It is imperative that we come to terms with an increasingly glaring fact: the idea of America is dead. America as a global archetype of leadership is in decline. America’s crisis is not geopolitical but existential. The images of militarized police firing tear gas canisters evoke the image of power as violence. That is, without doubt, a form of power that we as Muslims are all too familiar with. There is, however, a more latent form of power that evades our gaze: it is the management of dissent. Power mediates dissent by “managing the threshold” through future-making, which in turn includes excluding other futures. This occurs when the horizon becomes absolute, the end of time as we know it, and the norm and natural order-of-things. It is the Real. It thrives not on an engineered “collective history” but rather on forgetting that the order is not an absolute and closed reality but a situation. It is to forget that the order and ‘eternal present’ is not natural but rather the expression of a will-to-power created not in the image of God but in the image of the powerful.
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