The US has so much economic and military power that it’s not a mistake to view it as akin to Tolkien’s Ring of Power. And… that has uncomfortable implications. But seriously - did we think that we could build such a powerful thing, and then not have cruel people try to take it for themselves? +
Well Gollum's got the ring right now, and he's doing his little dance on the edge of Orodruin... The GOP has done more to undermine the power of the United States than any of us realize yet. They wanted the ring, but we never had the ring - we had moral standing and economic power.
So apt. When a nation gains GHODlike powers over life and death with the flick of a switch, the malevolent will hone in on it like iron to a lodestone.
Is there anyone who, in having control of it, will not then misuse it? Whether as a Sauron, an Isildur, a corrupted Gandalf, or a Dark Galadriel, “you cannot wield it. None of us can.” Even Frodo was corrupted in the end. +
The United States is too powerful a country to be invaded. But it’s also too powerful a thing for those who seek power to not want to claim it for their own. Unfortunately, our democracy gave them the ability to do exactly that. +
The solution, of course, is uncomfortable: we need to divest of our power. I don’t know what that looks like, but it is the strongest argument I’ve heard for anarchism (the kind @billieiswriting.bsky.social and @dr-maeforrest.bsky.social talk about, not the pop culture chaos one). +
The problem is that, like Frodo, I’m not sure we know the way. Is it possible to do this work without needing to possess the ring and thus risking (or even ensuring) one’s own corruption? Or is there a way to create the right circumstances by which a ring-bearer would actually go through with it? +
I honestly don’t know the answers to this. But it’s something I think a lot about. The US is simply too powerful to not have authoritarians constantly attempting to take control of it, and it’s not built in a way that can reliably hold them off.
I think this is the point behind the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.
That and the absolute necessity of diverse people, languages, and cultures. Monocultures kill off everything else and then die themselves from the lack of diversity.
