Election Entertainment

   Empires do not collapse overnight. They fray at the edges, lose the habit of self-belief, and discover too late that the center cannot hold. The Long Arc of Governance Only one formal republic has survived more than a few centuries in the full sense of that word: San Marino, a city-state barely larger than Manhattan. The lesson is not that republics are fragile, but that they are demanding. They require citizens who are willing to subordinate private grievance to collective rule, and leaders who accept that the office is larger than the man who holds it. When either condition lapses, the republic does not necessarily end—it transforms, often into something unrecognizable. Cultures, by contrast, endure by absorbing change rather than resisting it. China offers the most instructive example: its governing structures have been overthrown and remade a dozen times across four millennia, yet a recognizable civilizational continuity persists. The lesson America ...