In my capacity as cat-sitter to the literati, over Labor Day weekend I shared my home office with my orange nephews Rilke and Lorca, as well as my furry son Theodore. Much hissing and pissing ensued while the three lads jockeyed for territory. I alternated separating them into different rooms and allowing them supervised free-range interaction.

Theodore “Big Pussy” DiMeow approaches a sit-down with Li’l Ril from the Jersey Mob.

“You come to me…on the day of my daughter’s wedding…and you didn’t bring cat treats?”

From my superior (?) perspective, the boys’ squabbles seemed wasteful. Guys, I would say, you’re all cats! The most lovable creatures on earth! There are enough snuggles and kibble for all of you. Why can’t you get along?

The gingers’ dads are card-carrying members of the Communist Party. (Do they even have cards now? Probably codes in your Apple Wallet.) When I asked whether their cats needed a refresher course in communal ownership, they reminded me of the difference between personal and private property. Technically, I own the means of production, so the cats should band together to redistribute the contents of the kibble bag. Good thing they don’t have opposable thumbs.

The feline Game of Thrones taking place in my office led me to recall my unease during parts of Kamala Harris’ Democratic National Convention speech. Why does America need, or deserve, to have “the most lethal fighting force in the world”? Why should any country treat this as a prime objective or source of pride? I imagined folks in China probably listening to similar speeches from their politicians, promising that they would and should win the competition with America for global economic hegemony. The moral worth of this approach to international relations was simply assumed, as it always is in our presidential candidates’ and leaders’ speeches, Democrat or Republican.

Related to this, a Christian friend last month sent me a video of her favorite theologian, Greg Boyd, describing his “Warfare Worldview” as an ethical alternative to the idea that every event is part of God’s plan. He made a pretty convincing case that spiritual warfare between a good God and demonic forces explained the problem of evil better than the traditional theodicy that preserves God’s omnipotence by minimizing the importance of human suffering. As Ivan Karamazov famously argued, even one innocent child’s pain is too high a price to pay for “free will”.

Yet these two options felt like a false alternative imposed by an unexamined winner-take-all attitude to the cosmos, not unlike my cats’ competition to be Lord of the Office. Once we posit the existence of multiple spiritual entities, we should be able to imagine them coexisting and cooperating, not only fighting to wipe each other out. Evil and suffering could then be a consequence of the messy and imperfect business of sharing power. Intentionally malevolent spirits can be part of this worldview but you needn’t see bogeymen under every bed.

With the obvious caveat that human beings can warp any worldview to justify primitive monkey-brain status fights, I propose that there’s a connection between our cultural legacy of monotheism and American imperialism. As a survivor of abuse and gaslighting, I used to be comforted by the idea that someday everyone would agree on the same reality, on earth as in heaven. But Bible passages anticipating Jesus as sole acknowledged ruler of the earth hit me differently in this era of resurgent Christian nationalism.

Richard Beck’s trenchant essay “Bidenism Abroad” in New Left Review (March/April 2024) clarified why the Democrats’ version of American supremacy troubled me so much. Beck critiques how the foreign policy establishment prioritizes competing for superpower status with China even though this leads to decisions that could doom the planet for us all, like trade restrictions on Chinese-made electric cars and semiconductor technology. The Biden administration was caught off guard by October 7, and continues to enable the genocide in Gaza, because they didn’t want the Middle East to distract them from this objective. The problem is that our role in this human rights catastrophe destroys whatever remaining claim we had to deserve world leadership. Beck concludes:

Biden didn’t just promise to ensure that America’s economy remains the world’s largest, or that America’s military remains the world’s strongest. He promised to do what Giovanni Arrighi said is required of a hegemon in The Long Twentieth Century. Hegemonic power, Arrighi wrote, is ‘the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”’. What distinguishes it from its non-hegemonic competitors is that only the hegemon can plausibly claim to be advancing global interests other than its own. ‘The claim of the dominant group to represent the general interest is always more or less fraudulent’, Arrighi writes. ‘Nevertheless . . . we shall speak of hegemony only when the claim is at least partly true and adds something to the power of the dominant group’.

American hegemony certainly lives on for now in Europe, where compliant nato allies continue to fall over one another in their rush to hollow out social services and buy American arms. And the us may be able to retain economic dominance in a relative sense even if it never manages to reverse the slowdown in global growth, so long as its own economic power weakens less than that of its rivals. But after Gaza, America can no longer credibly claim global ‘hegemony’ in Arrighi’s sense. Biden’s support for Israel, motivated both by strategic considerations and what appears to be a real inability on his part to see Palestinians as fully human, flies in the face of both American and global public opinion. Europe may hold on to America’s coattails for a while yet, but in the rest of the world, continued American supremacy will be based primarily on coercion. Arrighi identified the catastrophe of America’s invasion of Iraq as the turning point: ‘The unravelling of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century’, he wrote, ‘has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of us hegemony—that is, in its transformation into mere domination’. If it is true that Iraq marked the point at which American hegemony actually changed into domination, then perhaps Gaza marks the point at which Americans finally realized it.