What is breaking in America is not just the balance between republic and oligarchy. What is breaking is the unity of the state itself.

One body remains public, electoral, constitutional, moralizing, televisual. It asks for votes, performs accountability, speaks in the name of citizens, and distributes the sweet rituals of participation. The other body is real: capitalized, securitized, infrastructural, dynastic, and increasingly insulated from control. The first campaigns. The second decides. The first promises representation. The second manages continuity of rule.

That is why the standard language of “money in politics” is now far too weak. This is no longer just influence. It is capture at the depth of the state. Capital, security, technology, donor networks, media power, family access, and war-making capacity have fused so tightly that the public surface of the republic increasingly looks like a façade for the networks that actually steer it.

The citizen is therefore handed a consumer version of the republic. Elections, campaigns, patriotic emotion, therapeutic slogans, morality plays about saving civilization, war packaged as responsibility. A political ice-cream machine: it produces flavors of participation, the illusion of agency, and a sweet surface of legitimacy. The title is not only metaphorical. Recent reporting on a Pentagon end-of-year spending spree under Pete Hegseth included roughly $124,000 for ice-cream machines, alongside other extravagances funded by taxpayers. The republic dispenses treats on the surface while the war core consolidates beneath it. 

This is why the current march toward a wider conflict with Iran cannot be read as a simple return of old American imperial seriousness. It looks instead like a degraded form of power that has lost even the discipline of its own justifications. The old empire at least staged a language of responsibility. The new one increasingly performs only proximity to the leader, branding, and a crude readiness for force.

Reports about the role of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner matter for precisely that reason. Responsible Statecraft reported that they told the White House Iran was using talks to buy time, that Trump publicly said they helped persuade him to go to war, and that experts and foreign officials challenged both their grasp of technical issues and the accuracy of key claims they relayed.  This is not interesting because it reveals one more group of hawks. It is interesting because it suggests something worse: the road to war may have been shaped by people without the competence required to understand the negotiations they were helping conduct or interpret.

That kind of incompetence is still discussed far too rarely. When a doctor ignores clinical expertise, we call it dangerous. When an engineer ignores calculation, we call it a disaster in the making. But when rulers sideline military........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)