The United States is in the middle of a high-stakes election year. Every election for the last decade has felt like an existential crisis, and this one will engage partisans explicitly on those terms. But I find myself obsessing over the Holy Roman Empire, the cobbled-together network of principalities, cities, and bishoprics that covered much of central Europe for nearly a thousand years.
I started thinking about this after two events this winter—events that, while seemingly minor, in fact reveal more about the direction of US politics than any individual election result does. In December, the Democratic National Committee decided to bury a postmortem it commissioned on the 2024 election. And in February, longtime sports commentator and political neophyte Stephen A. Smith briefly teased a possible run in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries.
Taken together, these are stories of institutional weakness. Reporting at the time suggested that DNC chair Ken Martin was worried about alienating important people and constituencies within the Democratic Party. Assigning responsibility for the 2024 disaster—in which Democrats lost the Senate, failed to retake the House, and lost the presidency to a man it had depicted as a threat to democracy itself—might offend some of the elected officials, campaign professionals, megadonors, advocacy organizations, and media super-users who make up the patchwork of the modern Democratic Party.
