Epstein is America’s Chernobyl, Bad Bunny Points to its Reconstruction

The reactor explosion in April 1986 was an epistemological and moral catastrophe. The Soviet state had built its legitimacy upon a promise of scientific mastery and government competence. Then suddenly the world witnessed Soviet officials lying through their teeth while radioactive ash drifted across Europe. As reality itself stopped obeying the propaganda, the system’s epistemic and moral bankruptcy was evident for everyone to behold.

However, Chernobyl did not singlehandedly destroy the USSR: a deeply flawed economic system, lack of basic freedom rights, government corruption, and a bankrupting arms race with the West were some of the underlying structural weaknesses that made the system unsustainable. But Chernobyl was the catalyst that pushed the system over the edge and brought it to a point of no return that not even Gorbachev’s reforms could turn around. After Chernobyl, fewer people believed the performance. The gap between official narrative and lived reality became impossible to ignore. Cynicism metastasized. The Soviet citizen learned what Václav Havel had already understood: the system survived only insofar as people participated in the ritual of pretending.

And now America approaches its own Chernobyl moment. Or rather, the explosion already happened, we’re just waiting for the ensuing radiation of the Epstein affair to erode whatever walls are currently keeping things from falling apart.

Now, if it had only been a group of wicked right-wing businessmen, the scandal wouldn’t have been so severe. But the problem is that everyone, from European royalty, over Democratic ex-presidents, to Leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and even fucking Stephen Hawking, strapped to a wheelchair, were on that rape island. David Copperfield also somehow magically appeared at Epstein’s parties. It’s elite folks across the board, not just some obscene subsection of the billionaire class.

And then there’s of course Donald Trump, the president of the United States who promised to release the Epstein files as part of his election campaign. I probably don’t need to spill any ink on how that’s going. I just want to mention that the only time I remember Trump expressing any sort of genuine empathy, is when he talked about all those “good people” who got into trouble over this thing, not least his friend Bill Clinton—whose wife he allegedly wanted to put into prison (which probably could’ve given the man a little more freedom to have fun with Trump and the boys, who knows).

The Epstein affair should of course be seen in the broader view of similar cases such as Hugh Heffner & Bill Cosby’s systematic rape of young, drugged women at the Playboy Mansion; Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse of children at his Neverland compound; and of course the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein who sparked the MeToo campaign.

The Epstein case is thus the culmination of more than a decade of sexual abuse scandals involving elite persons, which taken together carries an implicit underlying message to the public: Women’s bodies are disposable commodities for the elite. Win the game, and you become the one who fucks the losers. Your daughters belong to me, suckers—and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

It exposes an American dream that came true, for the few, and turned out to become a nightmare for the many. It wasn’t really about getting that big house, the nice car, and maybe a boat. I mean, there’s only so much pleasure you can get from planting your upper-class butt on your yacht’s hand-made Italian leather seats while eating a marginally better sandwich than average Joe. Even if you add the subtle joy of being first in line on a red carpet, that reward is hardly worth decades of hard work in the corporate world, is it? What’s worth it? Ask Freud. And what’s better than a big boat so that the bitches can’t get away once you’re out in the open seas: “Here, snort a line of coke, it’ll be over soon darling.”

(What I’m referring to here is of course the institutionalized sexual predation that takes place in and around the yacht industry. Young charming good-looking men known as “fixers” invite beautiful women to attend parties on yachts under the impression that the guy is romantically interested or can offer the woman a modeling or acting career—only to leave once they’ve delivered the “packet” to a boat full of rich old geezers and lots of coke and other drugs to make whatever needs to go down, go down.)

Anyway. No wonder they killed that party pooper Stanley Kubrick.

On a systemic level, the first American republic is terminal: The economy only works for an increasingly smaller section of the population, while systematic gerrymandering, voter suppression, and interference with free, independent and fact-based journalism has reduced the US to a so-called “flawed democracy” according to the international ranking of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index, just ahead of Botswana.

The impressive growth of the American economy, especially compared to Europe, is actually a testament to the relative irrelevance of its economic system. Life expectancy is lower in the US, just like happiness, health, and overall life satisfaction. Most of the growth goes to the top. The economy grows, but crime and violence are magnitudes higher than in other developed countries, while opioid deaths are soaring and millions work multiple jobs while unable to afford healthcare or housing. Compare that with all those countries with far lower GDP that have happier and healthier populations, lower crime and violence, and relatively more stable political systems.

