hegemony (pronounced huh-JEM-uh-nee)
Noun
Definition: Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. It’s the whole shebang, the top dog, the undisputed alpha at the geopolitical dog park, King Shit, The Man.  A form of leadership or dominance—usually political, cultural, or ideological—exerted by one entity over others. Not quite empire, not quite dictatorship, but the gravitational center that keeps the rest of the cosmic debris from smashing into each other at escape velocity.

The word slithers in from the ancient Greek hēgemonia, that old noun built on the verb hēgeisthai – to lead, to go first, to boss the line without quite having to shout about it.  Leadership that doesn’t need a megaphone because the weight of the thing just is, the way a big river doesn’t ask permission to carve the valley.  By the 16th century it had hopped languages and started meaning something like preponderance, dominance, the quiet (and not-so-quiet) way one player runs the board while everyone else pretends they’re still in the game.  Not raw conquest – not chains and whips every hour – but the kind of sway where the rules feel natural, the menu is already printed, and dissent starts to sound like bad manners or madness.

Look, let’s just lay the cards out on the felt, shall we?  You’ve got this sprawling, hyper-caffeinated beast called America – a nation stitched together from every conceivable scrap of humanity, running on a high-octant mix of ambition and refined sugar.  And then you have this other, smaller, altogether more ball-less and…fragrant subset of Americans whose entire waking life appears to be a meticulously curated performance of despising the very ground that keeps their Birkenstocks from sinking into the molten core of the earth. 

I am, of course, talking about the ones who spend their days hunched over glowing rectangles, fueled by fair-trade coffee and a sense of cosmic injustice, firing off screeds against the Great Satan U.S.A.  They’re the professional dissenters, the ones whose faces contort in agony if you suggest maybe, just maybe, the world needs a heavyweight in the ring to keep the whole thing from devolving into a no-holds barred cage match.  Their anti-Americanism is so reflexive, so deeply ingrained, it feels less like a political stance and more like a congenital condition.  It’s as if they believe their performative self-loathing will somehow absolve them of the sin of being born into the most powerful nation history has ever coughed up.  And it’s really embarrassing. 

These are the same folks who’d likely have decried Manifest Destiny not for its brutal realities but for its sheer lack of an ironic, self-aware hashtag.  They wring their hands and tear their hemp garments over the idea of American hegemony, apparently preferring a global free-for-all where any thug with a flag and a few thousand rifles can carve out a fiefdom built on bones and fear.  What, precisely, is the alternative they’re whiteboarding in their co-op meetings?  A world run by committee?  A planet where Russia, China, and a handful of rogue states get to hash things out over a game of Risk, with actual cities as the playing pieces?  It’s a stunningly naïve, almost childlike fantasy – the political equivalent of believing that if you just wish hard enough, the monsters under the bed will vanish.  They can’t stomach the imperfect, messy, and often brutal reality that someone has to be the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the valley.  They’d rather burn the whole valley down than admit it. 

What the hippies and fat liberal white women fail to understand is that the necessity of American hegemony isn’t some chest-thumping patriotic hymn; it’s colder arithmetic.  Without that preponderance – without the U.S. holding the sea lanes open, underwriting the global trading system, deterring the kind of multipolar pile-on that turns every border into a shooting gallery, and yes, occasionally reminding various aspiring regional powers that there are still adults in the room – the world doesn’t become some gentle multi-polar salon of equals.  It becomes the 1930s on meth: spheres of influence arm-wrestling with nukes, trade routes choked, supply chains collapsing into nationalist hoarding, proxy wars metastasizing because no one has the sheer testicular weight to say enough. 

I think the anti-Americans, those domestic dissenters who can’t stomach the idea, who gag at the mere mention that the republic they live in happens to be the one whose shadow falls the longest, are simply incapable of comprehending a realistic worldview.  So they feel compelled to spend their days in a kind of perpetual, high-decibel pantomime of resistance, “fighting” the hegemony as though it were a personal insult delivered by a smug uncle at Thanksgiving.  They march, they tweet, they riot, they convene panels titled “Decolonizing the American Gaze” or whatever, they burn energy like it’s infinite and cheap, mostly on symbolic gestures that change exactly nothing except the blood pressure of the participants.  It’s exhausting just to watch: the endless prosecutorial zeal, the certainty that every McDonald’s or Marvel movie is a cultural war crime, the silly conviction that if only the United States would shrink back into its pre-1898 borders and mind its own damn business, that the rest of humanity would spontaneously break into Kumbaya and equitable carbon credits.

It’s weird.  The confusion I feel, the real gut-churning bewilderment, is why so many of these Americans – born into the most materially abundant, personally free society to ever exist – seem hell-bent on treating their own country’s dominance as an original sin that must be ritually scourged.  They just wasted four years in this posture of anguished refusal, literally cheering on American retreat.  Meanwhile the world keeps turning, and the vacuum left by American retreat doesn’t fill with justice or equity; it fills with whoever shows up with the biggest battalions and the least scruple. 

So yes, hegemony.  Sexy word, older than sin, and necessary in the way gravity is necessary.  You can hate the pull all you want; it still keeps you from floating off into the void.  The ones who waste their lives trying to cut the cord are left clutching at air, shouting at clouds, while the rest of us keep shouldering the weight because the alternative is worse, and we know it.

N.P.: “It’s A Sin” – Ghost