American Supernova, imploding and exploding at the same time

Anna Chen – 5 March 2026, Supernova

America is going supernova, imploding and exploding at the same time until nothing remains except for a tiny, cold Death Star spinning in space. Who’ll be left standing by the time it burns out? In this astro-political metaphor, it’s more neutron star than white dwarf: dense, deadly, destructive and supported by a degenerated neutron field.

But it is a mistake to confuse a declining America with declining MILITARY power. They have, after all been spending as much as the next nine countries put together, including Russia and China. Trump may be running down the inventory in his projectile vomit, with much of the hardware proving to be inadequate in the field, but it still has the means to deliver a nasty sting. The world’s biggest superpower is unlikely to snuff out overnight in a cinematic climax. And they still have over 5,000 nuclear weapons.

‘Was you ever bit by a dead bee?’ Eddie (Walter Brennan) asks in To Have and Have Not (1944). Slim (Lauren Bacall) replies, ‘They can sting you just as bad as live ones. Especially if they were mad when they got killed’. That might be what we have to look forward to.

In my Supernova analysis I see the US ending as the Death Star: a shrunken superpower regressing into a feudal reliance on war and conquest because profits are running out in late capitalism.

A debased culture that’s sacrificed its own people in order to save the core elite can’t grow any further. Red giant expansion at the end of life is hot air, although it can still burn anything near it. All the finer developments are frazzled down to reptilian brainstem. Stomping around the world like a colossus, clobbering Iran, Venezuela and every nation that has something it wants, demonstrates the decline, although it is currently still a process and not a final destination.

(Supernova was recorded 21 February 2026, the final part of Anna Chen’s review of The Three Body Problem, published 6 May 2024. First posited in A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats speech for the No Cold War Online meeting on 6 October 2021.)

I described the corrosive destruction of our sensibilities down to lizard brain in The Science-Fiction Writer’s Coma Dream prose poem in which I tried to capture the experience of an expanded consciousness built across 400 years of Enlightenment in the West just as the capitalist system was peaking and rolling over.

The assault was palpable. As above so below. The same process of degradation experienced by the individual can be observed at the macro level in the piece-by-piece dissolution of the American cultural, economic and political entity.

As I’m fond of reminding everyone, the superstructure collapses back into the economic base, which is no longer productive for anyone except a tiny controlling elite at the top. It takes everything else down with it in its Wile E Coyote moment of realisation. The artificially-elevated dollar as global reserve currency made exports too expensive and much of the manufacturing skillset has been lost or overtaken. America increasingly depends on war and taking by force what others possess or produce because it can no longer make its own using domestic labour. Capitalism eventually ran out of road and, if the pundits had read their Marxism instead of monstering it, they’d have a closer understanding of what happened.

It is a system running on fumes.

This rapid degeneration is now impossible to miss, illustrated by Trump’s war fever ‘Donroe Doctrine’ and abandonment of his purported peace objectives.

Marco Rubio’s pugilistic Empire screech to Europe’s bow-wows at the Munich Security Conference, emphasised ethnocentric division and their own vassalage, and earned him a standing ovation.

Is a deranged Pete Hegseth’s monstrous id spilling out in public, coming on like a coked-up frat boy a day after the unprovoked attack on Iran began, the nadir? Or can they sink even lower? No regrets for the 160 elementary schoolgirls wiped out in the first strikes would suggest they could.

Is there anything more sickening than a drunk drunk on his own power?

Oh, that would be the gathering of pastors at the White House anointing Trump as chosen by Jesus Christ to lead the world to Armageddon. Not religious fanatics or anythin’ like that awful Iran theocracy.

6 March 2026: Nel Bonina asks an interesting question regarding religion filling the vacuum as the sun sets on empire in her latest Substack essay, The Chicken and the Egg of Current Geopolitics: Ideological Imperial Needs from Nationalism to Holy War. Nel drills deep in her elegant, detailed analysis. Recommended reading.

My take is that religion, faith, belief and the rest of the non-science ideology fills the vacuum left by the collapse of the superstructure into the economic base (yep, there it is again) which can no longer sustain the old capitalist profit-making system. However, religion is itself part of the superstructure so what’s left when that goes? In my supernova metaphor, perhaps religion is the final iron or nickel element that be created in the supernova sequence before the star explodes: the fusion killers. Or are we in Silicon Valley before it all goes tits up? Suggestions welcome in the comments.

The order of fusion of elements in a star leading to a supernova: hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen (also into neon and magnesium), silicon into nickel and iron. These last two metals absorb nuclear energy and so end the nuclear fusion process needed to withstand gravitational collapse. The mantle falls and bounces off the metallic core in a supernova explosion, taking us all with it.