The failure of the US increasingly suggests that GDP isn’t measuring what really matters. “Stagnant” and “broke woke” Europeans are looking across the Atlantic towards their wealthy cousins, while shaking their heads in disbelief—and onto European shores a growing number of Americans are washing up, seemingly leaving the Titanic before its final hours. There are now more Americans moving to Europe than the other way around, and 1 in 5 is considering leaving the country.

The Soviet Union suffered from stagnation despite vast industrial output statistics. America suffers from instability and a crisis of legitimacy despite its relative abundance and solid growth numbers. Two mirror images of dysfunction.

We like to believe that Soviet communism collapsed because US capitalism proved far superior; and certainly, if we look at the outcome of the Cold War, there’s no denying that the West came out on top because their societal model was more efficient and stable than its Soviet counterpart. But we tend to forget that communism actually worked, until it didn’t; after all, it managed to industrialize a poor agricultural economy within a decade, outperform Nazi Germany during the Second World War, launch the world’s first space program, and feed and comfortably house its growing population in the postwar period. Am I saying that we should reconsider this form of communism? Absolutely not. Instead, my claim is that US capitalism merely had a 30-40 year longer “expiry date” than Soviet communism. The form of late-stage consumer capitalism that the US has subscribed to for the past almost 50 years or so worked splendidly—until it didn’t.

And in recent years, mental health, especially among young people, has nosedived partly because of toxic and exploitative social media algorithms. Add AI into the mix, with resulting mass-layoffs and eradication of entry level jobs, plus an impossible housing situation, and you end up with the most screwed-over generation in recorded history.

There are now reports coming out that Gen-Z employees are deliberately sabotaging AI initiatives at work. And in educational institutions, students use AI to complete assignments they do not believe matter, while teachers use AI to grade papers they barely read. Add to it the well-known phenomenon of “empty work”, so-called “bullshit jobs”, and the way workers quietly sabotage meaningless corporate workflows—and entire sectors become ritualistic theater.

The old Soviet joke that “The government pretended to pay us and we pretended to work” is now 40 years later echoing across corporate life throughout the West in similar refusals to participate in the system’s disempowering and undignified theatrics that only serves the upper class.

If you need a music break, here’s an optional carefully curated interlude before venturing on to the next part:

That was the black pill. Here comes—not the red, nor the blue—but the purple, metamodern pill:

Please grab a big glass of water. This is a big pill. Bad even. But it’s brief so that you can kick back and watch the half-time show at the end.

The first American republic is dead. Whatever’s left is rapidly being destroyed by the Trump administration. However, the ashes left from this cataclysm are full of nutrients from which a new republic can rise—like the Phoenix bird—if the American people, that is, chooses a different path than the current.

A second American republic would require a new constitution, a new representational electoral system, wide-reaching financial and corporate regulations, serious measures to curb corruption, massive wealth redistribution, a vast expansion of basic welfare services like healthcare and education, and so on, and so forth. There’s obviously no chance that the boomer generation is going to accept any of this. But they’re dead soon. So bye bye, dinosaurs.

If we look at the political observations of Gen-Z (born between 1997-2012), there’s a drastic change in attitudes favoring a shift towards becoming a normal country more similar to other advanced economies. They’re in many ways post-ideological and politically pragmatic: They just don’t romanticize capitalism since it’s not working for them, and they don’t fear “socialism” since they’re too young to remember what it was like during the Cold War. Contrary to caricatures, Gen-Z is not radical in any ideological sense. Rather, they simply want a society that functions: affordable housing, healthcare, time to live, less bullshit. And beneath these modest practical demands lies something deeper: a hunger for sincerity after decades of postmodern cynicism. This is why metamodernism emerges now.

Plus, did you know that 50% of all newborns are now of minority background? So good luck with that white Christian nationalism.

This also means that the new institutional reforms of a second republic needs a corresponding cultural reimagining. A new iteration of “We The People” thus prompts a discussion about what kind of “We” is desirable, who exactly it is that “The People” are referring to, and what the terms of agreement are to be and who they are to apply to in this new social contract.

