A faint Napoleon errors over Florida. De Santis, grand inquisitor, plucks Excalibur from the lady of the everglades and proclaims himself king. No mouse will muscle him into compassion.

At the return of history, the real splits into two, then into infinities; from the illusion of a shared history, the digital circulation of capital fissures the consciousness of America. Nationalism roars into view clasping an upside down Gadsden flag, salt tears crocodiling into tragedy. Marx didn’t account for the gap, the no-place in-between no-time where a million messiahs haunt. Messianic eras always come with false messiahs, and none better than the libidinal violence of Puritan repression; a Leviathan on a hill has no need to hide.

Hobbes argues that the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short. Without the Leviathan, human beings are vainglorious bandits, like Kuyper’s Jesus proclaiming all things theirs. But what then when the root of the Leviathan is this same self-idolatry? The Puritans invade a shore that is already part of the history of other peoples and establish a covenant with the Roundhead deity. Cromwell’s ghost slides genocidally into Plymouth. In a previous apocalypse, the plague ravaged feudal Europe and collapsed it into a new form, Protestant fences erected on peasant lands. The publics bubbled into the private, one deterritorialized hierarchy kaleidscoping into a reterritorialized machinery, a growling furnace swallowing Eden and transforming it into a world of representations. Saints take up their hammers and deliver the temple from the machines but are soon swallowed by the force of proletariatization.

The new pharaohs, owners of the machines, can soon resist the old Adam, the old Caesaric monster. The English Civil War rearranges the ravaged monarchical order into the new circuitry of capital. Martin Luther privatized God, sublimating her into the self as property, the objectification of value as work and ownership. The Puritan work ethic is a form of idolatry that replaces the mystery of God with the fetish of congealed value – money, capital, land, rent, power. The commodity turns Moloch from a place into a process, corrupting the temple through carbon and steel.

De Santis rides atop an emaciated horse carrying the banner of Ozymandias. Hooves burrow into wet soil, dragging its host into the mud. Long ago capitalism replaced kings with pseudo-kings, a farce in the image of a tragedy, and our Caesars are reality TV stars drunk with the demons of neoliberalism. In the desert of the real, democracy turns into its shadow – nationalism – and appears as a Thermidorian reaction, putting down the supposed “degeneracy” and “excess” of the Jacobins. But, its heart pumps plastic and its Napoleonic pretensions hide an inner emptiness – in the wastes of the old world, the Old Regime frankensteins its own apparatuses into an icon of hollow strength. But, at its core, capital and the state remain cracked, broken, held together by duct tape and crooked nails. If the future appears as a fascist screaming, the past reveals it as a colossal wreck.

Pharaohs of machinery, digital mimicry burning into the human retina, translating abstract intelligence into concrete systems of power, make way for Napoleons of plastic. Capital is a screeching, a grinding of content into form, and just as it devours human communities and labor, it replaces democratic elites with spectacle, with capital in the image of an elite. State capitalism drifts into managerialism and managerialism drifts into the simulacra of a state – the appearance of democratic governance, its hauntings and fissures, obscuring its hollow core, the selling of democracy for scraps. De Santis is a myth, a story told by capital to hide the crumbling of the nation-state and the replacement of community and democracy with a social factory of constant extraction. The age of Caesars is an age without Caesars, a roar of populist hatred being subsumed into the machinery of impersonal domination.