On a threatening June evening, America’s army turned 250 and put on a show that revealed more than it intended.

Tanks and missile carriers rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. Fighter jets flew over the Capitol dome. The President, visibly aged, saluted the display, a general on each side.

Stewart Sweeney

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans from Boston to Berkeley marched under banners that read: “No Kings.” They marched not just at a man, but at what the country has become – and what it might yet be. The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In the capital, the empty pageantry of a dying empire; across the country, the stirrings of a people who remember America was once a promise, not a parade.

It was a scene from history’s playbook. One thinks of Rome in its final centuries: grand triumphs masking internal decay and external defeat. Or Britain’s Empire, which held onto royal ceremonies and military reviews long after its colonies had won their freedom. Or even the Soviet Union’s parades through Red Square in the 1980s – displays of power as the foundations crumbled beneath them.

What we saw was the manifestation of Antonio Gramsci’s famous phrase: “The old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The parade was one symptom: the outward display of strength hiding inner decay. But the “No Kings” rallies, for all their chaos and diversity, were something else – the early contractions of the new.

Two and a half centuries ago, Americans rose against monarchy. They rose against a king who ruled by decree, deployed troops to suppress dissent, and treated the colonists with contempt. They imagined a republic built on liberty, equality and self-rule.

And yet, today, as the American army turned 250, it was their own leaders who wore the trappings of monarchy: an executive who demands loyalty above the law, a government that turns its power inward against immigrants, workers and critics, a military celebrated not for defending freedom, but for being the state itself.

That this happened on the 250th anniversary should not surprise us. Empires, like people, often cling most tightly to their illusions of power at the moment of their decline. The US-led global order that emerged in 1945 is unravelling: alliances fraying, legitimacy squandered, moral authority abandoned. The liberal internationalism of Roosevelt’s generation, albeit compromised, has given way to militarised transactionalism under Trump. The old myths no longer work; the old mechanisms no longer function.

Experience tells us decline can end in two ways: in the brittle collapse of what was, or in the birth of something better. The choice is not with the rulers who stage their parades, but ultimately with the citizens who march against them.

The “No Kings” rallies, at their best, are tapping into the radical heart of American democracy: the abolitionists who demanded the republic live up to its founding creed, the suffragists who marched for equality, the civil rights workers who faced batons and dogs for justice. They also echoed global struggles: from the independence movements that broke empires to the pro-democracy uprisings that toppled tyrants.

It’s easy — too easy — to mock these gatherings as disorganised or naive. But every movement that changed history began in disarray. The storming of the Bastille was not a tidy affair. The marches on Washington and Selma were chaotic, contested and riven with internal debate. The point is not the perfection of the movement but the direction of its purpose.

The future of America — and of the world order it has dominated for so long — hangs on whether these stirrings can coalesce into a force strong enough to overcome the morbid symptoms of decline. That won’t be easy. The forces of reaction are well armed, well-funded and skilled at wrapping themselves in the symbols of patriotism. The danger is not just in the figure of a Trump or his imitators and followers but in the habits of empire: the reflex to dominate rather than to co-operate, to police rather than to serve, to parade rather than to reflect.

For Australia this is a moment of lesson and choice. For too long our foreign and defence policy has been shaped by Washington’s strategic interests. We have followed its lead, mimicked its illusions and hitched our wagon to its star. But as the old American order disintegrates it’s time to ask: will we cling to the corpse or help bring forth the new?

The 250th anniversary of the US army should remind us no republic is forever, no empire eternal. What matters is not the pomp of the occasion, but the struggle between what dies and what is born. In the end it will be up to the people — not the paraders — to decide what America’s next 250 years will be.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/06/not-yet-born-america-at-the-crossroads/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.