Year Zero: The Long Arc of the Lone Assassin

Year Zero: The Long Arc of the Lone Assassin

The years between 2015 and 2025 will be remembered, if remembered honestly, as a season of accelerating fracture in American life. On the surface, these were years of election cycles, culture wars, pandemics, and protests. Beneath the surface, however, they marked a deeper break: a rising ideology of violent hatred, especially directed toward Christians, conservatives, Donald Trump, and his supporters, coupled with a broader collapse of shared civic norms. Violence no longer lurked at the margins of society; it spilled into the streets, onto college campuses, into houses of worship, and across the digital forums where Americans once conversed.

In those same years, the rhetoric of annihilation—calls to “punch a Nazi,” to “deplatform” opponents, to treat half the country not as citizens but as enemies—became normalized. The result was the decomposition of tradition, not just in politics but in daily life. Trust in elections, courts, schools, even in neighbors, gave way to suspicion. Stasis, Thucydides’ ancient word for internal war, returned as the leitmotif of the republic. And behind the surface disorder loomed a familiar structure: the raising of the price of sovereignty, the disciplining of nations and peoples into compliance by the ever-present specter of violence, whether physical or symbolic.

It is here that our thesis of Derailment takes shape. Across two centuries, every attempt to anchor the American System—or its analogues abroad—in production-first sovereignty has been interrupted, aborted, or reversed by violence or the optics of violence. From Hamilton’s pistol duel in 1804, to Lincoln’s murder in 1865, to the cascade of assassinations in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the pattern repeats: when a nation builds, the assassin intervenes; when sovereignty rises, chaos re-prices it as unthinkable.