And this is where Bad Bunny enters the picture:

The Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance is arguably the most significant cultural event this year, or perhaps even of the last decade. It also has some interesting both-and elements that emphasizes its relevance to the discussion on metamodernism:

• First of all, as a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is both US-American, and not US-American. He’s both an outsider in the American context, and a local guy who just proudly represents his home country as any other good patriot (remember, the Puerto Ricans didn’t come to America, America came to Puerto Rico—and is still there).
• Both a statement of fierce defiance, but also an invitation—an open invitation to a party that everyone can be part of, if they like (and who wouldn’t!?)
• And it’s not any kind of party invitation, it’s a heartfelt invitation to co-create a new America: A colorful path towards a reconstruction that is desperately needed following a decades-long vacuum of postmodern deconstruction and relativism (which of course has accelerated since the inauguration of Trump).
• Both a counter attack, and a show of loving embrace.
• Plus, it’s clearly both sincere, and ironic.
• And it’s not multicultural, but rather transcultural—much like many parts of Latin America, and that’s arguably a promising alternative following the collapse of American multiculturalism in the general discourse.
• Oh, and it’s both straight (pleasantly catering to the male gaze, and probably a few lesbians, plus promoting the value of traditional heterosexual marriage), and it’s a little queer (subtle and not in your face).
• And Bad Bunny expresses a powerful assertive masculinity, but without the toxicity and pathetic incel vibes of today’s self-declared “alpha males”.
• And, before I forget, it even got something for old people, you know, folks over 35 who fondly remember Ricky Martin from back in the days.

Bad Bunny embodies an emerging post-Anglo American identity that the old republic never fully knew how to integrate. For centuries the US defined “Americanism” through an uneasy mixture of Anglo-Protestant norms, frontier mythology, whiteness, industrial capitalism, and constitutional patriotism. Immigrants could join—but only through assimilation into the dominant symbolic framework. That framework has only been halfheartedly renegotiated with a dash of politically correct multiculturalism since the late eighties, but it never truly penetrated the core narrative of America. This worked for a while, but now the story has become increasingly obsolete and is in dire need of an update.

Demographically, culturally, linguistically, and psychologically, the America of the future increasingly resembles the broader Americas. As mentioned, nearly half of younger Americans already belong to minority groups and Spanish increasingly functions as a parallel civic and cultural language. Cultural influences now flow northward from Latin America as much as southward from Hollywood.

And Bad Bunny stands precisely at this crossroads.

His art communicates both defiance and belonging. His performances carry the energy of people refusing invisibility while simultaneously redefining what America itself can become. There is joy, but also a tragic historical memory: Colonialism, migration, race, class, empire. Bad Bunny’s performance is a celebration against the backdrop of precarity.

Importantly, Bad Bunny doesn’t really represent a conventional form of multiculturalism, and definitely not in the exhausted liberal language of corporate diversity seminars. He presents a transculturalism that sensorially and rhythmically seduces us through style, sexuality, irony, vulnerability, and collective emotional energy.

This matters because societies are ultimately held together by shared emotional realities. And in this brave new reality of ours, neither the traditional American mythology of the anglophone “melting pot”, nor the multicultural tendency towards identity fragmentation, seem to adequately cater to the creation of this shared experience.

What is needed is something closer to “creolization”. A cultural identity that’s comfortable with mixture, with synthesis, or more accurately, a metamodern “proto-synthesis”: Never complete, always in flux, and open to constant reinterpretation and renegotiation.

The USSR failed because it could no longer metabolize reality. America risks failing because it can no longer agree on reality at all. Yet there remains an opening.

A Second Republic could emerge through a constitutional redesign, demographic transformation, cultural hybridization, and gradual institutional evolution. Such a republic would probably look less like a 1950s suburban America and more like a strange synthesis of the Nordic welfare state, Latin American cultural vitality, and a digital network society with a post-industrial ecological consciousness. Or what do I know. After all, it’s up to future American generations to decide what they want to create.

The Soviet Union couldn’t survive Chernobyl because its system had lost its adaptive flexibility. America still possesses immense creative capacity—but only if it abandons the fantasy that the old order and its dated identities can simply be restored. So by expanding the definition of “Americaness” to include people originating south of the Rio Grande, America has a chance to redefine itself and thereby remain a shining and sexy example for the world to follow. I guarantee that the soundtrack is going to be amazing and the food will be irresistible.

Oh, and do you know which ethnicity, or “race” as it’s commonly referred to in the US, is the fastest growing in America?

It’s “mixed race”—just like in the rest of the Americas. So the cycle has come full circle: from modern nation state melting pot, over postmodern compartmentalized multiculturalism, and back again to a reimagined transcultural creole identity that in metamodern terms defines what it means to be American again.

Bad Bunny’s America is the future of the US—unless of course, the country chooses an authoritarian and chauvinistic style of government like that of post-soviet Russia and thus embarks on a path towards terminal decline.

Which party do you choose?

I wish I’d been to this one (but I’m sure there are many more to come if we want to):

If the link is broken, you can view Bad Bunny’s halftime show on YouTube here.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.