Twenty-five years after 9/11, the anniversary passed with almost no public ceremony of belief. Historian Daniel Bessner, in an excerpt from his new book Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century, reads that quiet as evidence of something larger: Americans have stopped believing in the empire, and still cannot imagine it ending.

His concept, built on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, names that failure exactly — it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of US empire. Why the empire feels permanent:

  • Alienation, not enthusiasm, sustains it. “We feel as though it’s outside our control even as we deploy its influence, money, and weapons abroad. The apparently obdurate character of our empire is the primary reason Americans accept it.”
  • Two conditions produced imperialist realism: the end of mass politics, and the failure of the global war on terror.
  • The Lippmann–Dewey debate is the hinge. Dewey’s faith that an educated public could govern itself initially won; the Great Depression (bank runs, labor militancy, “irrational” crowds) and the rise of Nazism — read as proof that masses can be duped into dictatorship — flipped elite opinion to Lippmann’s contempt.
  • Containment ran in two directions. Containing the Soviet Union abroad was paired with containing the American public at home, institutionalized in the NSC, the CIA, the Pentagon, and parastatal research outfits like RAND.
  • Congress has been a bystander for eighty years. The last declared war was June 4, 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. Between 1946 and 2019 the US intervened abroad with the threat, display, or use of force 216 times (Toft and Kushi).
  • Policy follows the wealthy. Gilens and Page found economic elites and business groups have substantial independent influence on US policy, while average citizens and mass groups have “little or no independent influence.”
  • The GWOT ledger: roughly $8 trillion, 38 million people displaced, at least 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6–3.8 million indirect, over 7,000 US troops killed — plus police militarization, polarization, and eroded civil liberties at home.
  • The hope was real, which is why the failure cut deep. In January 2002, 93 percent of Americans backed sending forces to Afghanistan and 66 percent believed the US was winning the war on terror.

The empire’s durability, on this account, is not a fact about its strength. It is a fact about estrangement — a population that does not consent so much as stop contesting, because contesting appears futile.

Which is why Bessner’s conclusion is an opening rather than a lament. Declining imperial zeal is not merely decay; it is the precondition for ending the world 9/11 created. That requires rebuilding something the last eighty years deliberately dismantled: a mass public with the standing to shape foreign policy. The empire looks immovable until enough people can picture the alternative.