Interregnum and the Time of Monsters

The old world is dead, the new world is not yet born, and now is the time of monsters—the line is everywhere now, credited to Gramsci and passed along as the sharpest available diagnosis of the present. Whether he wrote exactly that can wait; the claim is worth testing on its own terms first. To say it is to describe an interregnum: the interval between two orders, when one framework of authority…