance as theater, with cruelty as the principal special effect. Nero ran the Roman state as a one-man show, and insisted that people treat his musical artistry as if he were Taylor Swift. Our present leader and his circle are similar: aiming for the right clip for the evening lineup, the right humiliation of enemies, the right image of power deployed without apology, and the right claque applauding it all as genius. The Tarantino-prayer episode fits neatly here. It is not about theology; it is about vibes—fusing pop culture, militarism, and pseudo-Christian nationalism into a single emotionally satisfying tableau in which we are righteous and they are vermin, and God is on the side of our airstrikes.
The corrosion of the informational environment. Suetonius wrote for an audience that understood that he was relaying rumor, gossip, and imperial propaganda. Our future historian will write about a society in which the filtering goes beyond that to a machine–learning–amplified feed of outrage, grievance, and fantasy, trained to maximize time-on-site and ad impressions. FaceBook, X, and company have turned and are turning mental “system prompts”, day after day, to expect betrayal by shadowy elites, invasion by sinister others, and redemption by a single strongman. Then of course a fake Bible verse from a gangster movie feels more “true” than anything in the actual text. It is emotionally on–model with respect to the embeddings vector space inside their heads.
Suetonius II might well ultimately cast this as a hybrid of Claudius and Nero: Claudius in the sense of institutional senescence and elite cowardice—people who knew better, but did not act as if they knew better—and Nero in the sense of a politics that made spectacle and vengeance the core of the regime’s legitimacy. The governing coalition could not pass a budget on time; it could, however, stage a prayer service in which the Pentagon was momentarily recast as the pulp-fiction throne of a God whose “call sign is Sandy 1”.
The remarkable thing is not that such a régime emerged—history is littered with such dysfunctional courst—but that it emerged in a polity that had, for two centuries, prided itself on being the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire.
And, if he is honest, he will also note that this was not done to Americans by some external invader but was done by right-wing Americans, to themselves and to the rest of us, for reasons that remain incomprehensible to me.