Do You Know What Time It Is?

We long for a goal.

Until recently, a popular right wing catchphrase was: “Do you know what time it is?” They even sold T-Shirts. The slogan was made popular by Claremont Institute scholar Dave Reaboi, who defined it as

shorthand for, “do you recognize or realize where we are in the movie?” — which is, itself, kind of another shorthand phrase. But the bigger picture is, what happens after 50, 60, or 100 years of the success of the Progressive project? What happens after 50 or 100 years of success of the Long March through the institutions? We’re no longer the country we were.

Life would be boring if time couldn’t be broken up into narrative parts. We have a need to name our years. We want our time to take the shape of a story. Reaboi uses dramatic language: “we are in a movie.” A movie is a block of time that has meaning. Every movie has at least one crucial moment when the story starts to make sense as a coherent whole, when we find out “what time it is,” so to speak.

“Do you know time it is?” seems to have fallen out of use after Trump’s victory. The times have changed. In Trump’s second term, “the Golden Age of America has most definitely begun.” Trump’s Golden Age is about building a new future; it’s hopeful. But both “Do you know what time it is?” and “The Golden Age” address the same human longing to have our lives mean something: to have our life stories contribute to something bigger and transcendent.

Liberals have tried to fulfill this need by talking about a brighter tomorrow and a progressive future. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” was once the liberal equivalent of “Do you know what time it is?” This need is also why the liberal catchphrase about being on “the right side of history” still works for many people. It’s not so much that you want to be on the right side of history; it’s that you want to believe that history has a right side. Because otherwise, time does not make sense; there is no story, no future, and no hope.

In a book review titled “Democracy Has Run Out of Future,”

Leonard Benardo

and recent Wisdom of Crowds podcast guest

Ivan Krastev

write: “We live amid the dregs of time.” It is a beautiful phrase because it evokes both a need and a lack. The book Benardo and Krastev are reviewing, Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, makes a case for the importance of having a vision of the future. For Benardo and Krastev, this point cannot be emphasized enough:

White’s argument is that, just as humans die in the absence of air to breathe, democracy can die from the inability to dream collectively. What makes democracy work is a productive tension between a near future and a distant and utopian future. The near future is the one we can plan for — the one that politicians promise to voters and remains at the center of democratic accountability. What the government did yesterday and what the parties pledge for tomorrow will always be the bread and butter of electoral politics.

Krastev repeated this argument when he came on our podcast, and he added that “Going to Mars is not a vision of the future,” alluding to Elon Musk. Yet the Trumpist vision of a Golden Age might be satisfying, at least in the short term, for a plurality of his supporters.

One man who understood the need for time to have a meaning was Paul of Tarsus. The early Christians of Thessalonica lost their sense of urgency in life because they believed that the final struggle between the Anti-Christ and the Church was imminent. If the Second Coming of Christ was happening soon, if the world was about to end, then why work and toil and build in the meantime? What’s the point? Answering this question, Paul reveals that a “restrainer” — the “katechon” — is holding back the rise of the Anti-Christ. Until the Anti-Christ comes, there would be no “end of the time.”

To this day, theologians speculate about what the katechon might be. In the first centuries of Christianity, some thought it was the Roman Empire, which maintained order and a semblance of peace throughout the world, albeit with a bloody hand. But the Empire fell — the western part of it, anyway — and the Second Coming did not take place. The war between the Romans and the Vandals was not the final battle between Good and Evil; it did not lead to the Final Judgment.

Because the Second Coming seems like it will take longer to arrive than what the early Christians expected, the meaning of the time before the end of the world has taken on a greater importance. This “time before” has been interpreted in two main ways. Some thinkers (like Carl Schmitt) believe that the time before the Anti-Christ is unleashed is devoid of ultimate meaning: it’s an empty time where power rules, and the fight between Good and Evil is held at bay. Others (like Ivan Illich) believe that the time before the Anti-Christ is the time of the ultimate corruption of the Church, as it lashes itself onto a human institution and falls before Evil.

In his book, The Mystery of Evil, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that this second view is conducive to a truly “progressive” politics, because in it, everything we do either contributes to the corruption of the Church, or fights those forces of corruption. Every action has a meaning in light of the end of the world: it is either for the triumph of Evil, or the triumph of Good. For Agamben, true politics — truly progressive or, in any case, hopeful politics — depends on human beings acting in light of the ultimate end-of-the-world moment. “The sense of last things … should guide and orient action in penultimate things,” he writes. We are called upon “to play [our] part without reservation and without ambiguity.”

But what exactly will guide our actions, and define our parts? Elsewhere, Agamben appeals to a secular apocalypse for ultimate meaning. He talks about our modern, secular end-of-the-world scenarios: nuclear war and climate catastrophe. It’s in light of these events that we should figure out how to act. We should not fear a future war or catastrophe; we should act as if these things are being kept at bay. The restrainer is holding up a catastrophic process that has already begun. “Only starting from this awareness do the end of humanity, nuclear war, and climate catastrophes cease to be ghosts that terrify and paralyze,” Agamben writes. Instead they “appear for what they are: political phenomena that are always present in their contingency and absurdity, which precisely for this reason we no longer have to fear as fatalities without alternatives, but can deal with each time according to the concrete instances in which they arise and the forces we have at our disposal to oppose or escape them.”

Is Agamben’s vision enough for hopeful politics? Is it enough for meaningful action on earth? Agamben’s secular apocalypse gives us a horizon against which to measure our actions, but by itself, it is not a positive vision. (Agamben does offer positive proposals in other books.) Moreover, one thing missing from all of the stories we tell about time today is religion. There is no literal overarching spiritual story at play in Trump’s Golden Age nor in contemporary liberalism. There is no Final Judgement to wait for in either. In the twentieth century, the absence of religion was supplanted by visions of a positive utopia. And here is where Trump has an edge. Merely avoiding catastrophe is not a goal in the same way that building a Golden Age is a goal. Even if Trump does not make use of Christian language, like Republicans before him, he at least points toward the future.

The Trumpist movement has exposed the human need for a goal. It has (for now) the political winds at its back, a taste for risk, and a technological project — not only colonizing Mars, but DOGE, and a new geopolitical order, and Greenland — to work toward. That’s why the moment feels equally frantic, fascinating and dreadful.

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