Election Entertainment

Power, Topology, the Dawn of AI and the End of Shared Governance, 2025–2028 There is a scene that recurs in the political science literature on regime change, drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville , from Crane Brinton , from Juan Linz : the moment when the erosion of norms, which has proceeded for years beneath the surface of institutional life, breaks through. It does not announce itself. The courts still meet. The legislature still convenes. The flag still flies. But the animating logic that gave those institutions their authority — the shared agreement that the rules apply to everyone, that outcomes must be legitimate even when they are unfavorable, that power is held in trust — has quietly departed. What remains is the scaffolding of a republic inhabited by the logic of something else. We are in that scene now. And the question for those who study how power actually operates — not as civics-class abstraction but as a lived social force — is not whether something fundamental has ...