A republic, not an empire. But what does that mean? For Britain, it meant decline.

We see this sentiment all the time in tech. A Google that’s nostalgic for the garage. A global behemoth that warmly remembers its womb. And at the scale of a tech startup, it actually is possible to build a giant company and then scale another one from scratch within one human lifetime. But at the scale of a country…it’s harder. Were the US actually so precipitous as to shut down its global empire and return to the proverbial garage, that would likely mean a 99% markdown for US living standards and the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. Seeking the nostalgic would result in the chaotic.