It will be a January 20th unlike any other. At midday the new president will be inaugurated. In the evening, the national college football championship will be played. On a single day America will bloom in the full flower of late imperial excess.

It’s been 20 years since Niall Ferguson published Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, a masterful account of “an empire with attention deficit disorder.” He wrote it before Facebook became common, the smartphone ubiquitous, social media contagious and Donald Trump omnipresent.