It has always been the feudal lords who made the common people dependent—those self-interested elites who hoarded power, extracted wealth, and left the masses to suffer under the weight of their decisions. They orchestrated wars for personal gain, imposed crushing taxes, and built hierarchies that ensured generational inequality. In every age, these figures emerge with new names and new titles, but their function remains unchanged: to dominate. Today, the new feudal lords wear suits instead of armor, fly private jets instead of riding horses—but their goals are no less imperial. Chief among them are the oligarchs, and most prominently, Donald Trump, who has leveraged populist rhetoric and economic nationalism to wage a trade war not for the good of the nation, but to assert personal power. In doing so, he imagines himself a kind of modern emperor presiding over the fractured remnants of what he would call the American Empire.
In the East, we find a precursor and mirror image in Vladimir Putin—the self-styled Russian ‘Czar’—who embraced this model long before Trump did, and in many ways became the prototype. He reconstructed a state built on fear, propaganda, and personal loyalty, rather than democratic ideals, and in so doing, inspired others who dream of restoring their own twisted visions of past glory. Both of these men operate on the belief that they are inherently above the people they rule, and that their vertical structures of power are not only justified, but necessary. To them, the decades of democratic experiment, with its messiness and accountability, were an aberration—a deviation from the rightful order of things.
But history teaches us otherwise. The revolutions of the past—whether French, American, Haitian, or Russian—were responses to this kind of madness. They were struggles to create societies where power flows upward, from the people to the state, not the other way around. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” was not just a phrase; it was a sacred commitment to a new way of being.
And yet here we are, watching the old order creep back in through the cracks, disguised as populism but driven by plutocracy. The question that confronts us now is simple but grave: how long will we tolerate this return to feudal logic? If our democratic institutions are once again becoming hollowed-out shells, perhaps we must rekindle the revolutionary spirit—not necessarily with violence, but with the courage, organization, and vision to dismantle the systems that place kings above citizens. Because it seems, more than ever, that we need another revolution—not only to reclaim power, but to remember that it was always meant to belong to us.
