The progressive left seeks an end to the U.S. empire, but it merely desires to replace it with their own corrupted version. This makes the DNC into a rivalry for empire control that must first be addressed, because its "great replacement strategy" involves much more than race. 

Empire for the left means white supremacy, class discrimination, slavery, and economic imposition. But empire is blamed for their frustrated ambition and fantasy to realize a classless, open border, welfare utopian order.  Empire is also code for “western hegemony” and nothing excites the left more than the collapse of Western values: political liberty, religious freedom, economic choice, and entrepreneurial reward from merit. 

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Of course, the left doesn’t stop to consider that their utopian fantasy is their own form of empire, one envisioned by intellectual elites defining and directing everyone else's values and interests. Their empire weapons include class ideology, mass media and lawfare, while “social scoring” is their ideal for replacing the earned rewards of merit with the accumulated favors from obedience.

Rarely is the traditional economic empire assessed in more pragmatic, positive ways. Most historians do not consider what positive effects a modern empire can create, and relatedly, what happens when such an empire no longer supplies benefits to other regions, and “collapses.”  Order may lead to chaos, and an empire is replaced with a private network that no one can see.  Leaders are replaced with a “deep state.”  

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Rome is always the subject of empire analysis and used to speculate about the U.S.: it is on its last leg and will "collapse." 

The left loves collapse theory because they have contempt for Americans, American power, and its founding principles.  

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Academics like to frame empire in Marxist terms, as an oppression that justifies revolutionary violence. But it also stems from an academic misconception: empires don’t fail per se; they adjust and live on with practices and knowledge attained from managing complexity, restoring order, enforcing rules, and providing direction and confidence. Empires are centers of leadership, creativity, invention, and problem solving that can survive and flourish.  

The political left’s current “empire” is arguably the university system (note the link to the Harvard report on the "university empire," that displays funding by the Harvard-China Fund).  The university system has been formed into a sprawling progressive empire of subjects, installed on thousands of campuses in a global network totaling 264 million young adults in 164 countries--and growing.

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According to the UN, there are 1.6 billion young adults worldwide, age 15-24. Nearly half of those among 18-24, are in the university system, and increasing. That is the left's self-perpetuating empire.

The Left’s interpretation of empire has been corrupted into something that makes historical empire seem benign in comparison, because it rests not on economic expansion, trade and regional stabilization under a common system, but on a set of detached ideological goals that have been incubated in the higher education empire: climate change, green energy, carbon tax, depopulation, open borders, biosecurity, wealth transfer, and economic dependency on a state ruling class.  Some call that enslavement.  

The left’s kind of slavery is created by substituting markets and voluntary exchange with government and state distribution; free speech with controlled speech; individual judgment and choice with medical and social controls; and families and religion with a state and political party.  

Back in 1978, University of Chicago Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman gave the radical Left a lesson on U.S. economic principles at Cornell University, and set the facts straight for all generations:  

The U.S. is in fact a strong, brilliant economic empire that the rest of the world covets. If you map its stages of growth, it follows positive empire economics: the development of banking, currency and finance systems; the spread of legal systems that guide contracts and property; the use of a dominant commercial language; the influence of culture (Asia enthusiastically copies American music, fashion, luxury goods, science, technology and more); the ability to undertake large-scale infrastructure projects including space exploration and sophisticated military defense that small states could only dream of; and as Friedman emphasizes, the realization of higher levels of human dignity and prosperity.

The historical reality of empires is that they are the rule, and not the exception.  There were countless empires including the Spanish, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, Sumerian, Mongol, Aztec, and even the native American Comanche empire that controlled over 250,000 square miles of territory, and called the “Lords of the Southern Plains" (the left loves Native Americans, but only as long as they stay on their reservations, and are cast as victims). 

The breakdowns in social stability today may come from a lack of empire.  One need only assess the Middle East, the Caucuses, the Caribbean, Africa, and Central America, to see regions that do not enjoy any central unifying political and economic system.  Even Canada and Mexico exist largely at the pleasure of the United States and its markets.  They are both subject economically to a U.S. economic empire because they benefit from it, and realize that it forms the foundations of their economic survival.

America is the natural primary empire, because its Western values and systems serve precisely as the role model and blueprint that is also copied by other major empires: Russia and China are far more "Western" than they publicly admit, and while hosting different political systems, they have ascended up the stages of growth precisely because they used the U.S. as its blueprint (sometimes they stole those blueprints). 

For the U.S., its empire interests could be consolidated into South America. via the Caribbean; into Mexico; in the Middle East by establishing a centralizing federal partner; and north into the Arctic.  By recognizing that superpowers are empires, and that empires create relative social stability, economic growth, technical advancement, and shared security, the U.S. is on the right path, and should consolidate its expanding North-South regional claims through explicit, active empire influence. The 2025 White House National Security Strategy implies such productive empire principles in its opening paragraph.

Successful empires also prioritize and consolidate their domestic political environment: an adversarial two-party electoral system may undermine empire, while "uniparty" behavior stems from prevarication and selective national commitment.  Whether the U.S. can continue to afford such a divisive DNC party (and wobbly SCOTUS), raises difficult questions about the short-term value of elections that have been contaminated by it, and being used as a means of systematically subverting the U.S. empire. 

Empires crush their enemies before their enemies crush them. 

Matthew G. Andersson is a former aerospace CEO and law and policy author.  He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and National Academies of Science. He has testified before the US Senate, and cited by the UK Parliament on World Trade Organization policy. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, via PICRYL // public domain