The Lamps Are Going Out Around Us
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
It All Falls Apart
by William Kristol
Yesterday afternoon, having dispatched his regular mid-day newsletter, my friend and colleague Jonathan Last was moved—compelled, I think—to write a second, emergency newsletter. His eloquent and powerful missive arrived in our inboxes around 6:30 p.m. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now .
The heart of Jonathan’s argument is that yesterday, April 3, 2025, was the day that, in his words, “The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana , ended.”
We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
It was almost 111 years earlier, on August 3, 1914, that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stood with a friend at dusk at a window of his room in the Foreign Office, looking out across St. James’s Park. Seeing the first lights being turned on along the Mall, Grey famously remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The Liberal statesman was right. World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust—these all followed in the space of three decades. The lamps were not to be lit again in Grey’s lifetime. A century of relative stability and peace, of progress and prosperity, was followed by thirty years of chaos and war, of darkness and misery.
Midway through this terrible period, the imprisoned Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci—a very different man from Grey, but as perceptive in his own way—is said to have remarked, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
And so it was.
And yet. That time of monsters was succeeded by another stretch—an 80-year-long stretch—in which the forces of civilization were once again mostly in control. The United States picked up the baton of liberalism and leadership from Britain.
Many of us have had the good fortune to live for most of our lifetimes in a world more like the one Grey looked back on in 1914 than the one Gramsci experienced in the 1930s.
But now a new time of monsters—of terrible mistakes, monstrous deeds, and disastrous consequences—could well be upon us.
It was difficult for those alive in 1914, having been formed in the relative peace and tranquility of the late 19th century, to even begin to imagine the horrors of the following 30 years. It is difficult for us to imagine today how dangerous a future we are inviting.
Jonathan closes his piece with this observation:
We have a deeply stupid government . . . But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.
I very much want to believe that this terrible judgment is not true. I very much want to believe that the lights have only been temporarily put out. I very much want to believe that we will once again find our way before too much damage is done, before we descend into a time of monsters.
But I very much fear that the lamps are once again going out all around us.
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It is tempting to say this kind of talk is overblown, but does anyone really know?
This uncertainty is what happens when you put a mentally ill demagogue in charge.
"Only the weak will fail"
Donald Trump
April 4 2025
( He was asked about two days of the stock market tanking)
So you disagree with his statement?
He's a psychopath.
Cooke and Michie (2001) proposed a three-factor model of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised which has seen widespread application in other measures (e.g., Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory, Antisocial Process Screening Device ).
Psychopathy - Wikiwand
Interesting,... is there a test for dementia?..
So what?
Why? Would you Pass?
Good seed.