The Consent to Destroy: Imperial Melancholia and the Hegemony of Fragmentation

Across the world’s most powerful states, millions actively embrace the destruction of the shared reality on which democratic life depends. Democracy does not simply collapse from without; it can be unmade from within through consent. This article introduces hegemonic fragmentation, an original concept revealing how declining empires manufacture consent for their own unraveling. Synthesizing Arendt’s analysis of the common world with Hall’s theory of hegemonic consent, I generate a novel framework to identify the culturally constructed consent for the dissolution of shared factuality, political space, and meaning, experienced not as loss but as freedom and belonging. Imperial melancholia, the refusal to mourn lost dominance, is the affective mechanism converting structural decline into the desire to destroy. Through conjunctural comparison of Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia, I reveal authoritarian populism as a pathological sociological mechanism through which imperial decline is distorted into consent to destroy the common world.